Underperformance by Wolves, say Soccernomics

I’ve stumbled upon an article on the web that analyses the economics of footballing and more precise the correlation between transfer spending and final results for the teams of the Premier League.

The article – on the BBC – is written because of  a book with the title ‘Pay As You Play’ that I understand can be acquired as an e-book from Amazon for less than £6.

The conclusion by the author in the fresh article –  is that there is a very strong correlation between the signing fees and the final result of a team (70%), but even stronger between the salary of the players in a team and the final placement of the team in the league (89%). Probably because of the secrecy concerning signing fees they are not the data that are most reliable to use.

Interesting from a Wolves perspective is this results table that takes account of all Premier League games up to the 7th of December this season:

As you can see Wolves are at 19th place – as we still are – in the tables, but according to the predictions made from the cost of our players we really should be on 17th place when the season ends. So we have – until now – underperformed this season.

But teams like Aston Villa and West Ham are even more underperforming than Wolves.

On the other hand, Bolton and West Brom has overperformed and very much so. The Bolton team has costed them about the same as the Wolves team costed us in transfer fees, but they were at 6th place a wek ago, but should end up in 16th according to the economical prediction.

I’m not the man to explain all of these figures to you and that would only get very boring. You can read the whole article from the link above if you have a special interest in the economics of professional football and it’s impact on the results.

One question that could be asked to the makers of these stats is perhaps if Wolves will perform better if we pay the current players better. According to these stats and theories I believe we  – at least predictively – will. So perhaps that’s the way to go for Morgan and Moxey instead of trying to get them cheap and give them the lowest wages they can. 😆

Another way of getting a higher predicted position is of course to get more expensive players to sign for Wolves in January. But  even if these soccernomics shows that it’s a large correlation between transfer fees and final results, I believe that good performances by players and team – regardless of how much they have cost us or make a week – is the best way of being assured that Wolves will get a high position in the tables at the end of season.

Paddytheflea

~ by paddytheflea on December 14, 2010.