EPL- wages vs performance

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Wage and the Premier League scaled table

The right two columns represent the current league table drawn to scale. The wage costs (shown in the two left columns) are based on either, recently published wage costs for the 2011/12 season, or, where not available, an estimate of the wage bill.

The wage costs are highly polarised with Man City spending £200m on wages, whereas clubs like Swansea spend only around £35m. Manchester City's (and Chelsea's) spending generates a stretched table with only a few high wage-paying clubs at the top, but most of the clubs paying broadly similar wages around the lower part of the table.

The green and red lines show the clubs that have significantly over-performed (green line) or under-performed (red line) against their wages expenditure. Looking at the clubs who have most over-performed, we see:

Man Utd, Tottenham, Swansea, Everton, West Brom, Stoke, Norwich and Southampton

The stretching of the wages table has the effect of somewhat over-emphasising the achievements of the lower teams in the league table - however by any standards, these teams have all had a rather good season.

There are six teams that the table suggests have under-performed given the resources at their disposal:

Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Villa and QPR

 

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Footballers' wages: No cheap points | The Economist

As a consequence, clubs near the top and bottom are locked into arms races with each other. If one club spends more to finish in the top four, its rivals must spend more also. In particular, it is worth spending a lot to finish first rather than second, as Manchester City did; or 17th rather than 18th, as Queens Park Rangers managed to do. It is worth rather less to finish 11th like Swansea rather than 12th like Norwich City, who finished just below the Swans in the points-per-pound ranking too. That may explain why the clubs near the top and bottom of the Premier league cluster near the bottom of our points-per-pound table. They're not necessarily inefficient or irrational. They're just playing a positional game.