Keith Hill's trouble makers!

I think Keith Hill and David Flitcroft are the best thing to happen to this club in a long time. I am pretty sure they've been following closely the autobiography of Peter Taylor - Clough's companion through his years of management - the fact we are taking on rough diamonds with issues who we get on the cheap and can hopefully turn a profit and improve the team's performance is right out of Taylor's biog - when they signed a player he would sit down with him and say "Right son, which is it; booze, woman or gambling?" and then would bring in people to help them.
As I've said before on here league position is generally determined by your wage bill, there is a huge statistical colleration between the 2 , about 90%. Very few managers buck that trend, if by getting people like Mellis on a free after he's been in trouble, or pursuading the likes of Mido here we can have players who are better than we are paying them, that might be the key to some surprising results for us. Obviously KH and GF have their tactical knowledge and approach each game with a good degree of thought that I sometimes think doesn't exist amongst many managers. I like to think that at least with these 2 we have a chance outperform our wage bill - I would be interested to see how many teams last season had a lower wage bill, were there any?

 

We can only speculate on the wage bills of other clubs but I bet we would be surprised if compared league positions to wage bills. I bet it wouldn't be as straight forward as that.

 

Err, it is.

 

Errr....a billion pounds says that West Ham's wage bill was higher than Reading and Southampton last season.

Half a billion says that Leicester's was.

 

I agree, it would be almost impossible to get the wage bill figures for most clubs, it's all based on assumptions...you'd think something like Football Manager would be very well researched when it comes to salaries given all the insider information they will have yet managers over the years have said it is miles wide of the mark.

We probably do have the smallest wage budget in the league, but it might not be as far behind as the club would have you believe...the fact that we have one of the smallest squads (if not the smallest) would go a long way to being the reason for this.

Clubs like Middlesbrough, Wednesday, Forest, Huddersfield will have huge wage bills yet they will probably be nowhere near the top 6 at the end of the season.

 

Errrrrr no it is not. Leicester and West Ham would have gone up at a canter as mentioned above, now put Portsmouth in your pipe & smoke it! How's them stats looking now?

 

Err, no it isn't.

 

You're right that it's not as straight forward as that, but I would be fairly confident in predicting that the GENERAL trend would be higher wage bills result in higher league positions.

It's no coincidence that us, Peterbrough and Millwall aren't fighting it out at the top of the league.

I'm also sure that there was a report recently that drew a direct correlation between wage bills and final league position in the Premier league. There will always be anomolies in any set of statistics but it's the overall trend that you have to take notice of.

 

If nobody knows for certain what the wages are, as stated above, how was there a report drawn up with any sort of accuracy? It would be pretty obvious that the top 5 or 6 would be the most successful, don't need any report on wages to decide that, just look at the players they have got. There are also way too many variables for it to be any sort of reliable barometer. What about squad sizes? Or long term injuries, a club could bring in a couple of 100k a week players and they might get injured the next day and be out for a season. I think high wages are a consequence of being one of the successful clubs, not a cause.

 

I don't know how the report was drawn up and i'm not sure of the source - I just remember reading something to that effect.

If spending money doesn't correlate to success then how come City, United, Chelsea etc are always at the top end of the league and the generally less well off clubs are usually battling out at the bottom - albeit for the one or two anomolies each season?

To suggest that financial investment doesn't generally relate to success is crackers.

 

Who said that financial investment doesn't generally relate to success? But we have seen loads of clubs paying wages higher than they can afford and not getting anywhere. To suggest that if you pay high wages means you will be successful though is crackers. Liverpool would be the best example, massive wages but nowhere near the top table. Portsmouth as mentioned above. Leeds did it. There are enough examples of clubs paying high wages and doing nothing, and vice versa clubs with lower wages doing well, to suggest that wage levels are not the driver behind success. What it does show is that the successful/bigger clubs can afford to pay massive wages, and that is all it shows. There are way too many variables to suggest anything else.

 

Wages = investment. The only other investment in top level football is transfer fees, other than academies which are generally a moot point these days. So if you're saying that wages doesn't somehow reflect in improved performances then I'd suggest you're wide of the mark.

You've used Liverpool as an example, yet they've won the European Cup twice in recent times. Portsmouth went from being a nothing club to winning the FA Cup and competing in the top half of the Premiership. The big clubs are the big clubs because they spend money on players - salaries and transfer fees - otherwise they would slip down the leagues.

As I said, there are always exceptions to the rule, but they are exactly that. Exceptions. Also the higher up the spending ladder you get, then the differences become more marginal. After all, what's the difference between paying someone £150k a week or £90k a week? You surely don't get a more than 50% better player. Yet the difference between the top earners and the 'low' earners in the Premier League on £10-25k per week is a hell of a lot more.

Same in the Championship. West Ham may have had a higher budget than Southampton and Reading last season, but it would have been marginal in terms of the quality of player yielded meaning that Southampton and Reading finishing above them is not a huge shock. However, had BFC or Peterbrough finished above West Ham, then that would suggest that wages do not play a part in final league position.

As for the point of clubs spending money but still not doing well is down to the fact that some clubs are just very badly managed, and I would think that these examples are exception to the rule. After all, how many clubs that spent very little on wages migrate to the upper echelons of the football league? None, apart from the odd exception, who then have to invest to have any hope of staying there.

However, I wouldn't suggest that money spent on wages is the only driver behind success but I would say it is the main driver. After all, you said yourself above that successful/bigger clubs can afford to pay massive wages - which in itself proves that to be consistently successful you need to spend money.

 

Over a single season there are enough variables which can distort any given position, over longer periods statistics have proven, I mean as it real proof, not speculation or guess work, but using real facts and figures, that 90% of the clubs league position over time can be explained by wages. That is not to say a particularly good or bad manager cannot change that fact - the fact that each season you can probably give me a couple of examples which don't fit this model doesn't prove its wrong, it just shows either the variation over one season makes it more difficult or that the manager was good/crap, anyhow, still the other 22 clubs in the league will fit that pattern.

 

http://tomkinstimes.com/2010/12/soccernomics-was-wrong-why-transfer-expenditures-matter/

Here is an article which critiques the thesis that the transfer fees a club pays doesn't matter when determining league position which was the assertion in Soccernomics. They argue that 70% of a teams position can be related to transfer fees which is a strong correlation. Note they do NOT dispute the original thesis that up to 90% can be related to wages spent, and they also note the following when it comes to how the wage data is derived:

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*[Since the original publication of this blog entry I have been contacted by Soccernomics author Stefan Szymanski and this is what he had to say about the wage data used within Soccernomics:

“You question the quality of the wage data but I’m not sure that’s right- this is audited data from the company accounts published annually - not a guess like you see in Forbes. Its one weakness is that it is total payroll data, not just players- but players account for 90% plus of payroll normally. It must be much better quality than transfer fee data which is not audited and represents figures mentioned in the newspapers- the clubs never reveal the actual transaction value, and I’m told there are a lot of inaccuracies. Without getting confirmation directly from the clubs, there is no way to check this.”

Indeed, it appears the wage data used in Soccernomics is of the highest quality. I retract my earlier comment questioning its quality. At the same time, I would stand by the CTPP database being the most accurate of its kind for transfers. Stefan was quite complimentary of the overall post and its predecessor deconstructing his work at my blog, for which I am very grateful. Ultimately, he and I would agree on the wage data being a better predictor given its higher R2 value for the same reasons I gave at the conclusion of my post.

 

You claim 22 out of 24 clubs in every league in every season will line up exactly on wage budget in the table? And you claim you've got proof, hard facts, to back this up? That's what you said, 22 clubs will fit the pattern.

Show us this proof then.

 

Jay, I don't know what your objection is to the fact that wages paid to players explains the clubs finishing position in most cases. See my reply to Ponty72. Serious mathematicians who look at this have concluded this link exists, the proof has already been made, there really isn't an argument to be made.

 

I wouldn't argue for a minute against the fact that wages have a bearing on where you finish in the table. There is certainly a correlation there. But you cannot predict league placings with anywhere near the accuracy that you are claiming. It isn't 'as straight forward as that' as you claimed earlier. 22 out of 24 teams do not line up in the table based on wage budgets. 22 out of 24 teams line up in the table based on points they've gained from playing football matches. The anomaly being that some clubs enter administration.

 

Of course there's an argument to be made. You've just discussed a critique of a thesis. That sounds like an argument to me.

We've all pretty much agreed that West Ham and Leicester should have finished in the top two so that means Reading and Southampton shouldn't so that's already four of 24 that didn't finish in their supposed postion. Then we have Forest and Portsmouth who should have finished higher so that means two more teams finished higher than they should have done. That's a third of the division without even thinking about it.

 

The Premier League is completely different, the best players who the top clubs sign are either household names or at least well known to people who follow football. That's not really the case in the Championship, a lot of the best players are ones who came through the clubs academies and have turned into quality players or the players who have found it tough in the Premier League yet look like world beaters in the Championship.

If you sign a player who has played in the Premier at a Championship club his wages are automatically going to be higher - the fact that the player has dropped down to the Championship says a lot about his ability.

Huff - it's too complicated, there are far too many variables - at the end of the day the wage bill / success rate argument is a load of rubbish. Being prepared to splash out on wages certainly gives you a better chance of success but if you were to compare a league of wage bills to the actual final table it would be all over the place. Not that any such table could ever be accurately produced.

 

Not sure about Reading, but can'ti they have a small wage bill, but certainly Southampton were paying people like Jack Cork over 20k a week and he's barely out of Chelsea's youth side, so I think we can safetly say the are one of the top spenders - so at least 2 of the top 3 I would say paid the highest wages in the league and certainly Reading would be in the top 5. Anyway as I explained I am not saying "you spent 5th most therefore you finish 5th", that's not how stats work, the correlation is over about 20 years, if you look at one season you can find any number of variations, over time those bits of luck or good manager or bad manager should even themselves out. The fact remains even looking at one season, last season, the wage spent to league position doesn't seem that far out to my eye.