Want to be able to see the future? All you need to do is figure out how much everyone is getting paid.
For all of the advances of in-game soccer data over the past decade, there’s still one thing that predicts future results better than anything that actually happens on the field: the wages each team pays its players. The findings were most publicly established by the economist Stefan Szymanski, and it has since been confirmed by a number of other studies.
This isn’t to say that you could turn, say, Jordan Morris into Arjen Robben just by quintupling his salary. Rather, in an unequal sport with no hard salary cap, the teams with the most money, over the long run, tend to win the most points and finish highest in the table. The legendary Johan Cruyff once said: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” But I’ve seen Erling Haaland score lots of goals, and he plays for Manchester City because he gets a bag with $500,000 in it every week.
And yet, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation here, either. Brentford and Brighton routinely finish higher than expected in the Premier League table than their spending suggests they should, while Manchester United underachieve their spending almost every season.
One way you might fall below expectation, perhaps, would be for the players you’re spending lots of money on to not actually play much soccer. That could be because they’re not as good as you thought, your coach mistakenly believes they’re not as good as you thought, or they’re simply just injured. Whatever the reason, though, it all adds up to money being spent that’s not actually contributing to the team’s performance.
Which clubs are spending the most money on unused minutes? And which are getting the most out of their player investment? Let’s rank all 20 Premier League teams on their spending, from best to worst.