The fine city of Norwich together with Sheffield United will once again be hosting Premier League from next season with Norwich clinching the title on the final day of the Football League Championship season on Sunday. Both clubs have graced the Premier League before: Norwich as recently as the 2015-16 season whereas Sheffield have not been in the top flight since being relegated in 2006-07.
What is interesting about the two teams is neither were fancied for promotion at the start of the season, with many experts (pundits and bookmakers alike) suggesting both teams would finish around mid-table. This seemed justified. Prior to the start of the season Norwich cashed in by selling some of their high profile players, such as James Maddison who was sold to Leicester City for a fee reported to be in the region of £20m and Josh Murphy who signed for Cardiff for around £11m). These players were replaced with a number of players on free transfers, including the Finnish International Teemu Pukki whose only previous experience of playing in the UK was for Glasgow Celtic in 2013 to 2015, scoring 9 goals in 37 appearances – hardly the hallmark of a proven goal-scorer! Sheffield United had a more proven goal-scorer in Billy Sharp but much of this – at least recently – was achieved in the third tier of the football pyramid (League 1).
In contrast it was widely expected that promotion candidates would have come from those clubs that had been relegated from the Premier League (e.g. Stoke City, Swansea City and West Bromwich Albion who might still get promoted via the play-offs) in part because these teams would have received a financial payment, commonly known as a “parachute payment”, based on a percentage of the equally shared element of the broadcasting rights each Premier League club receives. This is not a trivial amount of money with Stoke, Swansea and West Brom each receiving £41.6m in parachute payments. Compare this to the £88m the English Football League distributed to its 72 clubs (equating to £1.22m per club) demonstrates the obvious financial disparity between the two leagues.
However whilst financial performance appears to be a strong indicator of success in the Premier League (most could probably predict the top six clubs, for example), there appears to be no magic formula for success in the Championship. The most recent edition of Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance (published in June 2018 and based on the 2016-17 season) found that the correlation coefficient between the wage bill and team performance (league position) to be 0.81 in the Premier League compared to just 0.5 in the Championship. The corresponding scatterplots are displayed in Figures 1 and 2 with the quadrants based on mean position (y-axis) and mean wage (x-axis). In the case of the Premier League the mean wage was £123.4m whereas in the Championship it was £29.83m. As Figure 1 shows, the majority of Premier League clubs lie within either the lower-left (low-wage low-performance) or upper-right quadrants (high-wage high performance). For the Championship a third of clubs lie within the opposite quadrants (low-wage high-performance or high-wage low-performance). This means at least a third of Championship clubs were either over-performing or under-performing based on their reported wage bill.
So what are the prospects for both Norwich and Sheffield United as they embark on their Premier League journey next season? Well apart from the huge financial injection both clubs will receive as a result of playing in the Premier League, there are also likely to be wider benefits to the local economy. A report published by EY in January 2019, has suggested that the Premier League as a whole contributes £7.6bn in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy and supporting close to 100,000 jobs.
The global power of the Premier League, with an audience reach of over 1 billion, can also benefit the universities. Our own Vice-Chancellor, David Richardson, suggested that Premier League status helps the “international profile” – essentially acting as free advertising for the region. This seems to be especially important for less “fashionable” regions and regions unfamiliar to an overseas audience and can be seen as putting a region “on the map” so to speak. This has been supported by recent research academic research coming from Germany, which find that promotion (relegation) has statistically positive (negative) effects on student enrollments.
Overall the prospects for Norwich and Sheffield are financially very good for the clubs and their local areas. If Teemu Pukki is able to do the business in the Premier League as he has done in the Championship this season (scoring 29 goals in 43 appearances) don’t also be surprised to see a spike in student applications from Finland!
1 Comment