Analysis: Competitive Balance in Europe’s Big Five Leagues after 11 Matchdays
By: Jan | November 8th, 2007A bit over one-third of the Bundesliga season is over now, and I thought it’s time to cater to the statistic nerds among my readers (are there any?). I decided to take a look at how the table shaped up and how it compares to last season. In particular, I wondered whether the balance of power has changed. While I compiled the numbers, I thought it might be interesting to put them in a European perspective as well.
Since the Bundesliga has 18 teams it’s easy to split up the league into three groups with 6 teams each. So I created a group for the top, middle and bottom of the table and calculated the sum of points each group earned so far. I then put them in relation to each other. For example: the six best teams of the Bundesliga have collected 2,3 times as many points as the six worst teams. As the other leagues feature 20 teams, I had to apply some magic to create the three groups, but the numbers should be representative. It’s more about a tendency rather than definitive statements anyway. The comparison of top vs bottom is probably the most interesting, and I used it to rank the leagues. Whether lower numbers are better is up for interpretation though.
The last Bundesliga season was the most balanced after 11 matchdays and would indeed turn out to be wide open at the top and at the bottom that year. This season has changed quite a bit, especially when comparing the top and the bottom of the league. It looks like we’ll have a more ‘normal’ season again. At the least, far fewer clubs will probably be involved in the relegation battle.
Ligue 1 is the most balanced league this season. A finding that complies with a far more in depth analysis by Ernst & Young, I blogged about a few months ago. The Bundesliga comes in second, which again is in sync with that study. Though, La Liga and Serie A are close neighbours. The numbers that obviously stand out the most are the ones of the English Premier League.
The Premier League has the most pronounced hierarchical structure. Which is in so far interesting, as the massive new TV deal kicked in this season and flooded the smaller clubs with money. E.g. a bottom placed Premier League team receives the same amount of TV money as a top placed Bundesliga team. Yet, this money didn’t help create a more balanced league. The money could have just inflated player prices and wages, without adding any substantial quality to the smaller clubs. Maybe more teams need to get Sven’s and Juan Ramoses first. Another phenomenon that might explain part of this hierarchy has it’s own Wikipedia article and is called the Premiership-Football league gulf.
But, as I mentioned above. Whether a balanced or an unbalanced league is better is up for interpretation. Isn’t it odd that the least balanced league is the one with the biggest worldwide TV deal? What isn’t odd is the fact that Bayern Munich has the most fans in Germany. And that’s not because they win a title every five or ten years but because they win one every other year. Most people who watch the Premier League want to see the biggest and best teams with the best players. Most people who aren’t bound, via local or family ties, to a shite team, will become fans of a big winning team instead. It’s OK if the rest of the league just serves as cannon fodder. Extras whose sole purpose is to let the top of the table perform their magic tricks, that we all strive to see. Like Slavia Prague or Besiktas Istanbul in the Champions League. And every once in a while, one of the smaller teams is allowed a remarkable upset everybody will talk about and remember. The Premiership-Football league Gulf also has the positive side effect of turning the relegation model in an American franchise model in disguise. If the same five or six teams get promoted and relegated each season, all the other teams can operate in relative economic safety, similar to a franchise driven league.
Overall, as an entertainment product the Premier League seems to work very well so far, and the competitive imbalance that is in place hasn’t hurt the league. Maybe it even helped it?
Just a thought…
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Thanks for the stats, Jan. I for one love numbers.
Your findings, and that of the survey, confirm for me what I’ve always thought. L1 has a lot of average clubs but not so many poor clubs, which I don’t believe is true for any other of the leagues you listed. That is why they will never shine in European competition but are all competitive with each other (except Lyon).
It’s a shame that the EPL and its followers don’t care about the overall strength of their league. I honestly think England has the worst bottom half of the table among the top five leagues. Sure, the usual CL applicants are among the best in the world, but their relegation teams are just plain embarrassing. It’s like the TV broadcasters are paying those clubs money to lose to the big teams so that there will be “spectacle.”
If England were like France, where even the bottom clubs managed to grind out at least draws with the top half of the table on a consistent basis, people would call the EPL boring too!
I can’t comment on the state of the Bundesliga relegation teams since I’ve haven’t watched them on a consistent basis, but Serie A and La Liga are slightly better than the EPL in this regard, though you still get the feeling there is a big gap between the haves and the have nots in terms of quality.
Not that there isn’t one in France, but despite the common perception, Lyon aren’t that much superior in terms of manpower quality compared to the other L1 teams. It’s just that they have more money and can afford to have a deep bench, and that’s how they get away with winning the league. Sort of like Bayern I imagine.
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Huh. That’s an interesting interpretation. I would have always assumed that having more balance in a league would make it more interesting because there would be less “freebie” matches thus rising the overall excitement and the roller coaster of emotions and giving wins more weight and merit. In other words more “good vs good” or “good vs decent” matches that make for good television.
It seems interesting that more people would like to see just a winning team in general, but it makes more sense in hindsight. There is a large group of casual fans who just want to see teams win things. And furthermore, the teams that overall dominate serve as villains for the rest of the league thus drawing massive fans for “giant-killer moments”. A big example over here of that would be the Yankees where assholes and NYers would cheer on the money team and everyone else on the planet would cheer on whoever they were playing in the hopes that it would shut the Yankees up.
I imagine the EPL is further bolstered by the fact that the CL and UC are genuine good on good competitions for the most part and so the imbalance of the league (long draughts of “freebie” games) is offset by the drama of the European matches. I imagine that also decreases interest in teams with more balance at the decent level because it sucks to have your team knocked out early if they are even in the competition at all and leaves you without European drama.
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Inara:
The Bundesliga has a problem with an economic imbalance between clubs from the rich west and the poor east. Clubs from the east struggle with poor infrastructure and other economic road blocks they have to get out of the way first. So there has yet to be an east German club, that can establish itself in the league for a longer time (Berlin doesn’t count). Teams from the west aren’t really poor and are also benefiting from the boom in the Bundesliga the last couple of years.
There are obviously people who care about the imbalance of the EPL; fans, journalists, players, managers. But the EPL is doing really well, so there isn’t really a need to dramatically change anything yet. And so I thought it’s worth looking for alternative explanations for a league’s attractiveness.
About the relegation teams in the Bundesliga: they are competitive. Not as much as last season, as the stats show, but they got wins and draws against the best clubs. But it doesn’t help Cottbus if they win against Schalke but lose against everyone else.
And there is a lot of truth in your statement about the depth of the bench of clubs like Bayern or Lyon. And I think that’s one of the problems that clubs, who don’t yet have such a big name face. I mean how do you maintain a quality bench, without players requesting a transfer at the end of the season? Big clubs can offer prestige, Champions League play etc. That’s another advantage of the big four in England and of an unbalanced league in general. Teams in a balanced league automatically have problems keeping their best players as they can’t offer them the same perspective as a big club, that is basically guaranteed to play in the CL (Mid sized French or German clubs may play in the CL, then don’t even make it into the UEFA Cup the next season, then play two seasons in the UEFA Cup and then maybe play in the CL again).
That’s why I wonder whether it would help the Bundesliga or Ligue 1, if they had more teams consistently playing in the Champions League or at least UEFA Cup?
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Cerberus:
>In other words more “good vs good” or “good vs decent” matches
>that make for good television.Well, I think you probably can’t make definitive judgements whether a balanced or an unbalanced league is better. Both have different qualities/advantages/disadvantages. You obviously have a point there. And the last Bundesliga season was wide open and it was exciting to watch because of that.
>There is a large group of casual fans who just want to
>see teams win things.Exactly, plus superstars. Not that a normal fan would mind any of that either.:-)
>And furthermore, the teams that overall dominate serve as
>villains for the rest of the league thus drawing massive fans for
>“giant-killer moments”.Just like your Yankees example, it’s the exact same here with Bayern. They also serve as villains. Though they currently also receive a lot of love for their new brand of football (even if it went missing the last couple of weeks).
Also very good point about the Champions League and UEFA Cup. Should be added to my explanation.:-)
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The problem with the Bundesliga and L1 is that besides Bayern and Lyon, the other European spots aren’t consistently filled by the same teams. In England, Spain, and Italy, everyone more or less knows which teams will qualify. Maybe not what order, but it’s basically the same teams over and over again. So they get richer and richer and build a reputation and gain experience.
I don’t know about Germany, but in France, in the six years Lyon have been champions, there has been a different second place finisher every time. Last year, Bordeaux and Lille accompanied Lyon into the Champions League; this year it is Marseille and Toulouse (who didn’t get past the qualifying round).
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Werder Bremen have been quite consistent the last four years. But Stuttgart, Hamburg, Dortmund, Schalke etc. have either played in the CL, UEFA Cup or no European football at all.
Bremen’s success has definitely helped the club build a good team, grow their fanbase etc. But the other teams still have an economic advantage over Bremen. Since the Bundesliga doesn’t have a rich TV deal, clubs get more money from other income sources and those have more to do with the economic potential of the region the clubs are from. E.g. Hamburg needs to play one CL season to show up in the Football Money League Top 20. Bremen hasn’t shown up once in the previous three years.
So it would actually make more ’sense’ (assuming I want to see a Big Four in the Bundesliga) that clubs like Hamburg, Schalke and Stuttgart always take the top spots together with Bayern. Or actually it would make the most sense if Berlin take one of those spots. Probably replace Stuttgart with Berlin. Even my second division team of choice Cologne would make a good Big Four team.
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Very interesting post. As a huge statistical nerd, I love stuff like this. The question of whether a balanced or unbalanced league is “better” is an interesting one. Obviously, a top team’s fans want to stay on top, and balance makes that less likely. Mid-table teams’ fans would prefer a balanced league that gives them occasional shots at Europe rather than always languishing in the same spots. I think balance is best, though all else being equal, balance probably hurts a league’s European record and UEFA coefficient by spreading talent out a bit thinner throughout the league and letting mid-range teams occasionally take top spots.
Nice work.
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Ian: I think balance is best, if you would have a really big closed domestic league - like a supersized MLS. Balance doesn’t work if the league itself is in a way just a prelude for the bigger European stage. The best players want to play on the biggest stage, so they will favour clubs that a) play in the CL b) look set to play there regularly. A highly balanced league in Europe can’t offer that.
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