Which English Premier League defence has the best Return on Investment? Blackpool. For now anyway…

Source: Blackpool FC Website

The parallels between business and sport are getting closer everyday, with many large sporting teams across the globe increasingly looking to their business counterparts in the hope to gain an edge. Indeed many football teams throughout the world can be considered not just businesses, but thriving multi-national companies. Consider the example of Manchester United, who on current value has the world’s most valuable team, worth an astounding $1.8 billion dollars. To contextualise this relative to the corporate world, that’s comparable to American retailing giant Office Depot ($2.08Bn).


From personal experience companies constantly measure and scrutinise employee performance and output. Should we not heed our company’s reminders around delivery then we are often shown the door. Today employees are a company’s main asset , so why don’t companies and sporting organisations quantitatively track return on investment for employees.

With employees being labelled assets and companies expecting a major return on their investments (ROI), at Sports Analytics INC we evaluated the top football/soccer leagues in Europe’s player performance ROI, starting sith the English Premier League. In the business world ROI is your net income / value of assets. Many people have applied this to the sporting context, few have incorporated their players current performance. Hopefully to add a further level of value to this ‘performance ROI’ evaluation, segmenting players into their traditional areas, i.e. defender, striker, midfielder and goalkeeper provides a greater drill-down into positional ROI. For consistency purposes all leagues will be evaluated in a 4-4-2 formation.

First off the rank will be defenders. Many a sports expert will tell you that defence is the cornerstone to a title winning team hence the analysis starts down back.

Teams performance will be evaluated as follows;

Criteria	Weighting
Clean sheets	5 points
Goals scored	5 points
Assists	4 points
Minus
Red cards	5 points
Yellow cards	3 points
Divided by
Goal per game average
Divided by
Cost to assemble starting back 4 that has played the most games this season.

Table 1:Team Performance to determine ROI indicators

Now we know the methodology behind the performance ROI this is what the results look like. I also threw in the cost to assemble that back 4 just to further emphasise the point;

Rank	Team	Cost to assemble
1	Blackpool	$ 924,000.00
2	Fulham	$ 7,172,000.00
3	West Brom	$ 4,690,400.00
4	Birmingham	$ 4,690,400.00
5	Chelsea	$ 27,192,000.00
6	Arsenal	$ 24,970,000.00
7	Everton	$ 23,584,000.00
8	Man Utd	$ 56,760,000.00
9	Liverpool	$ 30,360,000.00
10	Stoke	$ 12,760,000.00
11	Sunderland	$ 10,912,000.00
12	Tottenham	$ 21,032,000.00
13	Newcastle	$ 21,120,000.00
14	Blackburn	$ 3,960,000.00
15	Man City	$ 31,592,000.00
16	Aston Villa	$ 24,552,000.00
17	Wolverhampton	$ 3,432,000.00
18	Bolton	$ 15,632,000.00
19	West Ham	$ 11,352,000.00
20	Wigan	$ 4,840,000.00

Table 2: Defensive ROI Rankings

Tangerines head and shoulders above

I remember before the season commenced Blackpool’s Manager Ian Holloway was struggling to recruit players, as many a pundit had the ‘Tangerines’ at the top of their ‘most likely to be relegated list’. On evidence so far this season they may be spending at least one more season in the top flight. Not only did they top the list, they were also providing a performance ROI of over 4 times more then Fulham in second place.

Biggest Disappointments

When you have a starting back 4 that costs over $30M to assemble, with many more multi-million pound replacements sitting on the bench, as Manchester City do, I would be expecting a little more “bang for my buck” if I was Sheikh Mansour. Whilst analytically they were the biggest disappointment, logic at Sports Analytics INC says they were not the biggest disappointment. Whilst we can ‘excuse’ their lack of cohesion due to their limited familiarity playing with each other, we cannot give Aston Villa the same leeway. With a back 4 that has been playing together for a few seasons now, and renowned for their no-nonsense defensive style, the start they have made to the season is unacceptable. Yes they are adapting to a new mangers game plan, though gone are the marauding runs of the full backs overlapping the wingers and whipping in crosses at will. With the giant John Carew in the penalty area, this is a weapon that needs to be utilised as often as possible.

Trends

Looking at the results from an impartial perspective, it seems that whilst money doesn’t necessarily equate to the best defensive performance ROI, a carefully selected back 4 will generate a number of other benefits.

The below table represents the most attacking defence this season to date;

Rank	Team	Offensive points
1	Chelsea	105
2	Arsenal	53
3	Man Utd	51
4	Birmingham	48
5	Fulham	46
6	Everton	41
7	West Brom	40
8	Blackburn	37
8	Stoke	37
10	Liverpool	36
10	Wolverhampton	36
12	Man City	34
13	Sunderland	33
14	Newcastle	32
15	Aston Villa	29
15	Blackpool	29
17	Tottenham	28
17	Wigan	28
19	Bolton	15
20	West Ham	10

Table 3: Most attacking defense

Conclusions

Many a conclusion can be drawn from this analysis, however we need to keep in mind that this was conducted at round 11 of a 38 round season. Moving forward, Sports Analytics INC will endeavour to conduct this defensive performance ROI once a month to see how teams fare throughout the season.

The best ROI midfield and attacks are next up. Stay tuned next week for an in-depth midfield review.