This year’s premiership is on course to being the most competitive in over 12 years. Not since 1997-98 has the league been this competitive, with such an even distribution of the points on offer.
The chart below shows the competitive level of the premiership since it began in 1992-93. Building on analysis first carried out by footballeconomics.com, I’ve created a competitiveness index*. This uses a statistical technique to allow us to analyse the variation in the league. A perfectly competitive league would produce a competitive value of 1 in this index, as all teams would end up winning an equal proportion of the points on offer.
As can be seen from the chart, the long term trend has been for a decline in the competitiveness of the premier league ever since it started. However, many football pundits have suggested that this season is the most exciting and competitive league for a long time, pointing to Blackpool’s entertaining debut season with little resources, the wide open battle against relegation this season, and with Spurs and Man City challenging for the top four positions. It’s interesting to see that the statistics shown above would bear that out, with this season one of the most competitive in premier league history.
There are reasons to be optimistic, e.g. with the new UEFA financial fair play rules, that this year’s increased competitiveness may be a sign of things to come, and if so we can look forward to a much more competitive league in future years. Time will tell whether this is true, or whether like 2003-04 (itself the most competitive for 8 years at the time) this is just a short term blip in the long term decline.
(* in which the competitiveness value is equal to one minus the standard deviation of the proportion of points achieved by each team, for those of you that want the full geeky details...)
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