An image of Sunderland fans at Roker Park.

How many points do you need to avoid Premier League relegation?

Here we are, ‘Survival Sunday’, this decrepit season’s death rattle.

Either Hull City or Newcastle United will, come tea-time today, have secured their Premier League status for another year despite supporter boycotts, cocaine abuse and managers accusing players of getting themselves sent off deliberately.

Should they both lose, which is likely considering just how absolutely rancid these two teams are, Newcastle’s meagre 36 points will have proved just about enough.

Whereas managers once used to talk of ‘the 40-point mark’ as a some kind of life-giving panacea, it has been four years since a team needed so many to stay up (Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2010/11). Whisper it, but because of declining standards, the number of points needed to stay in Premier League has slowly fallen since the turn of the century.

How do you know that?

We took a look at the final league tables for each year since the division was reduced from a 42-game season to a 38-game season in 1995/96. This allowed us to calculate the probability of avoiding relegation for a series of points totals.

Remember, there are few certainties in football. This data is based simply on past Premier League seasons, none of which have been freak anomalies on the edge of mathematics with teams so bad they lose all but one or two games.

It should be noted that 64 points is the amount needed to absolutely guarantee safety in the division. A club could, however, potentially stay up on a total as low as 6.

So, how many points does a team need to probably stay up?

Probability of avoiding relegation per points total

First things first, no team since 1995/96 has stayed up with 30 points or less. There’s your minimum standard. In 2009/10, both Hull and Burnley were relegated with 30, ahead of a cash-strapped Portsmouth side who earned only 19.

If, next season, Newcastle’s owner Mike Ashley is particularly eager to pinch the pennies, history suggests he could only invest enough into his side to earn 31 points and still keep them up, but there would be a slim 5.26 per cent chance of success.

At the opposite end of the scale, West Ham United’s 2002/03 side, which slotted young talents like Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe alongside established performers in Paolo di Canio and Frédéric Kanouté did not do enough to stay up despite taking 42 points.

Somebody has to be the unlucky outlier in this dataset and, unfortunately for the Irons, it was them. Based on this information, a side that earns over the traditional target of 40 now has a very healthy 94.74 per cent chance of avoiding the drop.

The most interesting point to take from this information, however, is the jump from 36 points to 37. Whereas the former has only been enough to secure Premier League safety 44.74 per cent of the time, the latter offers a 68.42 per cent chance of survival – above two-thirds.

It might not be a round and even number but maybe 37 points is the new target that managers should aim for when facing a battle at the sharp end of the league table.

Featured image: Homes of Football (Wikipedia)


@mjcritchley

An image showing the Champions League banner being waved before a match.

UEFA Champions League Market Pool: Financial Foul Play?

The story of Juventus’ march to this year’s UEFA Champions League final has been billed in some quarters as a romantic one.

Never mind the on-going corruption scandal that caused Italy’s most storied club to fall from European football’s top table; for those who remember Wednesday nights in the late 1990s, with Zinedine Zidane’s pirouettes, Alessandro del Piero’s back heels and Edgar Davids’ glaucoma, their renaissance carries a nostalgic quality.

The Bianconieri have, however, been somewhat helped along the way by UEFA’s system for distributing Champions League television money.

Before the current campaign, Juventus had qualified for Europe’s premier club competition three times in five seasons. They crashed out at the group stage in 2009/10 and 2013/14, but reached the quarter-finals in 2012/13, where they were eliminated by eventual champions Bayern Munich.

For one of the continent’s biggest clubs, that is not a spectacular record. The Old Lady’s rather limp performances did not, however, prevent them from earning €88.7m from UEFA in television money over the same period, the sixth-highest amount of any club. Incredibly, that’s more than ever-presents Real Madrid. What’s more, in the year of that quarter-final defeat, they earned €44.8m, the most of any club.

How can that be right?

Welcome to the ‘market pool’, the perplexing way in which the money paid by Champions League broadcasters is redistributed back to their respective nation’s clubs.

Market pool: highest-earning clubs (2009/10 - 2013/14)

Essentially, it is a payment based on the size of the television market in each nation. So, for example, in England, where Sky and ITV currently hold the rights to show Champions League football, around €70m is split between the four qualified English clubs each year (and the single Scottish club, if they reach the group stage). This system works well for clubs like Juventus, Arsenal, Barcelona and others who can count themselves lucky enough to come from countries where television rights go for a lot of money. Regardless of their performance in the competition, they are guaranteed to take a sizeable  amount from the market pool. Last season, Marseille lost every game in the group stage and still took home €23.8m.

OK, is there really a problem with that though?

Amount received from market pool per nation (2013/14)

Yes. The problem is that the current system hands out the big bucks based on factors unrelated to achievement.

Remember APOEL? The Cypriot club were responsible for the most extraordinary run in the competition’s recent history when they reached the quarter-finals in 2012.

Their famous victories over Zenit St. Petersburg, Porto and Lyon that year, not to forget their two goals in the Santiago Bernabéu, defied logic, science and the various in place to keep the minnows in their place. Their reward from UEFA’s pool of television money? A measly €1.8m.

By comparison, in the same season as APOEL’s run, Manchester United earned €25.2m despite finishing third in their group and exiting the tournament early. Romania’s Otelui Galati, the team that finished below United and lost every game, still managed to take home €11.2m.

In this sense, the payments bear no relation to how far a team actually progresses in the competition. Another payment, the ‘performance bonus’, is designed to reflect this but the sums are much smaller than those distributed by the market pool, meaning that clubs like APOEL have to pull off  miraculous victories to merely compete.

It’s not only unfair on the smaller nations. Imagine, for example, that a Portuguese club make it all the way to the semi-finals, at which point they are knocked out. An English club, who have an identical record to the Portuguese side, are also eliminated at the semi-final stage that year.

Both have had credible campaigns, both have played the same number of televised games and they can both consider themselves unlucky to be missing out on the final. The English club, however, receives a significantly higher amount of television money.

Why? Solely because their country’s broadcasters pay more for Champions League coverage.


A map showing how much each nation has earned from the market pool (2009/10 – 2013/14)

There’s an argument that the system is fair. The clubs who earn the most from the market pool tend to be the most popular and, therefore, tend to attract the largest television audiences. Why shouldn’t this popularity be reflected in television money payments?

Well, for one reason, because the most popular Champions League sides do not need the cash boost.

Each year, under the market pool system, around €330m of broadcasting companies’ money is pumped into the five major leagues; the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1.

This has entrenched the elite nations’ dominance in European competition, to the point where 79% of the clubs to have progressed through the group stage in the last five seasons have come from one of these five leagues.

The market pool is one reason why we see the same names in the latter stages of the competition year in, year out, it is  one reason why we have entered the age of the ‘super club’ and it is one reason why we may soon see the dawn of a ‘super league’.

Download the data
Featured image: Alberto Sánchez Fernández (Flickr)


@mjcritchley

"Newcastle United v Zulte Waragem, 2007 (2)" by User:Responsible? - Self-photographed. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Newcastle_United_v_Zulte_Waragem,_2007_(2).JPG#/media/File:Newcastle_United_v_Zulte_Waragem,_2007_(2).JPG

A Timeline of Woe: How Newcastle found themselves on the brink of relegation

Ahead of the last game of the season, we’ve taken a look back over Newcastle’s campaign, which sees them dangerously close to the relegation zone with only a game left to play.

Should results not go their way on Sunday, Newcastle could find themselves plying their trade in the Championship, a division they escaped in 2010, next season.

In part, this is a result of the policies of the owner, Mike Ashley.

A poor summer of recruitment caused a bad start to the campaign.

However, manager Alan Pardew turned it around in staggering fashion, climbing to seventh in the league.

Having not been given assurances over transfers in the January window, however, he moved on to Crystal Palace, who he saved from relegation with plenty of time to spare.

John Carver was then put in charge, and coming into the last weekend of the season, he has lost nine of the last ten games, putting Newcastle only two points above the relegation zone.

They could still go down.

Featured image credit: “Newcastle United v Zulte Waragem, 2007 (2)” by User:Responsible?Self-photographed. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.