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2 hours ago
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Do clubs with the most expensive players score more goals in English league football? The answer is a strong yes.
In this blog post, I'll show an analysis of goals scored vs. club transfer value and you'll clearly see a strong correlation. Of course, it's not the only factor that affects goals scored, but it's a strong signal.
(Google Gemini. Note the Euro has three legs!)
The data comes from TransferMarkt (https://www.transfermarkt.com/) who publish a market values for clubs. The market value is the estimated transfer value of all the players in the club squad. Obviously, transfer values change over time when players are bought, sold, or are injured. TransferMarkt have club transfer values at the start of each season and they also provide biweekly values. For this analysis, I've used the season start values. The dataset starts properly in 2010 for the top four tiers.
The charts below show goals for, against, and net (for - against) vs. total club transfer value for each club for each season for each league. The slider lets you change the year and the buttons let you change the league tier. The points on the charts are individual clubs and the line is a linear regression fit. The r2 and p-value for the fit are in the chart title. The blue band is the 95% confidence interval on the fit.
In addition to the buttons and slider, the charts are interactive:
- You can hover over points and see their values.
- You can zoom-in or zoom-out using the tool menu on the left.
- You can save the charts using the tools menu on the left.
Take a while to play with the charts.
All leagues show the following trends:
- Higher club value = more for goals
- Higher club value = fewer against goals
- Higher club value = more net goals
The strength of this correlation varies by league and by time, but it's there.
The r2 value varies in the range 0.4 to 0.91, suggesting a good correlation, but it's not the only factor; there are other factors we need to consider to fully model goals. The p-values are close to 0, indicating this correlation is very unlikely to have happened by chance.
Take a look at league tier 3 for 2024 (this is currently called "League One"). There's a huge outlier and it's Birmingham City. These guys were in the Premier League not so long ago, but suffered a number of problems on and off the pitch which led to their relegation. They've recently had a big cash injection are are now owned (in part) by Tom Brady. Part of this big cash injection was new management and new players. As a result, they were promoted back to the EFL Championship (tier 2) in 2025. In other words, they're a big club temporarily fallen on hard times; they're an outlier.
If you take a look at tier 2, you'll see the top valued clubs are pretty much all clubs recently relegated from the Premier League. To play in the Premier League, you need top-quality talent, and that's expensive. On the flip side, you get more gate revenue and TV money. Relegated teams face a number of issues: star players may leave and revenues drop precipitously. To stand any chance of being promoted, clubs need to retain top-talent at the same time as their revenue has fallen. These conflicting requirements can and has led to financial instability. To ease the relegation transition, the Premier League provides "parachute" payments to relegated clubs. The upshot is, newly relegated teams are in a better place than the other clubs in the league; they have parachute money and good players.
Growing up in England, there was a lot of football fiction aimed at kids. A staple of the genre was a struggling team that somehow make it to the top, out-playing bigger and more expensive teams. Sadly, this just isn't the reality and probably never was; money is pretty much the only way up. Looking back, I'm not sure the financial underdog fantasy was helpful.
Both the fictional Ted Lasso and the real Wrexham are in the news. Notably, neither Ted Lasso nor Wrexham are rags-to-riches tales.
In Ted Lasso, the fictional Richmond team owner brought in Ted Lasso to tank the team performance to spite her ex-husband. The team had plenty of money (lack of money was never a major story line). Perhaps the writers felt that having a cheap team rise to the top would be too unrealistic.
Wrexham's upward path has been paid for by Hollywood money, and in fact Wrexham's club value is pretty typical of a League One team, they're very much not the financial underdog.
The rags-to-riches fantasy, or maybe, the financial underdog-wins-all fantasy, is just a fantasy.
The bottom line is the bottom line. Money talks, and if you want to score the goals, you've got to spend the cash.
