Transfer Cost per point

Brighton & Hove Albion

Out of the 20 teams that competed in the 2017/18 season, Brighton & Hove Albion had the lowest cost per point (£0.591m per point). While staying up, they managed to sign quality players (Pascal Groß for £3m, José Izquierdo for £13.5m, etc…), while not overspending nor spending too much on players. Apart from having a strong home form, it’s clear that Brighton made the right investments, with Groß, Izqueirdo, and Pröpper all playing critical role in Brighton’s performances last season.

Furthermore, because they mainly signed players from abroad, the transfer fee was significantly lower than it would be if they signed an English player, alongside lower wage demands from the players. Brighton & Hove Albion are fishing in the pond, and it’s no surprise to see them do well in the Premier league.

Spurs

Out of the top 6, Spurs had the lowest cost per point (£1.724m per point), a lower cost per point ratio than the likes of Southampton, Everton, and Crystal Palace. Despite not winning any trophies, Spurs still managed to finish in top 4, despite other teams spending more than them and having higher cost per point.

*From 2017/18 season*

While Spurs have incurred massive costs from building the new stadium and despite having the chance to buy players during the summer transfer window, Spurs believe in giving players from the youth academy first-team action, something of which has contributed to its low cost model.

Part of Levy’s reluctance to spend money has “forced” Pochettino to play more youth, with games stacking up and the need for squad depth, which as a result allows Spurs to help grow young players, easing them into the first team.

Manchester United

Even though Manchester City had the highest cost-per point (4.125), they won the league so it’s very difficult to explain why City’s cost-per-point was so much yet they did so well. However, following City is Manchester United (£3.949m per point), who finished 19 points behind Manchester City and failed to win a single trophy throughout the season.

Apart from taking a huge gamble on Alexis Sánchez, Manchester United made him the highest paid player in the league. Not only that, but they signed players from other clubs in the league, rather from other European leagues (Romelu Lukaku, Nemanja Matic, etc….). Instead of deciding to buy a world-class player for a cheaper transfer fee and cheaper wages, Manchester United went big on players whose wages didn’t match what they were going to contribute to the team.

The absence of a director of football also heavily contributes. By not having a director of football, the club is essentially depending on the manager to choose which players to buy, but the issue with this model is that the club is that once the manager leaves, the new managers’ squad is filled with players that aren’t wanted. Louis van Gaal signed multiple players such as Memphis Depay and Daley Blind, but when José Mourinho took over, he inherited a squad comprised of a few players that he didn’t want, and eventually sold them for a price cheaper than what they were bought for, making a loss.

Because there is no director of football that’s signing players based on the best interest of the club rather than the manager, Manchester United have been forced to spent big amounts of money on players just so they can give the manager the squad they want. As a result, because most of their recent signings have flopped, they’re selling their players for a cheaper value while overpaying for players.

While commercially Manchester United gets billions of revenue, this still doesn’t hide the fact that they make big mistakes and incur several costs when signing players and assembling a squad.

Everton

Everton also had a notably high cost per point, incurring a cost of £3.032m per game. And this can be explained by poor mistakes in the transfer market. Everton in the summer of 2017 signed too many players in either the same position or in areas that didn’t need urgent replacements, and that as a result caused an unbalanced squad with players playing out of position to cover the gaps.

Despite a new manager with Marco Silva, some of the mistakes made in summer 2017 were replace during the summer of 2018. They signed 3 back-up Barcelona players (Yerry Mina, Andre Gomes, Lucas Digne) for big sums of money, while spending £40m on a player who scored 5 goals for the entirety of the 2017/18 season. Not only that, but because they haven’t signed players from undervalued leagues, Everton as a result have overpaid on players, including giving higher wages for players who are pretty mediocre.

Finding a relationship

If you created a scatterplot depicting the relationship between costs and points, than you would see that there’s a positive relationship. Considering that they’re two quantitative variables and there’s no pattern in the residual, a line of best equation that can be used to calculate how many points or costs a team might get can be determined by the following equation: Points= 0.1573(squad cost)+ 32.7239 (based on 2017/18 figures).

The correlation coefficient is 0.8832, suggesting it’s a strong, positive relationship, and with a r² of 0.78, this means that 78% of the data can be accounted for by this linear model.

Based on this, we can assume that there’s a positive relationship between squad cost and points.