Who's Made Their £Million Wage Earners "Put In A Shift"?

As soon as Omar Chaudhuri starts tweeting words like "bugbear", you know he's onto something that deserves a good going over.

£'s per point were deservedly in his sights as a way of determining over or under performance compared to league position following The Times perpetuating this nonsense.

I've outlined the fatal flaws in this approach in yesterday's blog, and Omar has also suggested improved methodologies on his Twitter timeline.

But it opens up a wider question about the simplified use of readily available data.

Just because something is relatively easy to calculate and appears to be intuitively sensible it doesn't make it immune from being a piece of pernicious hogwash.

In the NFL, strength of schedule prior to the season is regularly estimated by adding the win/loss record from the previous season of the upcoming opponents for each team. This seems sensible and excel & csv files are your friend.

However, this too is easily verified GIGO. Do you really think a multitude of easily identified factors that delivered a 2-14 record are going to perpetuate?

Note to the Racing Post, "stop using these numbers in your season preview".

No one minds flawed reasoning, but the greater the potential audience, the greater the responsibility to do some due diligence regarding methods and a willingness to make corrections if needed.

Here's the performance of Premier League teams over the last six, nearly complete seasons, using the proportion of resources outlaid in wages and the similarly weighted rewards in terms of wins and draws compared to the historical relationship between the two.

A couple of seasons may be missing because I couldn't find the data for a few sides.

Everton, Spurs & Southampton have had a more than fair return for handing out bulky pay packets as do Bournemouth, with more limited evidence.

Newcastle have managed just one, albeit a spectacular season of over performing against the splashed cash and Leicester's single over par was unsurprisingly the largest one in the whole six year sample.

Sunderland can at least attempt to eventually over perform in new surroundings in 2017/18.

Here's the individual under/over seasonal wages vs performance for the 11 ever presents over the six seasons.

Tottenham and Everton making a habit of beating expectation and Arsenal performing to similar relative levels as WBA and Stoke (whose managers names escape me for the moment).