Smart spending - Everton 4th best in Europe

Graham Kelly Friday, 3 , 2017 15comments | Jump to most recent

According to a report in the FT Everton is the smartest spender in the Premier League, and only three clubs have a better record in the whole of Europe.

The analysis has been modelled by assuming that the default league position is dictated by transfer spending, e.g. the biggest spenders will win the league, the seventh biggest spenders will finish seventh etc, and then ranks clubs by how much better or worse they actually did in comparison with that default position. So it will be no surprise to anyone that QPR is among the very stupidest spenders in Europe.

The financial figures cover the period 2011-2015, by which I assume they mean the club's accounts published in those years, so in terms of playing time, it probably means 2010-2014. That's mainly the David Moyes era, but our ranking will presumably have been pushed up by the strong performance in the first Martinez season of 2013-14. Even so, the performances under Moyes account for three quarters of the data, so seems to provide evidence that Moyes may not have had much money to spend, but what he spent was spent well.

Reader Comments (15)

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Phil Parker
1 Posted 03/02/2017 at 16:13:39

No credit given to Bill for his wheeling and dealing? There's a suprise.

Peter Gorman
2 Posted 04/02/2017 at 09:46:26

Did they factor Niasse in?

Steve Hopkins
3 Posted 04/02/2017 at 10:27:29

Oumar Niasse – the man credited with changing the phrase "to put one's foot in one's mouth" to "putting one's knee in one's arse" when describing a total balls-up.

Graham Kelly
4 Posted 04/02/2017 at 17:03:52

Philâ€¦ I didn't mention Bill because I was hoping for an intelligent debate about transfer policy, and I didn't want the thread to attract all the knee-jerk Kenwright hating comments that usually get trotted out.

Personally I think Bill has done a decent job and he deserves a share of the credit because he apparently does a lot of the negotiating himself.

Graham Kelly
5 Posted 04/02/2017 at 17:07:05

Peter & Steveâ€¦ I think the data was from a period before the signing of Niasse. By the way, he's just scored for Hull City against the RS, which has made me feel a little bit better about the waste of £13million.

Steve Hopkins
6 Posted 04/02/2017 at 20:06:46

I'd prefer it if a 㾹million signing was scoring against the RS for us in an Everton victory but beggars can't be choosers, I guess.

Denis Richardson
7 Posted 04/02/2017 at 20:13:38

Are they including wages or just transfer spend as usual?

The real decider is the wage bill, which eats up about 2/3s of our income. Transfer money just goes round and round.

Think we've had about the 7th highest wage bill for a few years and surprisingly we've averaged about err.... 7th.

Steve Ferns
8 Posted 04/02/2017 at 21:26:41

Exactly, Denis. Our finishing position and wage bill have been pretty much consistent for a decade now. 7th to 10th. Anything above 7th is "punching above our weight"; anything in the bracket is doing as expected... and 11th or worse is underachieving.

Tony Abrahams
9 Posted 04/02/2017 at 21:56:32

No credit to Bill, for all his wheeling and dealing? Let's start with Finch Farm, Phil@1.

Simon Jones
10 Posted 06/02/2017 at 09:33:59

I think most of us will agree that Moyes built just about the best side he could with very limited resources (I'm not making an argument for his tactics in individual games). I know you can wheel out Per Krøldrup as a disaster signing, but I will raise you a Tim Cahill in response.

We mostly punched above our weight under Moyes and the report would appear to back that up. If Sunderland can stay up then I think he will have repeated the trick.

Paul Burns
11 Posted 06/02/2017 at 18:07:09

Our weight is nine league titles.

Unless we win the league, we are not punching above it. Anything else is just an excuse for failure.

Phil Parker
12 Posted 06/02/2017 at 20:53:24

Fair enough, Graham. Bill has been robbing Peter to pay Paul ever since he became Chairman, and all he gets from some quarters are snide comments. No offence meant.

CiarÃ¡n McGlone
13 Posted 06/02/2017 at 20:59:41

Our league positions were in spite of Kenwright, not because of him.

Paul Holmes
14 Posted 06/02/2017 at 21:13:47

I would like to see the same survey done for selling players... we must be in pole position in Europe!

Remember the money we got for Lescott to Man City, Stones to Man City, Rodwell to Man City, big Vic to West Brom... and many more. Post on here if you can remember some of them, as the last two I can remember were Rooney to Man Utd and Jeffers to Arsenal.

John Graham
15 Posted 23/02/2017 at 13:35:01

Sorted then. From what Dennis and Steve 7/8 are saying, all we have to do is pay our players lots more and we will soon be Champions.

Shame Leicester had to go and win it last season or we could have found a great solution.

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