sloth
Well-Known Member
- Mar 7, 2005
- 9,018
- 6,900
Rather than speculate I thought it would be instructive to consider what we actually know about the Levy era at Spurs. In order to do this we need some comparisons. In this article I compare the Sugar and the ENIC years, then I benchmark performance against rivals, and finally I look at performance against expenditure.
The strong conclusion to draw is that on all counts Levy has done an amazing job for us.
Points Comparisons
The more points you win the higher up the league you'll tend to finish.
The first chart shows our points per year under Sugar,* I've included the average points required for top four over 17 Premier League years, and I've also fit a straightforward linear trend to it, this smooths the ups and downs to show the over-all direction of travel under Sugar. As you can see we never came close to hitting the top four threshold and the trend is basically flat (although it's appears to be down, it's probably actually flat).
This second chart shows the same thing but under Levy. Not only have we crossed that top four threshold three times in the last four years, but the trend could not be clearer.
OK, so I've shown that the when we switched owners the trend went from flat and low scoring, to strongly positive and so much higher scoring. This would be meaningless though if our rivals also improved during this period, for this reason it's interesting to benchmark against our PL rivals. I looked at a variety of teams including City, Utd, and Leeds Utd, but plumped for Villa, Arsenal, and Liverpool, this is because they were competing against us for the whole period, they did not get taken over by a sugar-daddy, in addition Arsenal are interesting because they're our main rivals, and Villa because they are a club with the same access to resource as us. The key measure I decided was the end of season points difference between us and them, and once again I overlaid the results with linear trend-lines, in this case if the trend is up it means we're doing more poorly in respect of our rivals.
This first chart shows shows the Sugar years points differentials. You'll notice they're all negative apart from against Villa where it's broadly speaking flat:
The next chart shows the same under ENIC. Once again you can see how we've progressed against our rivals, in the case of Liverpool we've over-taken them, and Arsenal we're now basically level, Villa we've left for dust.
However who's to say it's down to Levy? As all know money is the biggest indicator of success, those clubs which spend more should have more success, which means if we want to properly benchmark Levy we want to take the money out of it. I could only get my hands on four years of company accounts (as reported by the Guardian), so I have looked at the last four years and summed wages and transfer spend to get an over-all player spend for that period, I have then summed the points won in the same period and indexed one to the other to show how many millions of pound each club has spent per point.
As you can see from the chart below Levy far outstrips all his rivals in this regard, to my mind this is the biggest single indicator of the job he's done for us.
None of this is particularly revelatory, most people, even many of his critics acknowledge our improvement under ENIC, but I hope it does clearly illustrate the context behind that improvement. We are not a big budget club, our earning capacity is no greater than Villa's, and much less than our rivals for the top six. In the four year period for which I had data we spent £317m on players, less than anyone else, even less than Villa who spent £350m, £120m less than Arsenal's £436m, £213m less than Liverpool's £530m, and a whopping £544m less than Chelsea's £861.2m. These sums are not trivial, we're talking between £100m and half a billion less spent on players, if we fit the normal trend we should have been falling away fast from these rivals, at best you might hope to not fall further behind, but to consider the reality is that the gap has been closed, and not only closed but in some cases we've over-taken and even stretched our lead is frankly, in my opinion, astounding!!!
*I've only included the period when there were 20 teams
The strong conclusion to draw is that on all counts Levy has done an amazing job for us.
Points Comparisons
The more points you win the higher up the league you'll tend to finish.
The first chart shows our points per year under Sugar,* I've included the average points required for top four over 17 Premier League years, and I've also fit a straightforward linear trend to it, this smooths the ups and downs to show the over-all direction of travel under Sugar. As you can see we never came close to hitting the top four threshold and the trend is basically flat (although it's appears to be down, it's probably actually flat).
This second chart shows the same thing but under Levy. Not only have we crossed that top four threshold three times in the last four years, but the trend could not be clearer.
OK, so I've shown that the when we switched owners the trend went from flat and low scoring, to strongly positive and so much higher scoring. This would be meaningless though if our rivals also improved during this period, for this reason it's interesting to benchmark against our PL rivals. I looked at a variety of teams including City, Utd, and Leeds Utd, but plumped for Villa, Arsenal, and Liverpool, this is because they were competing against us for the whole period, they did not get taken over by a sugar-daddy, in addition Arsenal are interesting because they're our main rivals, and Villa because they are a club with the same access to resource as us. The key measure I decided was the end of season points difference between us and them, and once again I overlaid the results with linear trend-lines, in this case if the trend is up it means we're doing more poorly in respect of our rivals.
This first chart shows shows the Sugar years points differentials. You'll notice they're all negative apart from against Villa where it's broadly speaking flat:
The next chart shows the same under ENIC. Once again you can see how we've progressed against our rivals, in the case of Liverpool we've over-taken them, and Arsenal we're now basically level, Villa we've left for dust.
However who's to say it's down to Levy? As all know money is the biggest indicator of success, those clubs which spend more should have more success, which means if we want to properly benchmark Levy we want to take the money out of it. I could only get my hands on four years of company accounts (as reported by the Guardian), so I have looked at the last four years and summed wages and transfer spend to get an over-all player spend for that period, I have then summed the points won in the same period and indexed one to the other to show how many millions of pound each club has spent per point.
As you can see from the chart below Levy far outstrips all his rivals in this regard, to my mind this is the biggest single indicator of the job he's done for us.
None of this is particularly revelatory, most people, even many of his critics acknowledge our improvement under ENIC, but I hope it does clearly illustrate the context behind that improvement. We are not a big budget club, our earning capacity is no greater than Villa's, and much less than our rivals for the top six. In the four year period for which I had data we spent £317m on players, less than anyone else, even less than Villa who spent £350m, £120m less than Arsenal's £436m, £213m less than Liverpool's £530m, and a whopping £544m less than Chelsea's £861.2m. These sums are not trivial, we're talking between £100m and half a billion less spent on players, if we fit the normal trend we should have been falling away fast from these rivals, at best you might hope to not fall further behind, but to consider the reality is that the gap has been closed, and not only closed but in some cases we've over-taken and even stretched our lead is frankly, in my opinion, astounding!!!
*I've only included the period when there were 20 teams
