English and Spanish clubs continue to dominate European football

Infostrada Sports recently released rankings for European clubs holds little surprises. Barcelona remain the top ranked club in Europe with English and Spanish clubs taking 70% of the top 10.

Looking at the top 50 provides a more equal distribution across Europe with English and Spanish clubs taking 32% of the places with 13 countries represented.

Relegation results, Nicknames and Predictability

By Martin McCutcheon

The start of a new season brings a plethora of possible predictions: who will win the league, which teams will make Europe, who will be the first manager to be sacked, and, sadly, who will go down. We all know money will help answer who will take the top prize, but is it the same at the bottom of the table? This blog tries to analyse the form of the relegation contenders from the past decade to predict who will go down this season. With this being 2010, a decade makes a nice round block of time to analyse.

We assume the “big four” taking the Champions League places is almost a foregone conclusion and the top eight will be filled in by Villa, Spurs, Everton and Man City (although we accept City’s millions might trade places with Liverpool). We'll also assume Newcastle’s 08/09 and Man City's 00/01 relegations are outliers; curiously making book-ends of the decade.

Away from those headline grabbers, we turn to the other side of the league table. Table 1 shows the teams that have swapped places each year since 2000/01.

Table 1: Results from 2000-2010

Using the results we can assign all the teams a category:

• Teams that are first timers to the Premiership, or last for just that season we call “Fresh blood”; Blackpool taking that title this season, following Burnley, Derby, Sheffield United, Watford, Crystal Palace, Leicester and Norwich before them
• Teams that survive a season and then go down, we’ll call “One-hit wonders”: Hull and Reading in recent years
• Teams that bounce back and forth are commonly referred to as “Yo-yo” clubs, having been relegated more than once in ten years. WBA, Sunderland and Birmingham will all play in the Premier League this season bearing that tag. Wolves could join them and Leicester might have made a case of being part of that clique earlier in the decade
• Now teams that have been promoted in the past five seasons and stay around for more than two years, we’ll politely call “Clingers”: Stoke, Wigan and, forgive us, West Ham
• If a team can survive for more than five seasons, but never quite break into the Top 8, we call them “Fodder”; Blackburn, Fulham and Bolton taking that role throughout the past decade. Middlesbrough, Portsmouth, Southampton, Charlton and Coventry were all once good “Fodder” stock
• And to complete the names in the table, the “Outliers” are Newcastle, Man City and Leeds

Using these categories for all 20 Premiership teams, Table 2 gives us the groups (but not necessarily the predicted finishing places!) for the 2010/11 Premiership table.

Of the 30 relegation spots over the decade, 8 have been filled by a “Yo-yo” team, 9 by a “Fresh blood” team and 5 spots have been filled by “Fodder”. On average, a “Yo-yo” team goes down each year- so that's one from Birmingham, West Brom, Sunderland or perhaps Wolves. Given their repeated experience of it, we'll go for West Brom taking that place. And the “Fresh blood” teams generally last just that year so we think Blackpool's time is limited. That leaves one remaining relegation spot.

To help answer who will fill the final spot, we’ve spotted a trend over the past decade of the fall of the mid-table "Fodder": at the start of the decade, after 34 years of top flight football, Coventry got relegated. In 2005 Southampton followed suit after 27 years, Charlton dropped in 2007, and Middlesbrough in 2009. This year Portsmouth, after a 7-year spell, finally broke down; they went broke and went down.

Using these findings, for 2010/11 we predict a “Fodder” team is going down again, and oddly all three current “Fodder” teams have been around for the same time. Fulham were European finalists last season, and Blackburn finished in the top ten. Our money is saying that after ten years, it’s time up for Bolton.