Next manager odds - strange occurance

[Juggy 0]

"Football is a competitive sport it is your position against your peers

that matters. Prize money is paid for position not points so points are

irrelevant"Yes and our position against our peers will be worse this season than it was last season, and worse than the season before that, meaning that we will be given less prize money relative to several other teams this season than we did last season, or the season before that, if we don''t finish 11th or 12th. So if you want to go along the lines of prize money then we can t alk about how we have gone backwards this season can we? "You can estimate this season''s wages from last season''s because as I

stated there is a very high correlation between a clubs relative wages

for each season."Right, two points here:a) If I look at the 2012/13 accounts it tells me absolutely nothing about the wage bill for the 2013/14 season. Period. Full Stop. End of Discussion. b) Our wage bill to turnover ratio was 49% in 2011/12 at £37m against a turnover of £75m. At the AGM Sam Gordon said that costs this season are projected at £47m against an increased turnover, projected ratio of 57%. If you consider yourself to be some sort of financia analyst (unlikely, as apparently you just make up numbers and can''t read accounts) perhaps you can tell us all now what the wage to turnover ratio will be in the 2014/15 season, based on the current projected ratio of 57%, by using your made up formula which apparently makes you pyshic. Like I said... I prefer to deal with facts, and the facts presented are 49% in 2011/12 and 57% on a bigger turnover. An increase from £37m to £47m.

"THE correlation as I''ve always said is with the wage budget, these figures are readily publicly available"No, they are not readily available, they are available at a specific point in the future. Based on what we do know, and what you are making up, we can conclude that wage to turnover ratio is increasing and league performance is declining.

"THIS debt has been used to provide cash to subsidise the operations"No. The loan from directors has been used to pay off historic bank debt associated mainly with stadium redevelopment. The debt still exists, it is just owed to an internal party not an external one. Two clubs with very similar turnover numbers, neither with any external debt, one above the other in the league. You seem to be struggling to understand the point. Stoke and Norwich are in a very similar position financially. The players are not being paid by the owner. They don''t have to pay interest to the bank on their historic debt, that is all it means, and neither do we.

"Cash has gone out to repay loans unlike stoke"Yet again you show that you are making this up completely as you go along, Stoke make repayments to the very man that you claim is subsidising them!

"The McNally claim on our wage budget is in his recent interview with archant/radio norfolk which was on the club''s website"Two things:1) He has also said that we''d budgeted for 16th2) He has absolutely no way of knowing whether we have the 16th biggest budget or the 18th biggest budget, nobody does until all clubs have published their accounts. We can take a guess when the 2013/14 accounts are released. We won''t know for certain until 2015. No person anywhere knows this, no matter who you are. I am a shareholder of Norwich City and I don''t know what the exact wage budget is for this season, so why would Peter Coates know what the Norwich wage budget is unless a director at the cluh told him? Why can''t you understand this?

"I''ve seen all the club''s accounts as they are publicly available and

have worked on the acquisition of a premier league football club and

seen the deloitte report findings"I suppose you also have a 17 inch third leg, are the 3rd richest man in Britain, have four mistresses, served in the SAS, are born into the aristrocracy but passed on being a heridatory member of the house of lords, and studied at both Oxford and Cambridge simultaneously - sitting of your exams while juggling walnuts with your toes. You have not seen any accounts which give any indication at all of the playing budget for this season, because accounts which cover any of the relevant trading period do not exist.

[TCCANARY 263]

[quote] user="Le Juge"]



I''ve read Stoke City''s accounts, you have not. You are making stuff up, I am not. And my criticism is based on ignorance?
[/quote]

 

Why have you read Stoke City''s accounts?

 

 

[TCCANARY 263]

[quote user="TCCANARY"]

[quote] user="Le Juge"]



I''ve read Stoke City''s accounts, you have not. You are making stuff up, I am not. And my criticism is based on ignorance?
[/quote]

 

Why have you read Stoke City''s accounts?

 

 

[/quote]

 

Sorry, seems I''m a victim of simultaneous posting, fortunately it seems that it''s your job and not some kind of strange hobby.

 

 

[PurpleCanary 5,553]

[quote user="nutty nigel"]

Seems to me that you''re arguing about whether points or places are more important. First season we finished 12th with 47 poionts. Last season we finished 11th but with 44 points. One position better but 3 points less. Which was better? There''s little in it is there?   

 

 

 

[/quote]Nutty, of course points and places are inextricably linked, but with the wild card that the position depends on how other teams are doing. In isolation I would agree that there is not much to choose between our 12th on 47 and 11th on 44. You get examples of this with other clubs. In 2010-11 Fulham under Hughes finished in 8th on 49 points and the next season under Jol in 9th on 52!And the Fulham case is instructive. Having achieved what I think was a record PL points total for the club that year, Jol did markedly worse in the 2012-13 season.. They only dropped three places to 12th, but the points tally slumped to 43. I don''t think there is any doubt that a major factor in Fulham sacking Jol this season was the fear that the regression from 52 points to 43 was carrying on on and would lead to relegation if nothing was done.Back to us and looking at our three seasons in the PL then that supposedly insignificant (albeit financially productive) 3-point drop needs to be seen in the context of what has happened since. If we stay up but finish, as the statistics suggest, on 38 points we will have dropped under Hughton from 47 to 44 to 38 (and almost certainly to a lower place than 11th or indeed 12th). The three-point drop starts to look more significant than the fact that we actually moved up a place last season. We will have gone from 1.236 points per game to 1.157 ppg to 1.0 ppg.In any company - not just with football - that measurable falling-off in performance would be looked at by the directors in deciding whether to keep or sack the executive responsible. To be clear I am not arguing that Hughton should be sacked under those circumstances. Only that the directors would be remiss if they did not weigh that regression in the balance with all the other arguments for and against.

[T 190]

Firstly brutal reality is professional football is mainly about money.

Secondly it is about football performance as my calculation includes points from playing football.

I''m stating the hard objective facts which so happen to support CH while the critics are using subjective criticisms which have about as much objective reasonableness as an article in the daily mail. If an objective analysis showed CH is underperforming his peers I would want him out. They don''t though. Quite the reverse.

[TCCANARY 263]

[quote user="TCCANARY"][quote user="TCCANARY"]

[quote] user="Le Juge"]



I''ve read Stoke City''s accounts, you have not. You are making stuff up, I am not. And my criticism is based on ignorance?
[/quote]

 

Why have you read Stoke City''s accounts?

 

 

[/quote]

 

Sorry, seems I''m a victim of simultaneous posting, fortunately it seems that it''s your job and not some kind of strange hobby.

 

 

[/quote]

 

Or is it T''s job and I''m getting very confused, can you all go back to naming the source of quotes?

 

 

[Juggy 0]

I''d be happy to finish with less points if we manage 11th or 12th in the league again.But it is more likely that we will finish lower in the table with less points, so arguing about which is more important is pointless and futile, measuring success against either metric yields the same result: Decline.

[T 190]

Le J comments are just so sadly wrong. We can see the accounts for a number of years so we know there is a strong correlation between years. The relative wage position of clubs does not change much. We know that Stoke have been heavily subsidised by cash from the owner of bet 365 as demonstrated by the large debts in the accounts as a reader has confirmed!. It is like arguing with the flat earth society. If you don''t believe me then read the Deloitte report which is summarised on the Internet Guardian and Telegraph.

[The ghost of Michael Theoklitos 0]

[quote user="TCCANARY"][quote user="TCCANARY"][quote user="TCCANARY"]

[quote] user="Le Juge"]I''ve read Stoke City''s accounts, you have not. You are making stuff up, I am not. And my criticism is based on ignorance? [/quote]

 

Why have you read Stoke City''s accounts?

 

 

[/quote]

 

Sorry, seems I''m a victim of simultaneous posting, fortunately it seems that it''s your job and not some kind of strange hobby.

 

 

[/quote]

 

Or is it T''s job and I''m getting very confused, can you all go back to naming the source of quotes?

 

 

[/quote]It''s amazing the lengths people will go to prove their own opinion and/or agenda. Or, their full of sh*t.Either way, I''m finding this argument tedious and irrelevant, and for that reason, I won''t be investing.I''m out.

[Juggy 0]

"Firstly brutal reality is professional football is mainly about money"And we are seeing the backlash against this with unhappy fans (Stoke & Pulish, Villa & Lambert, Norwich & Hughton, West Ham & Allardyce) who are getting sick to death of their clubs obsession with television money.Somebody somewhere has forgotten that the fans pay money for fun and entertainment and are struggling to find it in the Premier league these days. Why do we all donate £500+ a year to a business which has the objective of maximising Sky revenue (from where the prize money comes also).They are losing sight of the product, and the customer. A restaurantuer needs to offer up great food to get repeat business. One day the bubble will burst and the clubs will need the fanbase again. I disagree that professional football is mainly about money though, clubs in league one and two tend to be like families. James Beattie earns £50k a year as manager of Accrington Stanley and on several occassions has paid for coach travel to a game because there wasn''t enough money in the bank account.Outside of the top two leagues it isn''t all about money, it is about survival.

[A Gay Schoolboy 0]

[quote user="T"]It''s the hardest, objective measure we have and is far more objective than any of the criticisms levelled.

The wage figures for 12/13 are in the accounts which have been published on the Internet for the individual clubs or are available from companies house same way as deloitte prepare their information which is a summary of public info.[/quote]Can you provide a link to these figures?Its also not the hardest most objective measure, it might be the hardest most objective measure that you can think of, but it is laughably simplistic and doesn''t account for some very basic concepts.Here''s one of them: as an accountant you should be familar with the idea of marginal utility. Adding £10 million onto Man City''s wage bill is not going to return the same amount of extra points as adding £10m onto Norwich''s. It would buy them 1, maybe 2 squad players, while it would buy us 3-5 first team players. As I said before, wages and points, and particularly wages and position, do not scale linearly, you need a more complex function to accurately model them.My issue with you is not that I think Hughton is a bad manager, I suspect that more complex analysis would reveal that he overperformed last season, and is around par for this season. My problem is you massively overstating your case and being incredibly arrogant about it when you clearly haven''t entertained the thought that maybe it isn''t as simple as you think it is.

[Juggy 0]

"Le J comments are just so sadly wrong. We can see the accounts for a

number of years so we know there is a strong correlation between years"Our wage to turnover ratio has increased from 49% to a projected 57%, our league position has declined. How can I be the slightest bit wrong in that observation?

[T 190]

My source is the deloitte football financial summary, published accounts any my professional research from investigating the acquisition of a premier league football club

[A Gay Schoolboy 0]

[quote user="T"]My source is the deloitte football financial summary, published accounts any my professional research from investigating the acquisition of a premier league football club[/quote]Can you provide a link to these figures? Repeatedly stating a thing is not the same thing as providing evidence of that thing.

[Juggy 0]

"The wage figures for 12/13 are in the accounts"The 2012/13 accounts cover a 13 month period, not a 12 month period, and that period starts 31st May and ends 30th June, so they incorporate one month of what is considered the previous season.What was the wage ratio for the 2012/13 season then? Why can''t you tell us this and explain it?The only figure I''ve seen is "footballing expenditure", which in 2011/12 was £40.8m against turnover of £74.3m.In 2012/13 it was £59.6m against turnover of £78.7m.So how does this equate to your veherment assertion that there is some sort of 95% correlation year on year? Looks to me like turnover increased by a single digit percentage and footballing costs increased by around 50%!You are talking out of your big farty bumhole and are about as much of an accountant as a numerically dyslexic special school student.

[T 190]

The comments about stoke not being subsidised by their wealthy owner are just wrong.

I fully agree that wages will go up this year because as for every club higher TV money but also debt repaid last year so you see you can make comments about wages for this year based on public info - you have just done so yourself.

I''m not disputing we will not do as well as last year which was a substantial outperformance. We are reverting to mean but still outperforming our peers given our resouces.

[The Butler 0]

[quote user="T"]Firstly brutal reality is professional football is mainly about money. Secondly it is about football performance as my calculation includes points from playing football. I''m stating the hard objective facts which so happen to support CH while the critics are using subjective criticisms which have about as much objective reasonableness as an article in the daily mail. If an objective analysis showed CH is underperforming his peers I would want him out. They don''t though. Quite the reverse.[/quote]

So it is wrong for supporters to expect value for their money.

To expect a team to perform at their highest level possible.

For the manager to prepare them in all aspects to compete at their highest level

To purchase players that fit his methods and to use them to the best of their talents.

For fans to at least travel to matches expecting their team to perform "with a chance"

Not to criticise if what they are served is well below standard.

All irrelevant because the basis is not football but money  and we should all be grateful that he is performing better than the financial criteria aginst other clubs financial criteria.

We will end up with eleven accountants facing another eleven accountants the mind boggles[:''(]

[Juggy 0]

Footballing expenditure in 2011/12 was £40.8m against turnover of £74.3m.Footballing expenditure in 2012/13 was £59.6m against turnover of £78.7m.Those two sentences have just completely obliterated your argument, nothing else needed to be added and anybody with half a brain can see that.

[A Gay Schoolboy 0]

[quote user="Le Juge"]Footballing expenditure in 2011/12 was £40.8m against turnover of £74.3m.Footballing expenditure in 2012/13 was £59.6m against turnover of £78.7m.Those two sentences have just completely obliterated your argument, nothing else needed to be added and anybody with half a brain can see that.[/quote]Maybe you can help me mate as T appears to be ignoring me. Do you have wage bills figures for all Prem clubs for 12/13 season?

[PurpleCanary 5,553]

[quote user="Le Juge"]"Le J comments are just so sadly wrong. We can see the accounts for a

number of years so we know there is a strong correlation between years"Our wage to turnover ratio has increased from 49% to a projected 57%, our league position has declined. How can I be the slightest bit wrong in that observation?[/quote]Without getting in this particular fight there needs to be some caution here, because the club used a different figure (pure wages against turnover) to that you will see in the reports (such as Deloitte''s) for all PL clubs, which give the ratio for all staff costs against turnover. So while the club’s figure from 2009 to 2013 vary from 34 per cent to last season''s 47 per cent, the relevant figures to compare with other clubs are as follows:2009 (second tier) 76.5 per cent.2010 (third tier) 72.45 per cent.2011 (second tier) 80.1 per cent.2012 (first tier) 49.3 per cent.2013 (first tier) 68.0 per cent.2014 (first tier) unknown.The figures are skewed because of being in different divisions, but there was a marked incraese from our first PL season to our second. An educated guess would be that there has been another rise this season.

[Juggy 0]

"Maybe you can help me mate as T appears to be ignoring me. Do you have wage bills figures for all Prem clubs for 12/13 season?"The Guardian published the 2011/12 version in April 2013. So hopefully we will get a 2012/13 version sometime very soon from The Guardian or a similar credible news source.Not sure whether they got that info from Deloitte or somewhere else, or if they compiled it themselves using public accounts.

[Juggy 0]

An even steeper rise then Purple! The failure to spend money in January led me to wonder whether we''d already hit our limit.

[T 190]

The wage correlation is between the wages for each club for one season and the following season. Ie if you do a league table by wages each season the league table will be 95pc the same as each season. Wages will go up but it''s the same for all clubs so theor relatively wage budget is similar each year.

Yes there is marginal utility from wages - there is a linear line for wages and points for 14 clubs and then the graph shows a substantial increase in cost per point so comparing CH to his 14 peers outside top F is fairer comparison - still pust him second with his more compable peer group

[A Gay Schoolboy 0]

[quote user="Le Juge"]The Guardian published the 2011/12 version in April 2013. So hopefully we will get a 2012/13 version sometime very soon from The Guardian or a similar credible news source.Not sure whether they got that info from Deloitte or somewhere else, or if they compiled it themselves using public accounts.[/quote]Ta. Thats exactly what I thought tbh, I could only find 11/12 figures. So its an odd definition of objective that T has which involves massive amounts of guesswork.

[T 190]

If you want a debate about money in football then I suspect we agree.

I''m just pointing out objectively CH is outperforming.

If you are saying you dont like style, tactics, substitutions etc that is a subjective argument like saying blue is better than red and a personal preference but not an objective analysis of CH.

[Juggy 0]

"Ie if you do a league table by wages each season the league table will

be 95pc the same as each season. Wages will go up but it''s the same for

all clubs so theor relatively wage budget is similar each year"So now we are talking about ''relative wage budget'', funny because I was talking about footballing costs to turnover ratio, which is the relevant metric and the one that The Guardian analysed.Ours has increased from 49% to 68% (Purple Canary''s figure). If you are telling me that most other clubs had a similar rise then all I can say is... BS.

[T 190]

The accounts are published so are available just not summarised. Very little guess work and where there is we know there is a very strong correlation between relative wages so very little guess work just those denying a reality which inconveniently does not fit their prejudices.

[BigFish 1,986]

[quote user="PurpleCanary"][quote user="BigFish"]Posters are confusing statistics with a predictive diagnostic science. Statistically, over a period of time there is a clear direct correlation between expenditure by clubs on the football side (wages, agents and transfer fees). That doesn''t mean on any given day you can predict the result but over a period of time you can. Therefore the difference between our performance this year and last year is not statistically significant. That is not a get out of jail free card for Hughton though, just science. If we stay up, he will have broadly achieved within expectations. If we down with Purple''s analysis of less debt and better players he will have under performed. Until we are in a position to pay for a top 10 team that will remain the case.[/quote]

BigFish, I well understand that, and certainly over a period of years there is a strong - albeit not an absolute - link between wages and performance.

The problem with your wage-link explanation as far as the directors of NCFC are concerned is that it really only makes sense if last season, finishing on 44 points, was a freak. In other words we did freakishly well. And this season is the norm.

But then the season before, under Lambert with 47 points, would have to be even more of a freakish success!

So we have a situation in which, out of the three PL seasons, we did best in the season in which we should have done worst and we are doing worst in the season in which we should be doing best...

If I was a director of NCFC I would bear the wage link in mind, but I would also very much wonder why we are on course to drop from 47 points in 2011-12 to around 38 points this season. Why are we on course for the worst season out of the three when when I and my fellow directors have done our best to ensure at least parity with previous seasons.
[/quote]

Ricardo put it best when he said (and I paraphrase) we are likely, at some point in the future to get relegated again as we have done in the past due to the nature of the club. Of course it is right for the directors to examine all criteria in an effort to eke out marginal advantage across a number of factors (staff deployed included) to avoid or postpone this. To describe the last two league finishes as "freak" results is to misunderstand or misrepresent statistics. WBA and Fulham are similar clubs with longer Prem track records and there current position is an illustration of this.

[Juggy 0]

"I''m just pointing out objectively CH is outperforming"And all we are saying is that nobody knows whether he is outperforming because nobody knows what his budget is relative to other clubs, relative to last season, or the season before.Even if it does turn out that we are in the bottom three on playing budget (unlikely if you ask me) then we will still know that we have performed worse this season than last season, and the season before, with a likely larger monetary budget, a likely larger relative budget, and a likely larger wage to turnover ratio.In any business anywhere in the world if you give an executive a bigger budget you expect a better return. If you give a stock trader a £10m portfolio one year and he makes £500k for his institution, and you give him £20m the next year and he makes £250k, then they might decide to sack him and give his £20m to another trader. If a retail manager gets £50k to make improvements to their branch to increase sales and improve quality of service, and the branch then makes less money, then that manager has failed.You are the one saying that football is a business. If that is true, and the manager has delivered lesser returns with a bigger budget, then we should do what a business would do and give him the chop. His target was 10th this season, Bowkett admitted it. He spent big in the summer. He is not going to deliver on his target and may not even get close. That is an underperforming manager who has not met his target. Underperforming employees in corporations are moved on. If football is a business then he is failing.

[A Gay Schoolboy 0]

[quote user="T"]If you want a debate about money in football then I suspect we agree.

I''m just pointing out objectively CH is outperforming.

If you are saying you dont like style, tactics, substitutions etc that is a subjective argument like saying blue is better than red and a personal preference but not an objective analysis of CH.[/quote]You keep using the word objective. You haven''t done anything objective, you are presuming based on prior events that Hughton will be shown to be outperforming, but until the 12/13 accounts are released your claims are not objective. Even then its debatable as to whether your metric shows what you claim it does.A better method would be to collect all the wage and points details for say, the post Abramovich era, adjust for wage inflation, and then calculate a function with well defined error margins that can predict points from wages. If a manager is consistantly over or under the expected range they can be said to be over or under performing.