Premier League Finances – Debt and Wages

Premier League Finances – Debt and Wages

This is a great article from the Guardian DataBlog analysing the finances for last season’s Premier League clubs. As the Guardian says, “More than two thirds of the Premier League’s record £2.4bn income in 2011-12 was paid out in wages, according to the most recently published accounts of all 20 clubs. The Guardian’s annual special report of Premier League clubs’ finances shows they spent £1.6bn on wages last season, most of it going to players.”

The first graph (above) shows the net debt levels for different clubs.

The second graph shows the total turnover:

The third graph shows wages as a proportion of turnover:

and the last one is particularly interesting – as it ranks clubs on their wage bills and their league position. This would be an interesting piece of data to test for the strength of correlation:

I’ve used an online scatter plot to calculate both the regression line and the correlation coefficient:

Which clearly shows a strong positive correlation.  This would be an interesting exercise for both IGCSE or  IB students (especially Maths Studies).

For even more data, a club by club full breakdown is also provided by the Guardian here.  I have also made the data above into a word document to be used as a some A4 posters – and you can download that here: Premier League Debt

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Essential resources for IB students:

1) Exploration Guides and Paper 3 Resources

I’ve put together four comprehensive pdf guides to help students prepare for their exploration coursework and Paper 3 investigations. The exploration guides talk through the marking criteria, common student mistakes, excellent ideas for explorations, technology advice, modeling methods and a variety of statistical techniques with detailed explanations. I’ve also made 17 full investigation questions which are also excellent starting points for explorations.  The Exploration Guides can be downloaded here and the Paper 3 Questions can be downloaded here.