AFF's Doublethink

rob — May 29, 2009 at 11:05 am

On the other hand, in the last decade, seven teams have won the Champion’s League, which isn’t too far off the pace of eight set by the Super Bowl and World Series. And one might make a decent case that the Champion’s League is more analogous to the NFL and MLB than any of the individual leagues, given that the most talented players are distributed across the continent (Spain, Germany, Italy, England, and at times the smaller leagues — France, Netherlands, Portugal, once upon a time even Scotland) rather than concentrated in one league (NFL, MLB).

Which is a rather funny point for me to be making, given that I agree that there is more truth than fiction to the stereotype under discussion, but I suppose I don’t see Nav’s claim as being quite as ridiculous as you do.

Will — May 29, 2009 at 11:14 am

I think this is spot-on, which begs the question: what approach do you prefer? American sports seem to have the best of both worlds, mixing a few dominant franchises (Patriots, Spurs, Yankees etc.) with any number of surprise contenders. I tend to think that European football would be more enjoyable if there was more parity, but the balance of comments at the League suggests that most fans are pretty comfortable with the status quo.

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 11:33 am

Rob: The champion’s league is kind of a weird beast, one I’m not sure exactly how to discuss, at least in these terms. The Champions League reminds me more of March Madness than an actual sports league (which it, obviously, isn’t), and that makes the wider spread of winners not too surprising.

Will: I think the American system is just about perfect, because it sets up a nemesis (the Yankees, the Lakers, the Patriots) for the fans of other teams to cheer against when their team isn’t in the mix while simultaneously allowing for more parity (those teams don’t win every year) and more hope at moving up.

rob — May 29, 2009 at 12:25 pm

Sonny: A fair point, as March Madness and the Champions League are both tournaments, though it should be noted that the Champions League begins with group play, which has the effect of greatly diminishing the opportunities for March Madness-esque upsets. There isn’t really a perfect analogy for it in American sports, which is fine. My original point was quite similar to the one you’ve just made: that the analogy between the European leagues (being distributed amongst a number of countries) and the American leagues (being concentrated) is not perfect, either.

Mark Thompson — May 29, 2009 at 12:45 pm

1. Picking nits here in a big way, but only 7 teams have won the Super Bowl in the last decade – your link only goes through last year. Pittsburgh has won twice now. Doesn’t change your point, though, which is pretty much correct – there is quite a bit of mobility in most of the American pro sports, with the exception of a handful of perennial bottom-feeders in baseball. And even that seems to be a result of mismanagement more than anything else – the Rays showed that a well-run small market organization with a history of bottom feeding can nonetheless turn things around.

2. That said, I think analogizing national soccer leagues to the major US leagues doesn’t make much sense because of the smaller population bases and the relegation system. I tend to think, as I said at the League, that the better analogy is to think of those leagues as comparable to college football conferences, with the Champions League equivalent to the NFL. In the alternative, you could think of them as equivalent to American pro sports conferences more generally, with the teams making the Euro tournaments equating to playoff teams. If you look at it that way, then it’s not such a big difference, at least not with baseball – even though there’s a fair amount of mobility overall in MLB at least, the fact is that there are certain teams that make the playoffs almost every year (BoSox, Yanks, Cards, Angels).

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 12:47 pm

Rob: True, it’s tough to compare American and European leagues exactly…if not quite apples to oranges, maybe red apples to green apples. But this conversation goes to another point I made at the League, which is that the average soccer fan (and soccer coach) seems to focus much more on the Champion’s League, especially in recent years, than their own league. It’s an odd development, I think…

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 12:53 pm

Mark: Yeah, you’re right, didn’t catch that. Fix it in a minute. But on your second point, I’m not sure I agree. Yes, it’s true that England has a far smaller population. But they also only have one major sports league, thereby funneling all the talent into one big pool. Same with Germany and Spain and Italy and the rest.

Also, I think the phrase “Champions League” obscures the fact that it’s not actually a league: It’s a tournament. I think it’s much closer to March Madness, where the Premiership is the ACC, the Bundesliga is the Pac-10, etc.

Mark Thompson — May 29, 2009 at 1:15 pm

Point taken, Sonny. Although in some countries, it looks like basketball has become a viable (if very distant) alternative. Ditto rugby. Still, the difference in popularity between those sports is about 10,000 times bigger than the difference in popularity between the NFL and MLB.

Nav — May 29, 2009 at 2:33 pm

i am going to get no work done today.

1) there are 20 teams in the premier league. 30 in the nba. 32 in the nfl and 32 in mlb. correcting for that (and yes, it’s a crude correction especially given a promotion mechanism, but lets run with it for a minute), the difference becomes somewhat slighter.

2) if i extend the time range for this analysis (going back to division 1 from back in pre-premiership days), we also find things look a little better.

3) one should be wary of the law of small numbers when dealing with stats like these.

4) there was a lot more than the first sentence in my original comment. in particular, you’re using a very crude statistic to estimate an interesting phenomenon, and to really get insight i think you have to look at more than just the top teams. on the other hand, this would be fairly tedious, so perhaps not.

5) the champions league is a mini-league, with playoffs in the final rounds. it is more tournament-like than the nfl/nba/mlb, but these also have playoffs. for a fair comparison you should look at the teams that make the playoffs each year, vs the equivalent top fraction of the premier league (and others).

6) assuming that multiple sports compensate for population differences makes a gross assumption about the interchangeability of players between sport (i.e. baseball players have a large talent overlap with football and basketball players). not sure how true this is.

7) and finally. its worth bearing in mind that analysing these sorts of things is pretty slippery. with a little exertion and some sophisticated math, i’m pretty certain i could establish a narrative (complete with data and model) for the greater parity of either the premier league vs the nfl or vice versa. which is to say, imprecise questions have many precise answers.

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 3:01 pm

Nav: Will’s point was that in recent years the soccer leagues have exhibited far less parity than their American counterparts…I think this is incontrovertibly true, with a decade serving as an acceptably “recent” timeframe. Further, as I argued, the Premiership has never, in its 17 year history, had anything approaching parity: The only teams that have any shot of winning are Man U., Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool. Again, if one takes a look at the standings year by year this becomes pretty obvious. You have to go back four seasons to find a year when one of those teams was out of the top four. And I don’t think there was any point in the last ten years where two were out of the top four (though I wasn’t looking specifically for that factoid, so I might be wrong).

I use the Premiership because it’s the league I know best, and it’s been around for 17 seasons (enough time for 2-3 generations of players to roll through the league). 17 years is a very, very long time in sports terms, enough for all sorts of factors to come into play. I think it’s telling that (with one odd exception) the same three teams have finished at the top of the standings for each of those 17 seasons.

Statistics can be slippery, you’re right. But I would wager that if you examined the percentage of teams that made the NFL playoffs and the MLB playoffs at any point in the last ten years, you’d find that it’s far higher than the percentage of teams that cracked the top four of the Premiership (hence making the Champion’s League post-’05, or whenever they bumped it from 3 to 4 teams). (It’d be hard to properly calibrate this method for the NBA, since so many teams make the playoffs.)

JL — May 29, 2009 at 3:09 pm

The diversity among Champions League winners flatters to deceive. Although it’s true that seven different teams have won it in the past decade, all of those teams were the dominant powers in the respective domestic leagues – that includes even the minnows of the lot, Porto, who annually top the Portuguese league.

Also, the main point of contention in recent years has been the hegemony of the English teams in the Champions League. The last time an English team failed to make the final was 2004, and the semifinals in the past two years have been largely a contest between the English big four (Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool), much to the chagrin of Anglo-skeptic UEFA president Michel Platini.

This isn’t a surprise, exactly: the English Premier league is by far the wealthiest of the international football leagues and attracts the most quality players. But it does suggest that the CL is a pretty exclusive affair, which to be sure is the idea, since the competition by design favors the top teams in their respective leagues.

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 3:22 pm

I just did some cocktail napkin math, and at a bare minimum the NFL had 22 of its teams see playoff action in the last 10 years. And those are just teams I remember being in the playoffs. That’s a full 2/3 of the league. There’s no chance that 13-14 teams finished in the top four of the Premiership. But this might need a followup post this weekend.

rob — May 29, 2009 at 4:10 pm

Well, certainly 13-14 teams didn’t finish in the top four (and I understand that you’re making that comparison because Champions Leage = playoffs was suggested), but that’s a harsh standard as top four equals .20 of the Premier League, while playoffs equals .375 of the NFL. A more equivalent comparison would be the top 7/8 teams in the Premiership (which would be roughly Champion’s League + UEFA Cup spaces, so probably a decent comparison).

Using that measure, you get an impressive 23 out of 20. On the other hand, you’re right about the comparison between the NFL playoffs and the top four sports — only seven teams finished in the top four in last decade. But two of those — Newcastle and Leeds — aren’t even in the Premiership any more, which I suppose (along with the 23/20 number) provides evidence that the dynamic is fairly complicated.

Look forward to the follow-up post.

Nav — May 29, 2009 at 4:13 pm

let me begin by conceding, that i may well be wrong…

however, couple of things. nfl has 12 teams in the playoffs. as a fraction, thats about the top 7 in the premier league, and a quick check gives me 17 teams that have done that in the premier league in the last decade. which given relegations etc. matches up fairly well with your nfl results. of course, given the differing incentives, this result is basically meangingless, but still…

my my best guess is that while the top four places are strongly correlated over long periods of time, below those positions you’ll only have a very weak year correlation between different placings. unfortunately, to do this analysis involves a fairly non-trivial amount of effort… also, i doubt you could use it to say smart things about relative parity.

the time issue is interesting. i’ll have to think about that some more. i think the number one wants is the rate of diffusion (in physics language, since that’s what i speak best) – we know, for example, the dynasties exist in the nfl, but they seem to have a lifetime of about a decade. in european soccer, no idea, though the date suggests it’s a least somewhat longer.

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 4:15 pm

Meh. Winning the UEFA Cup is like winning the NIT. You still wish you got into the big dance.

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 4:21 pm

Nav: Perhaps we’re operating from different ideas of “parity.” For me, parity suggests that, in any given year any team (or at least a reasonably high percentage of teams in any given league) has a shot of winning it all. That is simply not the case in the Premiership: four teams dominate, year in, year out. That’s just a fact. In the NFL you can have a team that’s relatively bad one year (like, say, the Cardinals) come within a minute of winning the entire thing the next. Some, like the Rams or the Ravens, actually pull it off. That just doesn’t happen in the Premiership.

If your definition of parity is movement through the middle/relegation and promotion, then I guess the Premiership has some parity? But that doesn’t seem like a terribly relevant definition of the term as it relates to sports…

Mark Thompson — May 29, 2009 at 5:13 pm

On the NFL playoff teams, I can give you some hard numbers because I’m a Bills fan, and I’ve come to know them all too well. If your time frame is just the ’00s, then all but (I’m pretty sure) two NFL teams have made the playoffs: the Bills and the Lions. If your time frame is the last ten years, then every single NFL team has made the playoffs at least once, as the Bills and Lions both made the playoffs at the end of 1999. For the last ten years, my only taste of the playoffs as a football fan has been a freaking forward lateral!

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 5:59 pm

OK, so in the last ten years I think it’s fair to say that every single team in the league had a chance of winning the Super Bowl, right? Considering how many wild card teams have made (and won) the Super Bowl, I don’t think this is too far off from the truth, even among the weaker teams to make the playoffs. That sort of parity simply doesn’t exist in the Premiership (or most of the other soccer leagues).

JL — May 29, 2009 at 7:42 pm

Sure, but of course there are no “wild card” teams in the Premiership. Soccer leagues reward consistency, and there are few opportunities for lesser teams to steal the title. I think the closest analogy would be the FA Cup, which actually is a playoff competition of sorts between premiership stalwarts and lesser clubs. And, indeed, lesser clubs have had more success there, reaching the final on several occasions, and even mid-table premiership clubs have occasionally raised the trophy (Portsmouth last year, for instance). One might argue, with some merit, that the top premiership teams field under-strength sides in the early stages of the competition, choosing to focus on the Champions League, so the parity is a little exaggerated. Equally, though, one could argue that there would be more upsets in the top flight if the victor were crowned in a playoff rather than on points. (An interesting case in this connection might be Hull City, a newly promoted team that was spectacularly successful in the early stages of this season – there was even talk of them qualifying for the Champions League – only to plummet mightily at the end of the season and barely escape relegation. But they had a good run in the FA cup, and nearly made it to the semifinals. In a playoff scenario, you could see a team like Hull winning the premiership.)

Sonny Bunch — May 29, 2009 at 9:28 pm

But JL, the structure of the American leagues — wild cards, divisions, salary caps, etc. — all contribute to their various levels of parity. It’s part and parcel…

uniondad — May 29, 2009 at 10:47 pm

And the bottom line, Ladies and Gents: In the US, who really cares about boring European Football or it’s lack of parity? Present company excepted of course.