Party-Crashing the Top 4 in the 09-10 Premiership Season

According to Duverger’s Law, the United States only has two political parties because of the structure of its elections.  In every district represented in the United States Legislature, voters select a candidate, and the person with the most votes wins.  The person who comes in second essentially is rewarded with the position of opposition – they wait in the wings if the public wearies of their current official.  The person who comes in third, when there is one, gets nothing.

The third-party candidate provides no material incentive for potential contributors to risk resources. As a result, America’s two-party tradition has remained largely unchallenged.

For most of this past decade, the Premiership has had a similar “law of four” at the top of the table.  Champions League places have gone exclusively to Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool with only the two appearances of Newcastle United and one (brief) appearance in the Champions League by Everton as exceptions.

The reason for the “big four” phenomenon in the Premiership has been as simple to explain as the American two-party system: it is a matter of resources and incentives.  The lowest payout for any of the English sides in the Champions League last year was a little over twenty-three million euros.  That money is a significant advantage going forward because qualifying for the Champions League is not a one-shot strategic endeavor.  One must build a squad that can qualify for the Champions League, and then play in it the next season while simultaneously qualifying for the Champions League for the next season in domestic play.  As hard as qualifying is once, it is substantially more difficult to do it again.

The big four enjoy many advantages of experience and reputation that have come with being consistent qualifiers, but just as important, they have also received between an extra twenty-three to thirty million euros.  Extra guaranteed money allows them to build a strong, deep squad with revenues they have generated.  Any club who wishes to catch them must gamble those same resources, because any club outside the big four has not generated those extra profits.  Given the costs and difficulties of maintaining one’s place in the Premiership by itself, much less adding two domestic cups and a European cup on top, the expected value of taking a credible shot at the big four simply does not have a high likelihood of paying off.

A New Day?

You may have noticed that this season appears to be against the conventional wisdom described above:

The table as of 1/08/2010:

1.  Chelsea  45 pts

2.  Man. United 43 pts

3.  Arsenal 41 pts

4.  Tottenham 37 pts

5.  Man City 35 pts

6.  Aston Villa 35 pts

7.  Liverpool 33 pts

8.  Birmingham 32 pts

What’s Going on?

Theory 1: The in-season blip.  It could even be the case that Liverpool will find their way back to the big four spots by season’s end and that will be that… but Liverpool are not lingering in 5th, they are in 8th position… and Fulham have a game in hand in 9th and are only one point behind them.

Theory 2: The one-season blip. It could be the case that Liverpool is just having a shocking season and next year everything will be back to normal.  Hey they did this before when Everton took their spot… except that the year Everton beat out Liverpool for fourth, Liverpool won the Champions League and were let back into the tournament for the next season on an ex post facto rule that was made up on the spot.  So in 2004-05, Everton did not get the usual competitive advantage over fifth place that teams usually get in the Champions League.

Theory 3: The times they are a-changin’.  This season marks the first real dramatic change in the incentive structure for Champions League qualification since the emergence of the big four.  Here are a sample of key differences.

1.      Man City has resources to gamble with.  Man City seems relatively unconcerned with their resources/wins ratio at the moment.  Time to gamble!

2.     Liverpool may have seriously misplayed its hand with finances and personnel.  They don’t have a new stadium plan.  Their owners are severely leveraged.  Their manager chased away their most important player and replaced him with an Italian man made of glass.  If a big four team has an internal collapse, then the cost of replacing them in the top four goes down dramatically.

3.     UEFA has attempted to make the second-tier tournament a better revenue stream – the increased revenue potential of the Europa League may help Liverpool in the short run but does not seem likely to insulate the big four in the long run. The more profitable this league becomes, the less the punishment is for just missing the Champions League.

4.     UEFA has reformed Champions League qualification – changing expected returns for third and fourth place.  The play in scenarios dramatically alter the chances of getting through for those who have to go through early qualification.

If it’s Theory 3, will the floodgates open in the Premiership?

Once there is a “Big 5” – someone loses out – if it is not consistently the same clubs in the top four, one wonders, why not a big 6? A big 7?  Will the party crashers blow the gates to the Champions League places in the table wide open?

The answer to this question rests largely on a lot of contingent facts about the strategies pursued by all of the clubs in this new environment.  In a strategic setting, any time there is a new environment; established winners oftentimes can close off the opportunities for new winners based on the relative advantages that they still possess.  But, rather than near-automatic paths to qualification in the past, results for the big four are much more dependent on a wider array of factors over which they have less direct influence than before (at least in the short run.)

I cannot tell you what is going to happen to the “big four” phenomenon in the Premiership.  I can tell you something better.  I can tell you that the future of what the top of the Premiership looks like might, for the first time in a while, be determined by the slightest boardroom decision, managerial mistake, or even an intended cross that accidentally finds the net in injury time. A beautiful scenario for fans of the beautiful game.

Steven Maloney is a contributing writer for Glorious Football and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  He can be reached for comment at steven.maloney@gmail.com.

Written By Steven Maloney (80 Posts) Steven Maloney is a regular contributor for Glorious Football. You can follow him on Twitter @stevenmaloney. Like Albert Camus, he fancies himself as having learned his morals "on the football pitch and in the theater." His football writing interests are in the institutional structures and strategies of world football, as well as the ways in which contemporary politics enters into the world of football and vice-versa. His most cherished memories of the game are of being in Holland for Euro 2000. In the interests of full disclosure, he supports Arsenal, the United States and DC United.

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