In Scotland only two teams have won the league title since 1985, Rangers and Celtic. They share 109 league titles between them compared with 19 for the rest of Scotland. I don't know how any league can beat that for lack of competitiveness.
Because Scotland has a tiny population. So two winners with a population of 5 million. Does England, with 12x the population have, 24 winners in the same time period? Absolutely not.
If the last couple of years, right up to Sunday, is anything to go by, it's going to be just Celtic pretty damn soon unless someone pulls off a miracle, and I say this as a Celtic fan. Of course I love Celtic, but the vanishing lack of competition is really beginning to hinder my interest.
I've always thought that the Brasileirão, Brazilian top division, was the most competitive of all, but i must say that being in third place is not bad at all. Just for reference to everyone, in the last 15 years, 7 clubs became champion in Brazil, and only two times a club won twice in a row.
And since the league started to use the format it used nowadays (20 teams in a point system, just like the Premier League basically) in 2003, the most a team won the league in a row was 3 times, and only one team managed to do it until now, being São Paulo in 2006, 2007 and 2008
@@stoned8034 Brazilian clubs have won the last FIVE Libertadores. They are bad compared to the European leagues, but not to other South American clubs.
@@stoned8034not really. Most league that have new winner every year sometimes must sold their own players just to stay financially healthy. Brazilian league are ranked 3rd on transfer income from 2000-now, with most of the expensive players are under 22.
Imagine Harry Kane moves to Tajikistan and still manages to bottle the title 😂 In all seriousness though, the quality of the video is insane and honestly you're really underrated.
Problems: 1) number of round-robins: a league where each team plays each other four times is going to naturally have larger point spreads, than a league where they play each other only twice (or less than twice on average, as per MLS). The Scottish league is uncompetitive, but it is even more so because you only have 12 teams to spread over the length of the table -- and the 12th best team doesn't spend 2/5th of its games able to take points off teams 13-20, hence keeping pace better with higher teams. (The top-6 bottom-6 split reduces the spread between 1st and 12th, but increases the spread between 1st and 6th, or 1st and 2nd). 2) Duopolies. While the Spanish league is potentially quite competitive for first, it can be highly uncompetitive between 1st/2nd and the rest. This hasn't happened every year, but it is likely that the competitiveness of the league is overstated by only looking at the first-second margin. Conversely, Germany scores very poorly when you consider Bayern's dominance at the top, but the rest of the table can be quite competitive. I would give consideration to, for example, the ratio of points scored by the team 1/4 down the table versus 3/4 down the table), or perhaps even find some really bespoke measure like, points per game difference when teams 1-3 play teams 4-6, if you want to focus on the top half of the table. Comment: How does football compare to other sports? Rugby, American major league sports. the County Championship...? How would the regularity of draws affect the spread and how would you fairly account for this? Can we look at constructing some sort of ELO ratings for different sports?
Would have to imagine football is pretty low in terms of competitiveness across sports. Some sports are purposely set up for balance most football leagues domt care to much about that haha
Yeah, I was going to make the point about duopolies. Scotland (as was), Spain, and Portugal are the ones that come immediately to mind, but there's bound to be more of them.
@@lorenzosegolonithe Portuguese league only gets really competitive from around 7th place down nearly every team is only a couple point away from eachother
The second issue can be addressed by comparing with lower teams like you said, but could also be fixed by adding the number of different clubs that have won to the equation. This would be less work for a similar result
French Ligue 1 before Qatar arrived in Paris used to be an interesting league. A part from the supremacy of Olympique Lyon in the 2000's which won 7 Ligue 1 in a row (2002-2008), the champion changed every year and it wasn't easy to predict who will win the league at the beginning of a season. Notice that between 2008 and 2013, every champion changed every year (Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lille, Montpellier and then Paris won the league during this period)
that's why people find it hard to like PSG in France. I remember when i was a kid, watching all those matches and besides Lyon supremacy, having an interesting league. I remember when Qatar bought PSG, everyone where spitting on that, except maybe PSG fans. And now, we have a farmers league because PSG has massive funds and buy every new football celebs. Everyone where cheering of joy when PSG has been eliminated by Guingamp in 2019. Honestly, it's nostalgic, but Lyon is my favourite Ligue 1 team. I still remembers Juninho monstruous free kick before going to bed for school hahaha. Nowadays i don't have fun watching Ligue 1 matches, knowing that PSG will probably win at 95% 🤷
As a variant, France need second club with big money, to competitive with psg, like in Spain. Because now second place are always different team. Like lille play good, and then they sells leaders, or Monaco, or other
Would be interesting to see an analysis of actual league competitiveness (due to time reasons i'd be happy with a top 5 league comparison). I think some people would be surprised how stale the Prem is compared to Ligue 1 for example.
@@reinrassigerStuhlthe "big 6" doesn't exist for nothing, really Compared to the brazil league, there is a reason we have a "big 12", and even crazier 10 of the 12 teams in the big 12 were relegated at least once.
The quality of your videos while still maintaining that down-to-earth, non-corporate-feeling humour, I love it. Underrated as fuck. GLORY TO ARTSTOZKA!
For my Portuguese friends FLI for Primeira Liga X=(38/38)(7/15)√(5.87+³√58.47) X=1.46 This makes Primeira Liga more competitive than the top 4 leagues, edging out Premier League by 0.3. My only criticism is the cube root of the champion's GD. Should be cube root of Champions GD minus last placed team's GD. This would benefit the leagues whose last placed teams play half decent.
Sporting's resurgence and Benfica and Porto's recent fumblings have allowed for the league to look a lot more competitive, at least according to this arbitrary metric. Still, a league where the the top 3 + Braga finish 20 points ahead, then Guimarães and an occasional great 6/7th placer finish 10 points ahead of the whole rest of the competition, who are essentially playing a relegation battle until March/April. It's rough.
@@Firescizor Sporting's resurgence has little do do with it, as Porto and Benfica splitting championship would mean that the winningest team would still be 8/15. But I agree with you in that the rest of the league falls off dramatically, which is why I suggested changing the cube root of the champion's GD and make it cube root of champion's GD minus the last placed team's GD, which would naturally lower the FLI of the more competitive leagues.
Well, we can't deny despite Sporting is one of the big 3 this is like their 4th league titles in this century.. Even team like Braga only can finished runner up once let alone Guimaraes. But, Benfica and Porto split domination doing it better than city's dominating.
Here in the netherlands we have an X=(38/38)(7/15)v(6+v59.2)= 1.468, around the same as Portugal, but so are the budgets, 3 big main clubs with braga and az sometimes flighing higher, and in europe we prestige around the same. I think Portugal is now Better in Europe though, we just farmed coefficients in the UECL. Although i still admire ucl 2019
The Portuguese league does not have 38 games, though. In the last 15 years, 6 editions had 30 matchdays and the remaining 9 had 34. The formula is as follows: X = (38/32,4)×(7/15)×√(5.87+∛58.47). X = 1,709 It's still better than any of the top 5 leagues, but by nowhere near as big of a margin.
Great video! I was expecting the Liga MX or Brasileirão to be the most competitive, the Kosovar league being that was quite a surprise for me. Brasileirão gotta have some props for being both one of the best leagues in the world and one of the most competitive too, makes it very fun to keep up with
South American football especially the Brazilian Serie A is very underrated. The best players in the world are made there and the league is very competitive. Unfortunately there’s not enough money or prestige so the best players leave for Europe
Speaking of leagues that have weird formats like the leagues in the Americas, you should totally make a video covering those various formats. It would be interesting to see how they vary compared to the traditional structure of leagues like the PL. Maybe try to find the wackiest format? Keep up the good work, your work is really underrated!
Barcelona’s women’s team is worth a look. I remember one season they could have started every game giving the other team a 3 goal head start and still won the league title.
@matthewczech2631This is a great idea - would love to dive into this further. Also poor form on my part for not specifying 'men's leagues' in this video. I should have made that clearer. I'd like to do something similar for women's football, but want to give it it's own angle
@@RouteNone All good. I just thought that since that season was the most dominant I've ever seen by any team in history it would be part of an incredibly noncompetitive league. After looking through the data though, turns out I was wrong-about ten years ago the La Liga Femenil had a few dominant teams instead of one, so their score was 2.417. (I only went back 13 years since before that the format got weird.) For what it's worth, if you only take the last five years after Barca professionalized their women's team more, the score is 6.09. But of course you can get any result you want if you play with the data enough.
i really dont think that the term "farmers league" has anything to do with grinding/farming wins. It is a league that features teams that have farmers, i.e. they dont spend money and have amateurs is the joke that is being made ligue 1 is a farmers league not BECAUSE PSG wins every year, but because the drop off after the first 2-3 teams is significant, in talent, in money spent
... Or because PSG is farming league titles nearly every year. Ligue 1 isn't that bad, as a matter of fact it can't be that bad given what an insane amount of young talent France has at their hands. Those players must play somewhere, and more often than not they at least play their first couple of years in France
@eduardochavezbarreto8140 in my opinion anything beyond 5 years is irrelevant if you want to know which league IS competitive. Going beyond is in the realm of history and does not represent the here and now.
@Darilon12 I see that point but nevertheless still interesting. Example, people carrying on about how good city are historically, okay cool put their run up against uniteds back in the day, the Madrid's, barca etc compare say a 3-5 year or however much time block so city from 2019-2024 and let's say united from 04-09. It'd be interesting to see actual FLI or a legit equation for it all. On top of that, I wonder what are some of the most competitive league SEASONS in history? That'd be an awesome one. All these MUST include top to bottom of the table
German Teams consistantly finish high in the UCL (Semi-Finals and better). Calling the Bundesliga a Farmers League would be an Overstatement. Also im not sure how you worked out your FL-Index, but 4 out of the 5 Leagues you showed on Screen have 20 Teams in their League so dividing 38/38 in the first Equation of your Index makes them comparable... The Bundesliga however only has 18 Teams (overall 34 Game Days per Season) -> dividing 38/34 and you get a higher Number in the first Equation to start with. It feels like your FL-Index is flawed in that way.
No, that is exactly the reason this 38/a factor is in there. The intuition behind this goes like this: if a league champion manages the same point difference in fewer games, that means they have been more dominant. This kind of factor is called "normalization factor" and aims to make differently sized leagues comparable at all.
@@henningg.1687 Wouldn't the normalization factor be a N value which would be the number of games per season in each league? thus giving it the value "per game", thus making it comparable across all leagues? as in, keep same formula, divide all by N. Thats usually how its done in various stats when we want create a uniformity metric.
@@danielpardejo3350 Yes, we want a value per game, that is why the 'a' is in the denominator. The 38 in the numerator does not change the ranking at all, we could use 1/a instead of 38/a just as well (or anything, really, as long as we divide by 'a'). Using 38 just makes the scaling factor exactly 1 for the common case of 38 games per season.
@@henningg.1687 well. if let's say Bayern won Bundesliga by 1 point ahead of Dortmund and City won Prem by 1 point ahead of Arsenal for example is that mean Bayern is still more dominant of what? except the points are like comparing 13/14 Bundesliga and 17/18 Prem that both Bayern and City have 19 points gap ahead of man Utd and Dortmund which is make sense. But 17/18 Prem are also damn dominant
For polish fans: Since Ekstraklasa was brutally eliminated, due to (in)famous ESA37, I've adjusted this formula just a bit, to use it for our Ekstraklasa anyway. I've calculated last 15 seasons separately using this formula, so it's adjusted for game played every year (09/10 to 12/13 and 20/21 seasons with 30 games, 13/14 to 19/20 with 37 games - even though it doesn't quite use normal round robin, and 21/22 to 23/24 with 34 games), and multiplied each separate season by 1/15, then added it all together to get the overall result. And I've got FLI of 1.42, which makes Ekstraklasa better than Premier League. We all knew it even before, but okay, we have another confirmation. Most competitive seasons: 2023/24, Jagiellonia won by 0 points (!) ahead of Śląsk, it was decided down to their H2H matches (Jagiellonia won 3-1 in Białystok, while Śląsk won 2-1 in Wrocław). Second most competitive season: 2014/15, Lech won by 2 points (1 point after dividing due to ESA37) ahead of Legia. Third was 16/17 (in reality this should be the most competitive, but formula doesn't care about 3rd and 4th places), when Legia won by 2 points ahead of Jagiellonia. In reality, there were 4 teams fighting for the title at the last matchday, and 4th Lechia Gdańsk was just 1 goal away from jumping up to the championship title! Least competitive seasons: no surprises there, 13/14 with Legia dominating the league and winning by 15 points (adjusted again, due to ESA37 dividing points by half after completing round robin in 30 rounds), and Raków in 22/23 winning by 9 points in 34 matches.
@@wavell14 Yeah, "everyone can with anyone" is simultaneously the biggest strength of Premier League, and the weakest point of Ekstraklasa. Sure. Enjoy tomorrow games, kicking off in Gdańsk!
I believe the phrase Farmers' League originally started in Germany as Bauernliga, a play on words with the team name "Bayern" being similar to the German word "Bauern", which means "farmers".
The term farmers league was first used on the French Lique 1 one. It didn't even mean dominated by one club either, it meant the whole league was garbage from top to bottom.
In case anyone's wondering about what's happening in Croatia to make Dinamo Zagreb so dominant, it's mostly a combination of good luck and good management. Until around 20 years ago, there was a very tight rivalry between Dinamo and Hajduk Split (which remains as fierce, especially as Hajduk are once more ascendent), but Hajduk dropped off in quality quite badly and stopped challenging for titles. Meanwhile, Dinamo (technically a state-run club due to its set-up in Yugoslavia, though there's no actual favouritism involved) were de facto taken over by Mamić, who is currently living in exile in Bosnia for a variety of frauds. Mamić, however, had an incredible eye for talent and with the club having been from the beginning one of the best youth training clubs anywhere in the world they quickly gained dominance when it comes to young talent, basically attracting all the best talent in Croatia, with the rest either getting secondary talent or loaning very young players. With Croatia mainly being an exporting league, no teams have really been able to build a competent resistance to Dinamo, though Rijeka (who did win one championship and sometimes win the Cup), Osijek and Hajduk have all come close in recent years. On the other hand, with the club being state-run there has been no chance of meaningful investment, Mamić stole a lot of money from the club and involved himself in all sorts of contracts, attendance was for a long time hampered by boycotts against Mamić and after the earthquake in 2020 the East (I believe) stand has been forced to shut down with no repairs in sight. Add to that the fact that the land surrounding the stadium is owned by the church, who currently refuse to let it be used for expansion or renovation, and it becomes clear that Dinamo Zagreb have the very unusual situation of having the capability to become a club at Ajax's level in a league even worse than the Dutch league while being held back by red tape, fraud and a setup that makes investment impossible.
How could you forget the main reason why Dinamo became so dominant in the first place? Dinamo (then for several years renamed FC "Croatia") was heavily favored by the first Croatian president Tudjman. He was obsessed with making it an European powerhouse, while at the same time stating that Croatia is too small a country to have even two big clubs. While he was still alive the project of rebuilding the stadium into the 60000 closed arena (like Ajax arena, but bigger) started. The project turned to be too ambitious, and was soon stalled and continued to hamper any realistic idea for the stadium renovation, also making it by far the ugliest national stadium in the world, in this unfinished state it is still today.
I’m a Rijeka supporter but my eyes glazed over the rest of your reply after “combination of good luck and management”. Take it you don’t follow the HNL closely… 😂
Are you living under the rock? Yes, most of the stuff you said are correct, but papers with the church property were resolved. Zagreb government wanted DInamo to get rid of Mamić supporters in the club and that's why the club went through a dire period last season when elections in the club were boycotted. Eventually Dinamo got a new management and the government confirmed the deal was done. They are going to tear down the stadium stand by stand and just build a new one on the same spot. Also, they will build a new complex around the stadium.
Seeing MLS's FLI score would be interesting, but it has a championship final as the 'winner'. Still, they've had 11/15 different champions and 11/15 different league winners (17 unique teams in total).
MLS would be interesting to figure out the FLI score comparing the most recent 15 years to its initial 15 years of existence… maybe then you can see if MLS (or other leagues around the world) have become more or less competitive over time.
While I appreciate this a lot, I do want to raise an extra point: Winning margin is one thing, but it doesn't necessarily reflect upon the competitiveness of yhe whole league. You can have a duopoly like La Liga where the top 2 are close in contention but the other teams fall somewhat short. And you can have a league like the Russian Premier Liga that though often won by pretty significant margins, has a very healthy battle right below, with 2nd to 12th all battling it out closely. If a more careful index is to be developed, considerations should be given to the kevel of competitiveness over the whole league.
love the video, definitely very high quality, but I have a couple arguments against your particular criteria for what makes a farmer's league: 1. how teams perform in Europe relative to their domestic competition should affect these standings - for example, in Germany, any given team in Europe can go far (see Frankfurt winning the UEL, Dortmund reaching multiple UCL finals, or the fact that it's just generally incredibly rare for a German team to get knocked out in a group stage), therefore although Bayern dominates domestically, all the teams that participate in Europe tend to have similar results - whereas, a French team not named PSG doing well in Europe is much rarer, showing that there is much more of an extreme gulf in competitiveness - now I'm not saying that a league like Germany having more teams do well in Europe means its domestically more competitive, I'm just saying that the relative evenness of German teams playing outside Germany should affect their standing, similar to the gulf of quality in French teams going abroad 2. variation in placements should affect how much a league is a "farmer's league" - in England, though there have been more champions in recent memory, there is still little variation in where teams place compared to other leagues, with the same clubs occupying European spots, the same clubs finishing mid table, and newly promoted teams (especially recently), looking to immediately head straight back down - in Germany or Italy comparatively, teams can go from doing well to being within threat of relegation in a very short amount of time, or vice versa (see Schalke, Koln, Union Berlin, Sassuolo, Monza etc.) great papers please and FM references btw, glory to arstotska and death to working with directors of football
I disagree with the first thing. While that may be important for measuring league quality, especially in relation to others in europe, its completely irrelevant for league competitiveness. A league can be high quality and completely uncompetitive, it can also be low quality and extremely competitive.
@@adrian225 There are also questions of whether the competitiveness of the league has an impact on European performance. I remember Spurs under Pochettino sacrificing a Europa League run to keep pushing for CL qualification by playing a bunch of kid in I think it was the quarter final
The EPL has had 3 UCL finalists (two of them winners) which ticks part of box 1, in the last 6 seasons, who have also failed to qualify for the UCL on at least one occasion in the same period, (more than one for Spurs and Chelsea) which shows the volatility and competitiveness you claim doesn’t exist in point 2. Not to mention the EPL has a title winner in that period that has been relegated. It isn’t surprising given the EPL has the most equal distribution of income of the big 5 leagues.
What's interesting is that I remember Latvian league being dominated by Sconto Riga back in the 90s-early 2000s. I think they won like 10 titles in a row or something. And now Latvian league is the second most competitive in Europe 😅
I am from Bulgaria. Happy to see our league finally being in the top 5 of something. 😂 Also I am a fan of the always winning team of Ludogorets, which is about to break the record for the most wins in a row of any national football league.
Great video! Really enjoyed it! I think that while this is great to determine competition among winners, it doesnt fully take into account competition for the rest of the teams (it does a bit with the goal scoring difference). Like competition for European spots, not relegate, and so on 1 way to do this is displaying the points (taking into account number of matches) and look at the dispersion of those
it's a shame that only the Brasileirão is rated here just because their league formats aren't like the ones in Europe, here it's really common to have two league championship in one year that are statistically combined into only one when the year ends to come up with which teams can play on continental cups and also there is a similar system for relegation that takes into account the points you've made on the last 3 or 4 seasons that is really common too it's a little messy I know but it's nothing like the last Argentinian league on the last decade that has changed a lot from season to season
It's lovely being a regular at a channel before it blows up, you can be one of the OGs when there'll be millions here, because that's definitely what's happening
Ekstraklasa would rank high if it was included. It has had 7 different winners since 2010 The past two champions, Jagiallonia and Rakow, were first first time winners. The MLS would rank #1 if it was included. The salary cap ensures teams can never horde trophies. The fact 9 teams have won a MLS Cup since 2010 speaks for itself. Its great for fans because any team can achieve greatness through great management, coaching, and hardwork. Argentine Premier Division, Brasileiro, and A-League are other great leagues with incredible parity.
Great video! Hello from France Farmer League! There is something funny here, the second division Ligue 2 is dominated by few teams too even if they go to Ligue 1, they always come back to win Ligue 2 again 😅
The problem in France is that everyone except PSG is broke, we are obliged to sell our talents pretty quickly, in terms of pure talent and level, Ligue 1 isn't that bad fr
Mais non clé, le PSG est certes gavé de thunes, mais le reste est pas à jeter. Faut juste arrêter de choke en Coupe d'Europe contre des clubs chypriotes ou azerbaïdjanais par exemple.
trop de taxes et impôts tout simplement on a des équipes avec des budgets digne du top4 pour des effectifs dignes des Pays-bas/Portugal. Ça rend aussi les C3/C4 absolument pas rentables à jouer sérieusement (le GAGNANT de la C3 touche 8m, rien qu'une équipe comme Lens c'est 110m de budget...) Forcément qu'on peut pas lutter, les dès sont pipés dès le départ
just a matter of time till you're big mate, fantastic video as always! loved the fm and papers please references although i think it's west grestin not gretin
I started the video thinking I'd probably watch the last few seconds to have some sort of an answer but was captivated from the start to finish. Really well done 👏
One minus about just focusing on the title is that it ignores how strong teams in a competition are compared to others. Take the average Bundesliga team and put it against the average League 1 team, and many would say the Bundesliga team wins. In Europe, since 2000 French clubs have been in European finals 4 times while German teams have been 11 times, winning 3 trophies.
The problem with Bundesliga is that bayern managed to create a big money difference between them and the rest of the league, but if you take the whole league ignoring them , it's extremely fun and competitive, as you can see this season where every them got a bit more equal
Me as a Romanian hearing that:”NOOOOOO!” A playoff system allows for more 6 pointers between first and second but the whole point of it is to increase the excitement, would be interesting to see it included but I guess it wouldn’t be a straight comparison
Great video bro. Maybe you can do something similar with the teams in the top 6 of each top 5 european league. Maybe even throw in their ucl/uel performances in the mix
great video, the thing when we say about a farmers league is about the quality of the teams. leagues like portugal, eredivise or ligue 1 usually have 3-5 good teams, but the rest of the teams are trash so a lot of players and teams get very high stadistics that doesnt translate to european football or other leagues when the players are sign by better teams.
I mean… most leagues have 4-5 teams that are of relatively « european » level all the time and the rest are usually never to be seen, the problem with ligue 1 is that we struggle to have a constant big 6, like the premier league have
@@paulsimonin6465 but if u compare teams in premier, laliga from 6-12 are usually way way better teams that the 4 of eredivise or the 5 of league 1. Most of these "farmers league" like they dont really focus on winnig the game, their defense is really bad and they tend to get 2-3 good players and sell them to bigger teams.
Quality of your video is astonishing! Quick remark on the formula: 38/a should move into the square root since its a corrective factor for the point and goal diff margin. Currently your FLI has a strong bias towards leagues with less games.
It's clear that the Brasileirão is the best league. It's the 6th most valuable league in the world, ranks 3rd in competitiveness and completely dominates it's continent. However, the time zone makes it difficult for it to be appreciated properly in Europe (or maybe they just don't want to do that).
@@Ajaxtothehead why you’d say it’s poor? You have no idea lol it dominates very easily the continent. The best Brazilian teams are better then almost any European team, but they only have the chance to play a game against the best European each year, and of course the best European is way better than the best Brazilian.
@@tostv8668 you have no idea many players stuggle coming from the brazilian league. Those players even admit it but I guess you know better than someone who actually played in both
@@desktoleaf6042 Germany 3.36 (Eventhough Leverkusen won last season, they also did it with one of the highest point margins ever, so no that big of a change there, but if they win again it (or any team that isnt bayern) would drop to ~2.5) Spain 2.05 Italy 1.48 France 2.91 (but this is not "exact" and to low, because 19/20 they didnt finish the season due to corana and last season they made the ligue smaller from 20 to 18 teams, but I just stick to formula and said they played 38 games each season to minimize effort)
I did the math for the Austrian Bundesliga (which is extremely lopsided in favor of RB Salzburg). For the seasons in which there were multiple stages, I simply looked at the points that would have been there without the split/reduction. The result was a 3.34, not quite enough to crack the top 5. Though had you done that assessment a year ago, the league would have landed at 3.63. Which shows the major flaw here. 15 years is absolutely arbitrary. Draw the line at 10 years and it would have been at 4.77 - much higher than even the Tajik League. (RBS won all 10 titles in a row, at times with well over 70 GD and even with 24 extra points at one point) This leads me to my actual comment: If you want something more robust, you would want to have past events be faded out instead of cut off arbitrarily. Something like the past 5 seasons at full value, and everything further in the past at 90%, 80%, etc. weight.
There is a strong confirmation bias. That 15 year period and only considering the winner help making some leagues look better. For example La Liga having two dominant clubs look quite competitive. But that does not actually make the whole league more competitive. Or the EPL. Is a league (the whole league) competitive if it's next to impossible for a mid-table club to get in the top 5?
@@Darilon12 What I'd love to see is if the CL money has a negative impact. Hypothetically, if a team gets say £20m a season over their rival clubs, they're more likely to get that payoff again. In theory, you'd have to test that over a much longer period, and I don't know if it would account for the increasing CL money, particularly in more recent years
For Wales which was mentioned here in 3rd place, The New Saints (formerly Total Network Solutions) have won the title I believe 13 of the last 15 seasons. They are the only permanent professional team in the league which is why they win nearly every year and they made the league stage of the Europa Conference league this year, meaning they will get at least 3 million euros, which will make the league even less competitive. Also as the rest of the league tends to be semi-pro (some teams sometimes try professional for a few years, but it rarely works out, because average attendances are around 300 and you need to basically win the league to make it sustainable) then it may literally be a farmer's league, in the sense of having literal farmers play in it! There are people with all kinds of normal jobs playing in the league and I'm sure at least one or two who work in agriculture. Despite that, it's not that bad to watch, if you live in Wales games are free to watch on TV (S4C) and there are some decent players playing in the league.
If anyone cares, here in America we have the term "church league" because once upon a time churches had informal (casual) sports leagues for their members, especially baseball\softball and basketball. While you can use it as an insult for a team, it's actually usually directed at basketball and American football referees. "Go back to the church league" says the referees aren't good enough to be working minor college or high school games, much less major college or pro games.
Wow, this is a good find. Great research, production and delivery. Keep making videos mate, there are football channels with half a million subs that aren't this well done.
Since 2010/11 Welsh Premier league/Cymru Premier has had 2 phrase and The New Saints are the only professional side so unlike Croatia, Germany or Scotland where you argue all teams are more equal footing, only Connah's Quays can mainly challenge TNS, they are the second best team in Europe from Wales by coefficant points.
Our league was exclusively amateur until 1992 also. Meaning clubs have had far less time to grow than every other league in Europe. So as long as you pump a bit of money into a club you could dominate the league easily.
3:36 Doesn't especially the 38 bit in the formula paint a skewered picture for leagues that do not play 38 games per season? The German Bundesliga or Dutch Eredivisie only play 34 games per season, I believe the Portuguese Primeira Liga played just 30 games per season in a not too distant past, and I'm sure there are other leagues that have been taken in the equation that don't play 38 games per season either (Belgium, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Austria come to mind...)
It's trying to normalise for it. The value of 38/a changes from 1 for the PL to about 1.28 for Portugal for that season you mentioned so the winning margin would change to being 28% bigger in the formula. I doubt it's that linear though - if there are more teams in a league, I suspect they'd be around the level of the bottom teams so would be much more likely to give a dominant team a win. I would guess that this formula would underestimate the margin in a bigger league, but I can't really test that theory
It's a shame u binned most of the leagues that has "nonsense" formats, most especially MLS in the USA and the A-league in Australia. Cuz they're pretty competitive, especially due to the salary cap systems, which means every team can only spend more or less the same amount of money on players. Furthermore, both MLS and the A-league has a regular season that is exactly the same as a regular round robin season in Europe. It's just that they hv a post-season knockout competition / playoffs. If u look at the A-league regular season league tables, th FLI would be 1.12. A top ten most competitive perhaps.
16 teams playing each other twice a season I'd say is best format, (as long as it's not a really small country). 30 league games a season. Also helps with formulating knockout cup competitions
EPL also have city so what's the different basically? in fact City need like 2-3 seasons to start their debut in UCL while PSG only 1 season after the takeover (finished as runner-up behind the miracle Montpellier). And they need 15 years even lost to PSG rivals like Lyon and Monaco. But PSG if you said rm, Barca, and EPL fans crying well as we can see in the last decade PSG keep getting knocked out by them including EPL teams like not so great man Utd, city, Chelsea (Liverpool and Arsenal already met PSG but in group stages. And PSG never knocked out in group stages since 12/13) but in KO stage they show super squad isn't the only way to win UCL. Heck even in last back to back 2 season they got knocked out by Bayern and Dortmund. Dortmund's squad value are just half of PSG though. Dominate is a pretty strong words. Not even Barca or Bayern in like the last 4 decades did.
You should sum the squares of the number of titles each team has won. Eg. Premier league: Man City = 8 titles Chelsea = 3 titles Man United = 2 titles Liverpool = 1 title Leicester = 1 title Total = 8²+3²+2²+1²+1² = 79 La Liga: Barcelona = 8 titles Real Madrid = 5 titles Atletico Madrid = 2 titles Total = 8²+5²+2² = 93 This method differentiates between leagues who had maybe 2 dominant teams who shared the titles equally compared with a league who had 1 team who won half and multiple teams who spread their titles out between them. The Premier League should get more credit than La Liga for having 5 different winners in the last 15 years whereas La Liga only had 3. It still punishes leagues who were dominated by 1 team but the number of teams able to challenge should also be a factor.
@@daviebananas1735 But the method used in the video also rewards the ones with less winners that’s why the “farmer leagues” would be on top, the video is more about them than the competitive leagues
Nice video! I wrote a similar thing a few years ago on Reddit (although I think your methodology is a lot better), and also used the term Farmers League Index! Was it just a coincidence we ended up with the same term?
Most likely long term outcome would be Cardiff/Swansea duopoly, with Wrexham also winning the occasional title, and perhaps Newport challenging. It would also end the dominance of TNS, since that is based on consistent qualification for the Champions League qualifiers and the resultant European money. In terms of fanbase TNS would be doing well to get crowds of over 1,000 regularly, even if the top teams in Wales were plonked directly into the league. I can imagine home games against Cardiff with the away fans outnumbering the home fans. So if they no longer had nearly a million euros (less expenses) income every year guaranteed from European money it would render the full time wages unsustainable. If for argument's sake the big 4 did get lumped into the CP, how many of their best players would leave almost immediately, and would they even all be able to beat TNS in the first season and qualify for Europe (bearing in mind Wales currently only get 3 European places, likely increasing to 4 after this season)? It would be interesting if the FA basically kicked them out and refused to allow them to compete on the basis they are clubs from a foreign association, as that's the only way this would likely happen. Merthyr Tydfil, however, should consider moving systems voluntarily since they aren't going anywhere in the English system and TNS have proven you can make way more money with a half decent European run than even the most unlikely of FA Cup runs. Though the experience of Colwyn Bay may make them think twice since that has proven it's actually not that easy to succeed in the Cymru Premier and the standard of the league is better than it is given credit for.
This was a great video ! I did my best to attempt to make the Colombian Primera A, even though it doesn't count due to the elimination round (so I only counted the First League Stage for the last 15 years [again, another mistake on my end]). So, the Primera A Colombiana... Has an average of 19 Games (at least in the last 15 years, which have totaled some 29 Seasons) Atlético Nacional, the biggest winners of the initial league round, have a success ratio of 0.31 The average point win margin is of 3.17 points And the Average Goal Difference of the winning team is 15.03 So, if I made the calculations right, the Primera A Colombiana should have an unofficial (by any standard) FLI score of 2.38 Well... I expected it to be worse.
not really, 20 years ago they were kinda close to the big 4. Now you see a very clear gap and they are even arguably worse than Eredivise and the Belgium League. And probably worse than the Russian League (pre ban).
Quality stuff, always nice to 'discover' a channel before it blows up! Keep it up, in a couple months you'll be one of the big football channels for sure
@@danielpardejo3350 I did the math for Portugal and got 1.779. Which for me makes sense because we often have small point differences and rotating winners (between 3 teams) but we have very big goal differences because the top teams are so much better than the smaller teams.
@@brunoalves-pg9eo well... 2,66 made since for me cause we only have 3 winners in 15 years... but mostly only 2 actually. And even then both porto and benfica, when they win, its usually 2 or more in a row. But what values you have for c and d= to check the difference we got.
Can you justify doing the cube root instead of the square root? You say you use data data, although the methodology of itself is flawed because there is no actual justification behind any of the formulas. 4:51
interesting video, thanks for sharing! your ranking mechanism takes its proud place in a long line of heuristic rankings - you figured out which things you care about, and then started smooshing them together into a formula that prioritised them in a way that reflected your own priorities. you even added a scaling factor for the number of games to account for how a longer season could give dominant teams more chance to dominate! this is a totally valid way of creating a ranking. you're right that it might not be the most scientific approach, but it will highlight the extreme cases you were looking for (like kosovo and kazakhstan) perfectly well! as long as we don't have a clear definition of what a "famers league" actually is, we're going to be injecting some kind of biases or assumptions into the model. i think your definition that includes how much the teams win the league by is pretty good. one more thing to think about - when you were figuring out your equation for the farmers league index, did you decide on what equation you were going to use first, and then accept whatever it spat out, or did you look at what it created, and then adjust it until it produced rankings that you thought made sense?
I disagree with bundesliga being least competitive, sure Bayern won it but the rest of the league is competitive, you get tes nearly being relegated 1 year and the next year in the top 6
Great Video! Really like how you calculated the competitivness of Leagues. But i think you still didnt quite understand what a farmers league is. Its not abaout farming titles, but about farming talented players. So basically a league where one team can buy all the players from the competitors, as soon as they get good enough. The other teams cant afford to do anything about it and are left without talented players/ star players. Typical criteria to look for are for example: How much money the top team has in comparison to the rest of the league. And how competitiv the 2nd, 3rd, 4th team from the league are in international comptitions. You can see, why the Ligue 1 is often considered the "most farmy" in the big 5. Maybe you could develop a formula to calculate a farmer score. I would be very interested in seeing that! Thx again for the great video!
Funny enough in the Ukrainian Premier League three clubs are financed by literal farmers: Inhulets (the president has a village, Toyota land cruiser, and AK47), LNZ (N is Nasinnya which means grain), Kolos Kovalivka (Kolos is a spike with grain).
Not by the measurements they take. They just look at the champion and there the Eredivise is not really competitive. PSV/Ajax pretty much steamroll the division scoring 80+ points each time in just 34 games (sometimes even if they are "just" 2and place) and its rarely close at the top either. With the messurement they take Netherlands is much closer to the non-competitive ones. PSV/Ajax are too good for the league - otherwise I agree that its competitive. Similar to Switzerland where apart of the very dominant Champion at the start of a season nobody really knows if they will qualify for europe or fight against relegation.
I’d say it’s getting more competitive mainly because Ajax completely fucked themselves over, giving Feyenoord and PSV a real chance to catch up. It looks almost identical to the portuguese competition.
1:36 probably helps that Rangers got themselves relegated to the bottom of Scottish football and still haven't sorted out their finances, despite reaching a Europa League final
Probably didn’t help that Rangers were spending over a hundred million they didn’t have in the decade before that just to keep up with Celtic. They went bust and had to start again. If you’re relegated you don’t need to apply for a new league membership. They got what they deserved for industrial level cheating rather than trying to grow their club like Celtic have and still to this day would rather spend money they don’t have just to give the illusion of competition to Celtic who as a club have outgrew Rangers and probably did long before 2012.
Fun fact: if you rank the teams at the end of the season by goal difference instead of points, the ranking will stay almost identical, maybe 1 or 2 pairs of teams will flip rank at best and that's it. The ones that flip identify the "lucky" or "unlucky" teams over the season. Normally luck/unlucky results will even each other out over a whole season but sometimes they don't. Whereas goal difference over the whole season is way less subdued to luck.
