Ranking Premier League teams by how much they waste on salary

Want to be able to see the future? All you need to do is figure out how much everyone is getting paid.

For all of the advances of in-game soccer data over the past decade, there’s still one thing that predicts future results better than anything that actually happens on the field: the wages each team pays its players. The findings were most publicly established by the economist Stefan Szymanski, and it has since been confirmed by a number of other studies.

This isn’t to say that you could turn, say, Jordan Morris into Arjen Robben just by quintupling his salary. Rather, in an unequal sport with no hard salary cap, the teams with the most money, over the long run, tend to win the most points and finish highest in the table. The legendary Johan Cruyff once said: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” But I’ve seen Erling Haaland score lots of goals, and he plays for Manchester City because he gets a bag with $500,000 in it every week.

And yet, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation here, either. Brentford and Brighton routinely finish higher than expected in the Premier League table than their spending suggests they should, while Manchester United underachieve their spending almost every season.

One way you might fall below expectation, perhaps, would be for the players you’re spending lots of money on to not actually play much soccer. That could be because they’re not as good as you thought, your coach mistakenly believes they’re not as good as you thought, or they’re simply just injured. Whatever the reason, though, it all adds up to money being spent that’s not actually contributing to the team’s performance.

Which clubs are spending the most money on unused minutes? And which are getting the most out of their player investment? Let’s rank all 20 Premier League teams on their spending, from best to worst.

But first, a note on how we came up with the rankings

Unlike the major American sports with players’ unions, Premier League contracts aren’t as publicly available. So we’ll be using the estimated wage data from the site FBref. It’s not perfect, but it’s generally and comparatively correct, and that serves our purposes just fine.

We’re also not including transfer fees, which are also a portion of total player costs. We’re just focusing on how much Premier League teams are paying their players to play every week.

The only other question: how to decide the rankings. We calculated the cost of every unused minute by multiplying each player’s salary by the percentage of minutes they haven’t played. From there, there are two options: (1) rank them by the raw value of all of their unused minutes or (2) rank them by the percentage of their payroll that’s going to unused minutes. Actually, there’s a third option, and that’s what we’re using: combining the two.

The richest teams are going to have the most expensive unused minutes because their payrolls are so much bigger than everyone else’s. But the sheer scale of wasted investment should also count for something. So, we’re weighting the raw unused spending as 60% of the input and the percentage of unused payroll as 40%.

FBref has wage data for 526 players, so we added it all up to come up with this list. Landing higher on this ranking page is better, and our No. 1 team is the biggest money waster in the Premier League.

20. Everton

-Total unused payroll rank: 17th
-Percentage of unused payroll rank: 19th

Manager Sean Dyche has done a fantastic job in a near-impossible situation. Given the uncertainty over ownership and the generally disastrous financial situation, Everton haven’t been able to make many external additions to the squad since Dyche took over. Pretty much every highly paid player at Everton plays a ton of minutes.

Talk to anyone who works in a front office in professional soccer, and they’ll tell you that their biggest issue with their coach is that he doesn’t get their best players on the field enough. While the actual quality of the players at Everton is dubious at best, Dyche gets his best talent on the field, week in and week out.

19. Fulham

-Total unused payroll: 16th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 17th

18. AFC Bournemouth

-Total unused payroll: 17th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 13th

17. West Ham United

-Total unused payroll: 9th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 18th

This one certainly surprised me. I view West Ham as the Manchester United of the midtable — a team that should be finishing somewhere between sixth and 10th every season based on its spending power. But instead, they’re a team that chases aging big-name players right as they’re about to decline in order to replace … the other big-name players they already have who have already declined

See: this summer’s signing of Manchester United

-Total unused payroll: 1st
-Percentage of unused payroll: 8th

In a massive upset, United did not finish first in a ranking of who’s the best at spending money badly. What makes them stand out, however, is the sheer breadth of money that has gone to unused minutes.

Among the 50 most expensive unused minutes in the league, Man United have nine guys — two more than the next most in the league. And those nine run the gamut of types of bad deals. You’ve got the old guys (Nottingham Forest section and pretty much apply it here. Chelsea have spent over $1 billion on what feels like approximately a billion players, and they’ve left it to Enzo Maresca to figure out whom to play and whom to leave on the bench. Given that they’re currently in second place in the table, it’s hard to argue that he has made the wrong decisions.