you can now get a 30-day trial to experience the athletic for free visit the link in the description below to try it now alorrog 745 alarag 745 asks do you think it's realistic for any non-old firm team to win the scottish league in the next 10 years or so j. j bull so the last team outside of celtic rangers the old firm to win the scottish premiership was aberdeen and that was in 1985. so i think it's unlikely anyone's going to win it in the next 10 years and i can show you with some data to do with money why that's definitely the case there's an economic model there's a bit called soccernomics and in that they say that the team who spends the most on wages is most likely to win that makes sense but it's not to do with transfer as much as he's spending transfers it's the team who spends the most on wages tends to win now if we look at the yeah this is the date i got for the 2019-20 season in the scottish premiership and this ended early because of this thing called coronavirus you may have heard of before but this is the this is how the wages are split and as you can see it's slightly imbalanced celtic won the league this year rangers finished second and then motherwell way down here they finished third on a points for game basis aberdeen finished fourth they were expected to finish third but didn't and as you can see this is quite a big difference right but if we compare this to the english premier league we can see where the sort of difference has come in this is the english premier league from the same season at celtic for comparison obviously a lot smaller but that's not what we're talking about now if we consider like the old farm to be the teams most likely to always win the league or expected to you can call it in england kind of the top five so man city man united liverpool arsenal chelsea i'd say they're the top five and spurs may be just outside it right is possibly the sixth now as you can see here liverpool won the league this year right this is them here this is in dollars but we converted it into pounds don't worry about it too much compared to leicester who finished outside the top four they finished fifth which is very good for them to do that this is them here that looks like a big that looks like a big jump right so you think well well done leicester they've done really well to do that but if we do this the leicester finished fifth the difference in average wages to first which is liverpool and there's 1.
65 so for every pound that lester spent liverpool spent one pound 65 on wages now mother well finished third the difference in average wages the first is 15. 1 this is more quite a lot more we can then take that and look at liverpool's average annual wage per player in 2019-20 right so they spent 5. 1 million pounds per player on average that's the average salary per player but if liverpool were equivalent of celtic and leicester with equivalent or motherwell this would be like instead of liverpool paying 5.
1 million per player they instead spent 46. 7 million pounds per player this is more and this is what it would look like [Music] which is quite a lot as you can see there now that's sort of where we're looking at in scotland so the premier league looks like this the scottish premiership looks like this and these numbers may look a bit closer than you think when you compare it to like over here but it's not it's miles away now how about we think about just transfers so sure enough the model doesn't say that the more he's going to transfer is you're guaranteed to win that's not how it works it's the wages but if we look at transfers what we find is uh something else very interesting now this is from this season the 20 21 22 season right the total spent by non-old firm teams so teams who aren't rangers and celtic is 1. 8 million and that's actually quite a lot in scottish privacy that's quite a lot this season aberdeen spend quite a bit of money for example right now um the total spent by the old firm in the 21 22 season 26.
5 million pounds this is quite a lot more so if we look for example aberdeen's transfer spend and they are most likely to challenge celtic arrangers outside of the old firm this is the team most likely to do it aberdeen spent 560 000 pounds in this this year and celtic spent 24. 5 million that is a multiplier of 43. 75 so it's quite big it's quite a lot more money let's compare it to something that more people know about now man united um they finished second last season right spurs the team most likely to finish outside of the old farms and man united and liverpool and city and chelsea whatever you want to call them right so sparrows transfer spends 86.
3 million pounds now if that were the equivalent and spurs like uh like aberdeen were trying to get into the finished second even and man united who did finish second so this is 86. 3 million times 43. 75 they instead spent 3.
