As we can see, from season 2007/2008 to season 2017/2018, revenues show only a minimal advantage for Manchester City. However, as we shall see with some upcoming visualizations, the trend would indicate a growing advantage for Manchester City.
On the other hand, transfer spending has been heavily tilted in favour of Manchester City since season 2007/2008.
A note on sources: Revenue data is based on Deloitte Football Money League publications and can be viewed HERE
Transfer data is collated from multiple sources; primarily https://www.transfermarkt.com/ and https://www.transferleague.co.uk/.
A good deal of inspiration that started us on this project came from https://github.com/ewenme who did a fine job scraping transfermarkt. We will definitely be going back to that dataset for future analysis. His football repo can be viewed at https://github.com/ewenme/footy-transfer-data
Liverpool booked more revenue than Manchester City from the 2007/2008 season until 2010/2011 season. From 2011/2012 onwards, Manchester City has steadily outperformed Liverpool. Although, for 2017/2018 it appears Liverpool have shrunk the gap somewhat. Whether this becomes a future trend is impossible to say but worth watching. In any event, it is clear that over 11 seasons, the overall revenue for these two teams had a steep incline. No doubt this is a large reflection of the tv deals signed by the Premier League over the past decade and the continued expansion of Premier League commercial activity.
This certainly tells a story.
Deloitte data does not include player sales in revenues. Commercial revenue is typically made up of sponsorship deals, leasing venues for concerts, etc. It is interesting that Manchester City is able to grow this type of activity beyond the levels of Liverpool.
Manchester City took full advantage of new investment in 2008, 2009 and 2010. This pattern also resumed in 2015, 2016 and 2017 where significant investment was made. Liverpool spent more on transfers than Manchester City during only three years; 2011, 2014 and 2018.
We can see LFC has the highest amount paid for a single player (Virgil van Dijk in 2018) but in all other years, MCFC purchased the most expensive player; in many years, several more expensive players than LFC.
Violin plots are interesting visuals. At the heart of the plot is the traditional box plot. However, taking the box plot one step further, the violin plot shows distribution of values. The nice, thick part of the violin shape indicates the greatest distribution, or probability, if you like. Bear in mind that if we updated our data next year, it would no doubt skew this data higher. A 10 year period in football is a long time. Transfer inflation is significant and our dataset includes a good deal of older transactions.
In any event, we can see that Liverpool’s distribution of player purchase values skews lower than Manchester City. Liverpool median is £7 Million and Manchester City £12 Million. The LFC mean is £11.5 Million and MCFC mean = £16.1 Million. LFC 3rd quartile is £17 Million and Manchester City at £25.5 Milion. If one assumes a correlation of quality to cost, this visualization would suggest a deeper distribution of quality in the Manchester City side.
Liverpool demonstrates a mean age of transfer targets almost a full year younger than Manchester City. This is also true of the q3 values and slightly less true of q1. The difference is reduced somewhat looking at median; KDE of 1 occurs for LFC at ~24.5 years of age and for MCFC at ~24.80. Again, readers can reach their own conclusions but we find this interesting and would be of even greater interest if combined with data regarding contract length, etc
Recent years have shown a trend towards profit. The period from season 2006/2007 until 2014/2015 was particularly bleak for both clubs. Clearly with significant losses for Manchester City during and either side of 2010/2011.
These values were recorded from corporate filings registered with Companies House. Please note distinctions between operating profit vs total profit.