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Football and the North-South Divide in England
Introduction
From time to time in its surveys of the regions and nations of the UK, Cambridge Econometrics has reported on the north-south divide within England: the widening gaps in the main economic indicators of earnings and value added. Despite the economic growth enjoyed by all regions of England in the years immediately before the recession, it is clear that, over the past 50 years, population and wealth have been growing faster in the southern regions of the country than in all others, and that this disparity has been particularly marked between northern and southern England.
At the same time football has become more of an economic activity, in two senses at least. The game itself and all its features (matches, championships, ancillary services, attendances) is a value-generating activity and supports many related activities of universal benefit (from hot-dog stands to betting shops and ticket touting). Second, the factors of production in football, ie grounds, clubs and players, have themselves become traded commodities and the objects of financial investment, a phenomenon that has not gone unremarked in the pages of our reports on the prospects for the sectors of the UK economy.
The questions
As the UK economy emerges hesitantly from the recession, the time is ripe to investigate what links there might be between performance in football matches and performance in the wider economy and to see whether there are any economic lessons to be learnt.
The potential interconnections between football performance and economic performance are many and varied. Before we raise any of them, however, we need to establish, in as neutral a way as possible, whether there has been anything in the recent history of English football corresponding to the widening of the North-South Divide. This, and this alone, is the subject matter of the present brief article.
If we find that there is such feature in English football, we can then, in future issues of this report, embark on a wider study with three broad fields:
- correspondences between football performance and economic performance in other member states of the EU and on an EU-wide level
- correspondences between performance in other international sports (from croquet and cricket to tiddlywinks) and economic performance
- the direction of the flows of causality between particular features of the economy and particular features of football performance and/or performance in other sports
The answers
In this exercise we use the English football league tables as a measure of relative success to see if there is a possible link between economic growth and success on the field. We ask the following question:
Has the shift of relative wealth from the north of England to the south been reflected in the football league tables?
In order not to be unfair to the Midlands, we decided to plot relative success in the football league against geographical position in relation to some fixed point. Since the North-South Divide is, more properly, a divide between London & the South-East and the north of England, we decided that the geographical fixed point ought to be within that more narrowly defined southern region. So we selected the Millennium Dome as the geographical fixed point. The chart below shows that there is a clear reduction over 1960-90 of the average distance of successful teams from London. This is significant and represents a combination of:
- the teams in the south becoming more successful
- teams in the north dropping out of the league altogether and being replaced with teams from further south
After 1990, however, the trend stops and seems to reverse. Although we are merely reporting the facts and not attempting to assign causality, it is worth drawing attention to the striking fact that how closely this reversal in trend coincides with the foundation of the Premier League in 1992 and the subsequent flows of money into the English game at all levels. One hypothesis worth investigating is that this development and, in particular, the collective bargaining for television rights which shares incomes equally between clubs, had a levelling effect for clubs across the whole country. In summary, local factors became much less important in determining revenues and sporting success.
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Data and methodology
We use two main data sets:
- the football league tables of the four top divisions from 1958/59 (when the current league structure was formed) to 2008/09
- the latitude and longitude of each club’s current stadium
The location of most of the current football league stadiums is given at http://www.communitywalk.com/footballgrounds. For clubs that are not included we took their post codes and converted this to coordinates using http://www.nearby.org.uk/.
We have not taken into account clubs moving home grounds but usually this will not have a major impact as the distance moved is not great compared to the distance between cities. The main exceptions we could think of are:
- Wimbledon - for which we used coordinates for Plough Lane, for MK Dons we use the stadium:mk
- Brighton and Hove Albion - for which we used the location of the Withdean Stadium throughout the whole period
We combined the two data sets to give us the average location (in terms of latitude and longitude) of a football league club, using a simple set of weights from 1 to 92, based on finishing position in the league pyramid.
The change in latitude on its own gives an indication of relative north-south success, but this does not take into account that ‘the south’ generally refers to an area in the south and east of the UK. We therefore use average distance from London (the Millennium Dome to be precise) as our indicator and tracked this over time. For simplicity using a simple Pythagoras approximation rather than a trigonometric function that takes the curvature of the earth into account, but this has no impact on the conclusions.
The photograph used in this article is © Copyright Anthony Parkes and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.