The Premier League
Payout
Analyzing player salaries from the 2021/2022 English Premier League season
Miriam Celebiler and Nyah Gray
Introduction
The English Premier League is the most watched football league in the world and one of the most watched sports leagues. Because of it’s popularity and demand for the highest level of football, teams that have the means are willing to pay extremely high salaries for players.
The English Premier League is made up of clubs, unlike sports leagues in the United States where the league owns the participating teams. The structure of the English football system means a large disparity between team budgets and by extension, the salaries of their players.
As you scroll down, you will see a variety of visualizations that show the correlations between salaries of players, their contributions to their teams, and their popularity.
Salary vs Time Played
It’s difficult to measure each player’s contribution to their team, but the amount of playing time they get is a significant marker of how much they are valued. Is this value being translated economically? Is there a significant correlation between the amount of minutes played during a season and a player’s salary?
Feel free to hover over each data point to isolate each team and for more details about the individual players.
As you can see, there is a slight positive correlation between minutes played and salary, but it isn’t especially strong or consistent.
Salary vs. Instagram Followers
A major aspect that contributes to team revenue and economic success is the popularity of individual star players. As a means of quantifying fandom, let’s look at each player’s Instagram follower count.
As you can see, Ronaldo’s whopping 509 million Instagram followers make the rest of the data hard to ingest. Below the visualization of all of the players, you can see the same data with the exclusion of Ronaldo.
How does popularity in the form of Instagram followers compare to salary? Is there a strong correlation or do the stars make the data incomprehensible?
Average Salary Per Team
As it turns out, the factor that decides how much a player makes most is simply which team they play for. The success of each team has a strong positive correlation to their average salary. Below, you can see each team placed in order of their final standings from first on the left to last on the right, with an evident financial correlation.
Salary Disparity
What is especially significant when looking at this data is that there is a large disparity between the highest and lowest earning players. Cristiano Ronaldo, who exemplifies the kind of aspirational star status that only a select few players can reach, makes over 26 million pounds more than Anthony Elanga, who plays for the same team, and over 25 million pounds more than Brentford’s top paid player, Christian Eriksen.
Below is a visualization of the pay disparities that exist within teams, ranked from largest to smallest.
Conclusion
Two footballers who dedicate the same amount of time to training and who have had the same amount of playing time can still have huge differences in their salaries based on the team they play for and the results they produce.
While there are many factors that go into deciding a player’s salary, all of these footballers are playing an extremely high demanding sport at the same competitive level. The wide disparity in salaries across the board is unlike most other professions, and doesn't necessarily reflect their skill or effort level, but is more indicative of how players are valued economically.
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Data for this project was collected using the Premier League Stats Centre website, Capology.com, and Instagram. To view our data set, visit the visualizations on Tableau by clicking any of the embedded visualizations above.
