This will cause a row or two
If you are not familiar with Nick Harris, better known as SportingIntelligence (
@SportingIntel) then you should be. Consistently Harris and his site provide all sorts of interesting insights into the numbers, money and stats that fly around the sporting world.
Today Harris has done a piece for the
Mail where he uses six criteria to try and find the biggest football club in England. Any task like this is fraught with danger but Harris applied as much 'science' to it as he could.
He ranked the clubs on six metrics;
Number of trophies won all time
All-time league performance by average finish since 1888-89
Crowds (current and historic)
Quality of player (using England internationals, and World Cup stars as the measure)
Global popularity (using social media followings)
Money
Then the team that had the lowest total rank when you add up all their places in each ranking wins.
The winner, according to Harris, is Manchester United, who are top in crowds, fanbase, player quality and income, second in trophies and fourth in average league position.
That puts them quite far ahead of the nearest rival and clearly the biggest club, according to Harris.
Second, somewhat surprisingly, is Arsenal, while Liverpool come third, hampered largely by their relatively poor crowd rating.
Any list like this is likely to generate debate but this one is as simple and clear to follow as we've seen.
Here's is the full list and for more on the methodology employed, the full article is
here.
