Professor Nial Friel of Insight at UCD has written about how money has impacted the competitiveness of the Premier League. The article draws on his recent paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A. The paper, ‘Assessing competitive balance in the English Premier League for over forty seasons using a stochastic block model’ is a season by season analysis which offers quantitative evidence of a lack of competitiveness emerging in line with TV revenue and external investment since the early 2000s. It tracks a structural change since then, from a reasonably balanced league to an effective two-tier league, with competition within, but not between, the two groups of teams.

You can read the piece in RTE’s Brainstorm.