Nick's Bits

The Price of a Point

I'm Nick Miceli. I am a public school teacher, a City supporter, and a statistics nerd. These three things come together in a harmonious way; in modern education, we are often asked to do two things - dig into data to find trends among the students and teach those same children to support their ideas with objective evidence.

As someone who was looking at Total Average and the “Shootist Statistic” in middle school, this kind of thinking informs my enjoyment of sports in general and City in particular. I hope a bit of this rubs off on you guys, or at the very least explains why I look at my phone so often during games.

Another massively successful season has ended. Now, we enter into the torturous in-between time of transfer rumors and hoping no one gets hurt during national team duty.

In other words, it's the perfect time to look at our recent success, and consider not just what the boys accomplished, but how it was done…and what it cost.

91 points we're enough to win the EPL this year. Not our highest total ever, but close enough. The question put to me* was: how much did this title and those points cost?

The obvious answer is 200 million Pounds, the commonly cited wage bill for City's current squad. Two things about that:

Subtract Philips and Cancelo's wages, because they were on loan for the most of the year, and you get about 180 million.
Is there a way to figure how much of that money actually made its way onto the pitch?

This second point is what I'm going to attempt to explain.

GSB stalwart Trevor Seeney challenged me to figure the cost of a point in the best football league in the world. This is my attempt to answer that call. My methodology is simple. Each season, 38 90-minute games are contested. That's 3,420 minutes of possible league action. Very few players are on the pitch for all of them, especially on City, when Pep starts rotating and experimenting. (For the record, the only outfielders who played every minute were centerbacks Max Kilman and William Saliba. A few goalies managed it, too.)

So, I took everyone's league minutes and found the percentage they played of the possible 3,420. I multiplied that decimal by the publicly-acknowledged player salaries, found on sporttrack.com. The resulting number is, to me, how much of this year's salary each guy “played for '' - rather than accruing guaranteed pay from the bench or trainer's table.

Here's how it breaks down. I excluded the loanees and guys who played under 100 minutes, as they barely impact the math or game day results. These totals are in Great Britain Pounds, because England.

Player:	Minutes played	% of EPL minutes	Salary (GBP)	Salary "played_for"
Rodri	2931	0.8570175439	11,440,000	9804280.702
Foden	2857	0.835380117	11,700,000	9773947.368
Ederson	2785	0.8143274854	5,200,000	4234502.924
Walker	2767	0.8090643275	9,100,000	7362485.38
Alvarez	2647	0.7739766082	5200000	4024678.363
Silva	2578	0.7538011696	15,600,000	11759298.25
Dias	2559	0.748245614	9360000	7003578.947
Haaland	2552	0.7461988304	19,500,000.00	14550877.19
Akanji	2511	0.7342105263	9,360,000	6872210.526
Gvardiol	2328	0.6807017544	10,400,000	7079298.246
Ake	2042	0.5970760234	8,320,000	4967672.515
Doku	1595	0.466374269	2,600,000	1212573.099
Kovacic	1551	0.4535087719	7,800,000	3537368.421
DeBruyne	1221	0.3570175439	20,800,000	7425964.912
Stones	1064	0.3111111111	13,000,000	4044444.4444
Grealish	1009	0.2950292398	15,600,000	4602456.14
Lewis	809	0.2365497076	1,300,000	307514.6199
Nunes	661	0.1932748538	6,760,000	1306538.012
Ortega	635	0.1856725146	2,860,000	531023.3918
Bobb	302	0.08830409357	2,600,000	229590.6433

Totals:			188,500,000	110,630,304

Down to 188 million - we're practically an amateur team! More importantly, notice how the lower minute totals belong to new acquisitions and players who were injured frequently. Such players generally have lower salaries - big money generally sees the field on a City team. (Yes, I know Kev is our top earner and missed a lot of games. I'm speaking more of Hazard-at-Madrid levels of dead money.)

Anyway, that subtotal is the percentage of the wage bill that the players earned by actually getting out there and kicking it around. GBP110,630,304 of a possible GBP 188,500,000. That's 58.7% - not terrible, considering the far and away top-earner missed more than half of the season.

And remember, 91 points in that season having dished out GBP106,990,304 for actual minutes played. That comes to GBP 1,215,717.63 per point. That's the price of a point over the run of the season. Some thoughts:

That's a lot of goddamn money.
Stats are of limited use without context
Just doing the math for City took a while, so I won't be doing the whole league, making point B even more relevant.

But, just for fun I broke down an individual game to see what a single win costs and what the player contributions to that success were worth. Just because I thought it would make everybody happy, I chose our decisive 3-0 victory over United on October 29th, 2023.

Using the same math, applied to the weekly wages, it works out like so:

Player	Minutes	Weekly wages earned
Haaland	90	375000
Grealish	87	289800
Silva	90	300000
Alvarez	87	96600
Foden	90	225000
Stones	90	250000
Rodri	90	220000
Gvardiol	90	200000
Dias	90	180000
Walker	90	175000
Ederson	90	100000
Doku	3	1650
Kovacic	3	4950

Total		2418000

So, a big win cost 2,418,000 of His Majesty's Sterling, or GBP 806,000 per point for this specific game. That's a substantial discount over the season rate. Let's attribute that to Kev's absence and Pep's reluctance to use subs. There were three goals with two assists; five contributions in all, coming from Erling, Bernie, and Phil. All three of them played the full 90, with a combined weekly wage of 900k, so each goal contribution was worth GBP 180,000.

All eleven starters were credited with a clean sheet, so a bargain price of GBP 226,181.81 per defender.

It's an expensive proposition, winning the Prem. Realistically, one of our starter's yearly wage could cover a decent team in the League One, player salaries and operating costs combined. With market trends being what they are, I don't see this getting any cheaper. But with results like we've had lately, it feels like money well spent.