castanyes blaves

A very interesting web application that studies the score distributions for different football leagues:
http://understandinguncertainty.org/node/228
Something that people already know is that Pay-per-view TV had a major impact in how different teams performed in different years. In the early 2000's, many more teams in Spain, Italy and UK had a chance to sign highly-payed players, because they were receiving the monetary influx from Pay-per-view TV. That narrowed the differences among the traditionally best-performing teams, and a group of teams that were traditionally in middle-of-the-table positions. Some teams were better at investing this influx of money than others, and this meant they had much better chances of winning the national league. But as Pay-per-view normalized, and teams with the highest media interest got back at receiving more money than the rest of the teams, sharp differences reappeared.
See for example the results for the Spanish League in 2000-2001: the variance due to chance went up to 60%.

Whereas last year: Barcelona and Real Madrid quickly dominated the scoreboard, and the % variance due to chance ended at 34%.

Italy before the referee scandal was down to 18%: