Football teams in England

Looking to take the opinion out of the discussion, the Daily Mail have produced their results according to six different measurements.

Those include the weekly crowds at the various football club’s matches, the reach of their global fanbase, how many trophies have each club has won, each club’s average league finish, player quality (which indeed does seem arbitrary) and income.

In fairness to the Daily Mail, they also went about explaining their different measurements in detail.

For example, global fanbase was calculated by totalling up club’s followers on social networks including Facebook and Twitter, while the ‘average league finish’ matrix was determined by the finishing position for each of the clubs since 1888-89.

On trophies, there was a points system, as follows: 10 points for each European Cup/Champions League win, 8 points for each top-division English title, 5 points for each FA Cup or other European trophy win, and 3 points for each League Cup win.

As for ‘player quality’, the Mail explained themselves accordingly:

We counted the number of players from each club who have played for England, all-time, ranking the clubs by total. This reflects historic ‘bigness’. We then ranked the clubs by the number of players provided to the 2014 World Cup — a measure of modern ‘bigness’. The overall ranking is an aggregate of these two.

Getting to the results of the survey, Manchester United are listed as the biggest club in England, while Arsenal come in in second.

Liverpool are third, Chelsea fourth, Man City are fifth, while Everton and Tottenham are joint sixth.

Reflecting the long history of English football, Wolves and Leeds United came in at joint 13th, Sheffield Wednesday are 18th, Nottingham Forest are 20th, while League Two side Bury just made the cut in 50th.