How Football Leagues Have Changed in Fourteen Years

I've owned this book for a couple of years now after finding it lying around in a WHSmith, by which point most of the stats in it were rather old. It may be called the Official Football Yearbook 2009-10, advertising how it's "the most comprehensive colour coverage" of that season (as if it being in colour would have been a selling point), but it's actually about the 2008-09 season, when Manchester United were actually good and clubs like Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth plied their trade in the top tiers of English football, and Luton Town were getting relegated to the Conference. I don't remember any of this, I don't have any recollection of 2009 let alone the teams playing in League One, but it's still fascinating to look through the pages and read how Plymouth Argyle fared that season and the varying numbers of red and yellow cards that each team got. And since this season marks fifteen years of that book being rather useful, why not write a blogpost on it?

Specifically, how have the teams that played in the Premier League and EFL fared since then? A simple way of looking at this question is to see how many teams still play in their respective division fifteen years on, disregarding individual changes by division over time. Here are the results (apologies for the formatting):

Division in 2008/9	Division in 2023/24
Leagues:	PL	Ch	L1	L2	NL	NL N/S	Defunct/Expelled
PL	11	6	3
Ch	5	13	5	1
L1	1	4	6	7	3	2	1
L2	3	1	5	6	4		5
Total	20	24	19	14	7	2	6

No teams playing in the Premier League or Championship back then has since dropped down into non-league football, with the majority of teams in the respective leagues in the same division as they had been fifteen years prior. League One has seen only Brighton and Hove Albion make it all the way to the Premier League, whilst I was surprised to see League Two has three teams that have made it there - Brentford won the league comfortably, and were promoted to the Premier League twelve years later; Bournemouth started with a deduction of seventeen points, yet stayed up and got to the Premier League in 2016 - before Brentford; and Luton Town were relegated following a thirty point deduction, yet have won four promotions in fourteen years to play in the top flight this season. 

At the other end of the spectrum, six clubs have folded since 2009 - Hereford United were relegated from League One and have since been liquidated, whilst similar fates beheld Aldershot Town, Chester City, Darlington and Macclesfield Town - all of whom now have phoenix clubs slowly rising through the leagues. Bury were expelled from the EFL in 2019, yet hadn't played in any leagues until merging with phoenix club AFC Bury this year. The furthest clubs have fallen whilst not being either expelled or wound up are Scunthorpe United and Yeovil Town, now playing at the sixth tier of English football.

That's a rather good start if you're focusing on those two time periods alone, yet clubs have obviously risen and fallen within that time. Leicester City won League One in 2009, the Championship in 2014 and the Premier League in 2016, and are yet again in the Championship this season. 

So I then decided to compile a spreadsheet worth of the league finishes which all ninety-two teams faced from the 2009-10 season to the 2022-23 season. That's fourteen placements, which can then be averaged out to suggest how good a team has been since then, as well as an average league of teams. The data suggested that, amongst other things:

• The best four teams by league finishes in the fourteen seasons have been Manchester City (average league finish of 2!), Manchester United (3.57), Chelsea (4.14), and Arsenal (4.42). 
• Stockport County had the lowest average league finish of 106.1, and were the only team to fall into the sixth tier (barring Hereford United, who folded whilst playing in the sixth tier with their results expunged).
• The most average league finish was about 43.1 - a mean of Barnsley (46th) and Blackpool's (47th) finishes. This seems to suggest that most teams that played in the 2008/09 season are not just still playing in the leagues, they've somewhat improved as a whole.
• The top 20 consists of 13 then Premier League sides, six then Championship sides, and one then League One side - Leicester City.

I then went on to calculate each team's past five year average, to see how they've more recently performed. With this methodology, Manchester City are still the best performing team (now with an average finish of an unremarkable 1.2), yet Aldershot Town are the worst performing (an average finish of 110.6). Going one step further, by calculating the difference between the overall average and five year average, you could see which team has improved the most in that time. Forty-five teams have positive ranges - Luton Town have the largest, at about 34 placements in a time span which saw them go from League Two to the Premier League. Then it's Lincoln City (at 25), Wycombe Wanderers and Sheffield United (both 15.8) and Brentford (15.5). The team with the biggest decrease in position in the past five years from the 2008/09 season is Scunthorpe United, at -23.3 places, whilst dropping from League One to the National League North. Yeovil Town aren't too far behind at 23.2 places, followed by Chesterfield (-20.8), Oldham Athletic (-18.6), Notts County and Sunderland (both at -17.1). Obviously this data should be taken with a pinch of salt, whilst this can show which teams have declined the most, you're focusing on a very narrow range - for that reason, I also included a three year average, but that's a blog for another day. Unfortunately there's no data for Chester City, as they folded in 2010.

As for the fate of the book series? There only appears to have been another edition of it released, this time for the 2010/11 season, which is somewhat a shame. At least the edition I have prompted this ridiculously time-consuming blogpost - but I'm not complaining.