Bristol City ranked for Sustainability

[ExiledAjax]

I'm posting this as a bit of a passion project, somehting I have worked on and been involved with over the last year or so. I know we are all excited by the financial situation of the club, and we're also all watching closely to see if £10m(ish) of Premier League money flows down Bournemouth's dirty drain pipe and into our little Championship coffers. Well, this project is aimed at demonstrating an innovative and forward-looking method of distributing football's riches across all 92 professional clubs that contribute to the ecosystem of the EFL and Premier League. What if we could spread the money around using something other than league position, convoluted rules, predatory transfers and market forces? What if clubs like ours, like Plymouth, Oxford, Preston North End and even yoyo clubs like Fulham and Norwich no longer had to rely on the scraps from the table above, but instead could invest effort and time into being truly sustainable clubs, that cared for their local communities, safe in the knowledge that there would be a tangible financial reward for doing that, and only that? Perhaps we'd enjoy a player like Antoine for a little longer? Perhaps we'd see more Antoine's coming through, perhaps we'd have a better club for Bristol and for our children and grand children.

I therefore present the Fair Game Sustainability Index. The Sustainability Index is a project that seeks to rate each club in the Premier League and the Championship a score, which is a combination of the factors that Fair Game believes are the essential building blocks of a sustainable club: Financial Solvency, Good Governance, Fan Engagement and Equality Standards. This first publication is a proof of concept and provides clubs, and the game’s administrators, with a baseline and a benchmark, that can be used to measure football’s progress for years to come. It is with this intended longevity in mind that Fair Game engaged some of the very best academic minds in the country (and yours truly) to help develop it. We have put in months of research and analysis to provide a robust and realistic index.

Bristol City are ranked ok. We get a score of 46.6 out of 100, which places us 11th in the Championship. Of clubs not in receipt of parachute payments I think* we are 6th in the division. Our score of 46.6 is also actually higher than Newcastle, Bournemouth and Forest, so were this to be the basis of financial distribution we'd be looking at getting more than them - how about that for levelling the playing field a little?

I know a lot of people think we cannot change football. I disagree. Football has always changed and I refuse to let the Premier League, the owners of the big clubs, and sovereign wealth funds tell us that it cannot change. It's our game, it's your game. The club we follow may be legally owned by one family but its soul is owned by us. We have to try and protect that as much as we can, and to do that we have to show those with power that we have ideas and that we're willing to put in the leg work - because we cannot put in the dollars.

The full report is available here. Currently it covers just the top two divisions as below the Championship there is less publicly available data. Included in the full report is a description of the methodology and reasoning behind the Sustainability Index.

You can read the press release here. There has been some national media coverage as well in The Guardian, The Athletic (may be paywalled), and The Mirror.

Then at the Fair Game website is the full breakdown of the Premier League and Championship, plus details of our own club's ranking.

You can follow Fair Game on Twitter as well if you'd like to do that - https://twitter.com/fairgameuk

PS. I pondered putting this into the existing Fan Review thread. However I hope it's ok to have it as a standalone thread for a few days, and then perhaps @phantom could kindly merge it into the Fan Review thread so that everything is there for ease of reference.

 

*assuming I've got it right regarding who has them.

Edited January 27, 2023 by ExiledAjax

[Topper 123]

1 hour ago, ExiledAjax said:

I'm posting this as a bit of a passion project, somehting I have worked on and been involved with over the last year or so. I know we are all excited by the financial situation of the club, and we're also all watching closely to see if £10m(ish) of Premier League money flows down Bournemouth's dirty drain pipe and into our little Championship coffers. Well, this project is aimed at demonstrating an innovative and forward-looking method of distributing football's riches across all 92 professional clubs that contribute to the ecosystem of the EFL and Premier League. What if we could spread the money around using something other than league position, convoluted rules, predatory transfers and market forces? What if clubs like ours, like Plymouth, Oxford, Preston North End and even yoyo clubs like Fulham and Norwich no longer had to rely on the scraps from the table above, but instead could invest effort and time into being truly sustainable clubs, that cared for their local communities, safe in the knowledge that there would be a tangible financial reward for doing that, and only that? Perhaps we'd enjoy a player like Antoine for a little longer? Perhaps we'd see more Antoine's coming through, perhaps we'd have a better club for Bristol and for our children and grand children.

I therefore present the Fair Game Sustainability Index. The Sustainability Index is a project that seeks to rate each club in the Premier League and the Championship a score, which is a combination of the factors that Fair Game believes are the essential building blocks of a sustainable club: Financial Solvency, Good Governance, Fan Engagement and Equality Standards. This first publication is a proof of concept and provides clubs, and the game’s administrators, with a baseline and a benchmark, that can be used to measure football’s progress for years to come. It is with this intended longevity in mind that Fair Game engaged some of the very best academic minds in the country (and yours truly) to help develop it. We have put in months of research and analysis to provide a robust and realistic index.

Bristol City are ranked ok. We get a score of 46.6 out of 100, which places us 11th in the Championship. Of clubs not in receipt of parachute payments I think* we are 6th in the division. Our score of 46.6 is also actually higher than Newcastle, Bournemouth and Forest, so were this to be the basis of financial distribution we'd be looking at getting more than them - how about that for levelling the playing field a little?

I know a lot of people think we cannot change football. I disagree. Football has always changed and I refuse to let the Premier League, the owners of the big clubs, and sovereign wealth funds tell us that it cannot change. It's our game, it's your game. The club we follow may be legally owned by one family but its soul is owned by us. We have to try and protect that as much as we can, and to do that we have to show those with power that we have ideas and that we're willing to put in the leg work - because we cannot put in the dollars.

The full report is available here. Currently it covers just the top two divisions as below the Championship there is less publicly available data. Included in the full report is a description of the methodology and reasoning behind the Sustainability Index.

You can read the press release here. There has been some national media coverage as well in The Guardian, The Athletic (may be paywalled), and The Mirror.

Then at the Fair Game website is the full breakdown of the Premier League and Championship, plus details of our own club's ranking.

You can follow Fair Game on Twitter as well if you'd like to do that - https://twitter.com/fairgameuk

PS. I pondered putting this into the existing Fan Review thread. However I hope it's ok to have it as a standalone thread for a few days, and then perhaps @phantom could kindly merge it into the Fan Review thread so that everything is there for ease of reference.

 

*assuming I've got it right regarding who has them.

Good post

[chinapig]

I read the Guardian piece the other day but thanks for flagging up the detail. Fantastic and worthwhile piece of work.

Just another example of the value you add to the forum and well beyond if I may say so.

[SecretSam]

oops

Edited January 27, 2023 by SecretSam
Wrong sort of 'sustainability' :laugh:

[ExiledAjax]

1 minute ago, SecretSam said:

oops

No, no, I read your post there before it got  deleted. You're absolutely right about environmental sustainability, it should be something clubs are looking at. 

This is about financial and corporate sustainably though. The topics are linked, and I did lobby for environmental to be included as one of the criteria. However it's really hard to get good quality data from clubs on environmental sustainability. Not much is available in the public domain and so it was felt that the Index would not be able to fairly compare clubs in that regard. However, it's definitely something that is being considered for a future expansion of the index should it be adopted.

PS. Our own CEO made the same mistake you've just made, so you're in good company.

[SecretSam]

On 27/01/2023 at 13:40, ExiledAjax said:

 

PS. Our own CEO made the same mistake you've just made, so you're in good company.

That's a BGS educayshun for you...