The Southgate Parallel is an attempt to quantify the subjective sense of belonging that accrues around a team over time, and that changes slowly, in response to a mystifying range of factors. It’s based on the assumption that there is an ineffable but shared perception of each well-known team’s “real level”: to take the Premier League as an example, we sense that there are teams that definitely belong in the top flight, while other teams survive there, or not, only by accident and desperation.
The difficulties of enumerating all the elements that contribute to a team’s aura of cultural prestige—recent success, historical success, age, finance, size and quality of fan base, player popularity, kit design—shouldn’t preclude our attempting to define a precise hierarchy of clubs based on our own vague apprehensions. You could make Southgate Rankings for any range of participants and quality levels for which definitive belonging could function as a criterion—SgR for greatest living dinosaur hunters, for instance, would seek to determine which living dinosaur hunters were numinously felt to belong in the category of greatness—but for the present I’ve stuck with English clubs in or near the Barclays Premier League.
The table below contains a list of the 24 clubs that either played in the Premier League last season, will do so next season, or still have a chance to do so depending on the outcome of the Championship playoff. In the middle of the table is a red line: the Southgate Parallel. The teams above this line are the teams that, whatever their recent history, are felt, in a way that could almost be called spiritual, to definitely belong in the league. The teams below are not. Teams can rise above or fall below the line over time, but only based on a change in general social perception—losing by itself can’t affect a team’s position unless it lifts away the vapor of their ghostly, indefinable prestige. The line itself can move, too.
SgR fact: The Southgate Ranking number (SgR) indicates how near or far the team is to the Southgate Parallel. Thus Man Utd, the top team in England, have an SgR of +13, indicating that they are 13 spots above the line of mere belonging. Birmingham, by contrast, have an SgR of -6, indicating that they are six spots below the same line.
The rankings take their name from Gareth Southgate, the manager of the second-to-last team in over the line, who I suspect is the SgR1 top-flight boss in England (at least in terms of job security).
Since the SgR concept is so new, I’m offering this as a provisional list. (I threw it together without thinking too much, since excessive thinking can numb your connection to the field of collective apprehension on which SgR depends.) If you think a team should be moved, I’m willing to listen to your reasons.
Provisional Southgate Rankings, May 2008
| SgR | Team | Trending | LPos |
| 13 | Man Utd | + | 1 |
| 12 | Chelsea | + | 2 |
| 11 | Arsenal | – | 3 |
| 10 | Liverpool | – | 4 |
| 9 | Everton | + | 5 |
| 8 | Tottenham | – | 11 |
| 7 | Blackburn | / | 7 |
| 6 | Aston Villa | + | 6 |
| 5 | Portsmouth | + | 8 |
| 4 | Man City | / | 9 |
| 3 | Newcastle | / | 12 |
| 2 | Middlesbrough | + | 13 |
| 1 | West Ham | / | 10 |
| -1 | Bolton | / | 16 |
| -2 | Wigan | / | 14 |
| -3 | Fulham | – | 17 |
| -4 | Sunderland | + | 15 |
| -5 | Reading | – | 18 |
| -6 | Birmingham | – | 19 |
| -7 | West Brom | + | Ch. 1 |
| -8 | Stoke City | + | Ch. 2 |
| -9 | Derby | – | 20 |
| -10 | Bristol City | + | Ch. 4 |
| -11 | Hull | + | Ch. 3 |
| LPos=League Position +=Improving -=Declining /=Static | |||
Read More: Going the Extra Mile, Premier League, The Southgate Parallel
by Brian Phillips · May 16, 2008
Between this and the Phrasenschwein Project, you seem determined to make sure that I get no work at all done for the next month.
Marketing types who come up with brilliant ideas like “building the Derby County brand internationally” have all kinds of easily-manipulated metrics they use to “prove” to their gullible clients that said clients are a “big club”, and may even be a “sleeping giant”.*
They all ignore the reality of the situation, which is that the teams that one intrinsically believes “belong in the top flight” are those that were in it at the time one first became obsessed with football. For most locals, that means roughly from ages 8 to 13, but given my geographical isolation, my own fascination with English football bloomed late, which is why for a long time I thought that the First Division was somehow incomplete without Bristol City (seriously, Gordon Hill had a column in Shoot! and everything) and that WBA “should” be a regular in European competition.
It can take a decade or more of contrary evidence to even raise the slightest sliver of doubt in one’s mind that this may not in fact be a true representation of reality.
Which is why there are going to be a generation of kids in Malaysia who think that Bolton Wanderers are “bigger” than Leeds United, and that those European Cups awarded to some non-entities called “Nottingham Forest” must be a mistake.
*As an aside, had I been clever enough to come up with this concept, I would have been tempted to use an astronomical construct. Wolves are a sleeping giant, Crewe a red dwarf, Hartlepool a black hole, etc.
be interesting to see the idea taken further … further down the pyramid.
leeds. leicester. there are a lot of sleeping/senile “giants” out there
Is Leicester really a giant though?
For me, Leicester and Coventry belong in the top flight whereas Portsmouth and Wigan do not. Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday in, Bolton and Birmingham out. From this you can probably work out when football first became properly part of my life.
Historically of course Forest ought to be up there too.
As for today’s so-called reality, which I seek to ignore where possible, I would put West Ham and Aston Villa substantially above Blackburn, who are intrinsically pointless and dead, like an unloved culdesac.
The SgR will also work better if you provide the points above the line as portions of an overall total. Say there are 200 EPL “belonging” points on offer; the Big 4 would easily eat 80-100 of them. Man City being bought out into the rich club might grow the pie, but also provide them a quick boost of 5-10; relegation could cost several, promotion provide several, etc.
This would be less “scientific” but give a stronger sense of which club’s brands have hauled in which point total. You could even have time-bound phasing of high finishes, cup trophies, promotion/relegation, key players on team, European glory, and other items, similar to the UEFA club coefficients – so if Reading does not return to the EPL for 4 or 5 years, their points from EPL status erode to nothing…
I love the idea, but I would certainly quibble with some of the particulars. Chelsea, certainly have many of years of success to accomplish (preferably, actually earned) to catch Liverpool, Villa, Everton, and probably even T*ttenham , and Newcastle.
And Blackburn, other then a few years of being a poor man’s Chelsea in what seems like a different universe, probably isn’t even Boro, and certainly not City.
Though, as I look at it, I feel like you weighed recent performance very heavily compared to past. I can understand the thinking, but as dirty as it makes me feel, there is no way about 15 of those clubs are more “natural” Premier League teams than…[bracing]…Leeds.
Oh, I need a lie down.
How on earth are Blackburn “probably not even Boro”? Middlesbrough’s highest league finish was in the WWI era (in a year when Blackburn won the title, incidentally) and the only major trophy they’ve ever won is the League Cup. Blackburn have won three Premiership/Division 1 titles, six FA Cups, and a League Cup. I like Middlesbrough, but there’s no comparison.
Next, Blackburn v. Man City. At the time when this was written (late in the 2007-08 season) Blackburn had finished above Man City in the table in six of the preceding seven seasons and qualified for Europe three times in the past six years:
2001-02: Blackburn (10th), Man City (playing in the Championship)
2002-03: Blackburn (6th), Man City (9th)
2003-04: Blackburn (15th), Man City (16th)
2004-05: Man City (8th), Blackburn (15th)
2005-06: Blackburn (6th), Man City (15th)
2006-07: Blackburn (10th), Man City (14th)
2007-08: Blackburn (7th), Man City (9th)
I’m not saying ranking Blackburn ahead of Man City is inevitable—I think Man City get an artificial boost due to playing in Manchester and the rivalry with Man Utd—but there’s at least a strong case to be made that a team that consistently does better than another team over a 5-15 year period would have more accumulated prestige than that other team, right? Particularly when you consider that, over the long term, Blackburn have won more top-flight championships, have won more FA Cups, were founded five years earlier, and have played in Europe more often over the last 25 years than Man City.
I’ll admit that leaving Leeds of the list was a questionable decision. At the time I felt like they’d been disqualified by the comprehensive nature of their collapse and the fact that everyone makes fun of them. A lot of people have disagreed with that, so I might have been too hasty. I’m not sure, though—when I see the name Leeds now, I think “God, what an embarrassing disaster” not “well, they’ll be back to reclaim their rightful place in the top flight soon.” I’d guess I’m not alone.
I don’t think I can argue with your points re: Blackburn v. Boro or Man City based on result, I admit I was probably bring too much personal bias into it (though, to be fair, I wasn’t really intending a debate in the first place).
I was I suppose weighting more heavily on the “cultural prestige” and “size and quality of fanbase”, as well as some other esoteric measure I may have projected into the ranking. I am more than happy to retract Boro, based upon your points.
I think I’d still stump for City over them, based upon the “artificial” points you enumerate, and perhaps a few others “style points”. I mean, I thought that was sort of the point, or else you’d just post the all-time table from RSSSF and be done with it, right?
I don’t think leaving Leeds off is a mistake in any sense, I realize the parameters you set for the list “provisional” and “not thinking to much” (which, I attempted to adhere to as well, particularly the latter).
I guess as point of clarification, I am wondering about the intent. I was interpreting the SgR as defining the sum of a club’s all-time “natural” position. Are you suggesting it is intended to be more indicative of their position right now, when their “all-time” is also considered?
As a further mea culpa, I was probably attributing too much “artificial” value to Boro, by grouping them with Newcastle & Sunderland, and giving them shared value as part of some northeast rivalry.
I’m also guilty of some hate-fueled Blackburn under-appreciation.
The latter, exactly. The “all-time” stuff only matters to the point that it affects perceptions now (so, say, Blackburn’s 1914 title counts for virtually nothing in itself, because so few people are aware of it or would care about it; but it does feed a larger sense that Blackburn are an ancient club with deep historical success, which contributes in some appreciable way to our perception of them now).
The style points definitely matter, and I agree that they might vault City over Blackburn. My sense when I wrote the list was that Blackburn were an unshakably solid mid-table club that occasionally challenged for higher honors, while Man City were a schizoid also-ran. I probably didn’t weight the location/rivalry/airtime factors strongly enough, and that goes doubly after this year, when Blackburn have tumbled and City have been waving giant checks on the news every night.
…and have taken the manager who was responsible for some of Blackburn’s upper-mid-table success, to boot.
For what it’s worth, hate-fueled under-appreciation should definitely be admissible evidence. We’re actually approaching the reason I never really did anything with this idea—the conversation tends to ping-pong a little too easily between objective lists of historical league finishes and resigned acknowledgments of the instability of truth.
Well, its given me a project for the afternoon. I’ve been busy on Excel attempting to craft some sort of objective measure.
Or at least, I started out that way, now I’m just crafting measures of something or another with no real end goal in sight.
I fear I’ve been permanently outed as an easily distracted geek.
I don’t know if you can see new comments for ye olde posts, but I stumbled upon this last night while going through the Pro Vercelli saga – the youth team just defeated Inter to sweeten the first Serie A title, and your new goal is to continue the dominance and win the CL; Francismar has to be declining by now. Anyway, these rankings both intrigued and reminded me that I did something similar a few months ago, but those were based a lot more on my personal preferences. Opening up the view to the common fan, I finished with this:
13 Man United /
12 Chelsea +
11 Arsenal /
10 Man City +
9 Liverpool –
8 Tottenham +
7 Aston Villa /
6 Everton /
5 Blackburn –
4 Sunderland +
3 Newcastle +
2 Fulham –
1 West Brom ++
————
-1 Stoke City +
-2 Bolton /
-3 Birmingham /
-4 West Ham –
-5 Portsmouth ++/–
-6 Wigan –
-7 Wolverhampton –
-8 Middlesbrough /
-9 Blackpool ++
-10 Leeds +
-11 Leicester –
The trend marks are tough, unsurprisingly, because there are wildly different measures of time for the teams. Even though Chelsea is the holder and leading the league, it would probably take them 5-6 years of sustained dominance to overtake Man U in having most people imagine Drogba/Terry first instead of Rooney/Ferguson when they hear the words “Premier League”.
WBA, on the other hand, could get on very solid you-belong-here footing should they manage a top-7 run this year.
Sunderland has slowly and significantly increased in the past three-or-so years, as has Stoke. If you think a team should be moved, I’m willing to listen to your reasons, as well.