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.

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.

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.

I’m also guilty of some hate-fueled Blackburn under-appreciation.

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?

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.

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.

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…