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…

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.

leeds. leicester. there are a lot of sleeping/senile "giants" out there

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.