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 | |||
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.