Given our league position comapred to our recent successes, there is a senses around the place that we are underachieving this season. However, ask any supporter at any club whether they think their team should do better and most would say that they should be doing better. This begs the question: on what do football supporters base their standards, given all the inequalities in the game?

One metric that we can measure success against is income, which is a function of crowd size. Just for kicks, I've therefore come up with the graph below which relates points per game to crowd size. In order to bring the outliers of Celtic and Rangers into the frame and to make the relationship linear, I have log transformed the crowd figures. The result is interesting and rings true to a large extent. The over-achievers compared to their crowd sizes (i.e. above the mean line) are St J, PT, Abdn and Celtic. Under-achievers are ourselves, Motherwell, Dundee and Hearts and Rangers. It is interesting to note that Hamilton are not under-achieving: I wonder how many Hamilton supporters would agree with that?

Our level of under-achievement is modest at this point in the season - we're about 5 points down on what this model might predict. It would be interesting to do the same for the last couple of seasons to see just how far above our weight we were punching. This can be updated on a weekly basis - just where will we sit at the end of the seaso? another way of looking at it is: if we got another 50 people through the gate every week, it should be worth an extra 0.1 points per game (~4 points for the season).

Like any model, this is riddled with holes, but given its simplicity, it is interesting to find such a clear assoication between crowd size and success. If nothing else, it helps to bring a reality check to our assessment of how well we're doing against what should be expected...

Thoughts?

On 01/04/2017 at 8:34 PM, DoofersDad said:

St Johnstone, they are really the miracle of Scottish Football.  They are a club from a small city with a population less than Inverness and with bigger city clubs not far away, and yet for a significant majority of the last 60 years they have had a team in the top league.  

St Johnstone do well off the field commercially. They have a good scouting network too.  

Scouting has crossed my mind of late.  Steve Marsella was down as scout and goalkeeper coach but what's happened since then?  Last I heard, the club still had some connection to the agency down south whom Butcher used extensively but what about other scouts in general?  I do recollect reading reports when we played Astra that we'd sent a scout over to watch them, while I also remember hearing that ICT scouts had watched Dean Ebbe before he was signed.  So there's the question; does the club have scouts?