The
financial health of the English Premier League is a regular topic of discussion. No matter how you look at it, the sums of money involved in the operation of Premier League teams are immense and it looks even more striking when you consider the locations of their stadia - typically in the most deprived areas of England. This is related to a number of factors (e.g. history, land values), but in
my work on neighbourhood deprivation and mapping I've noticed a common trend over the years so I decided to look at the location of
all 20 current Premier League teams in England and how deprived their local area is, using the Government's official measure of deprivation (the IMD*). The maps below show each team and its area's deprivation rank within England, where 1 = most deprived and 32,482 = least deprived. Shading: red = poorest 20% of areas in England, yellow = next poorest 20%, and so on... Liverpool is most deprived and Fulham least. See below for more.
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| Arsenal - IMD 4,432 |
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| Aston Villa - IMD 479 |
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| Chelsea - IMD 5,483 |
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| Everton - 1,070 |
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| Fulham - IMD 19,076 |
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| Liverpool - IMD 219 |
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| Manchester City - IMD 599 |
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| Manchester United - IMD 10,235 |
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| Newcastle United - 18,570/6,582 (split) |
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| Norwich - IMD 12,253 |
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| Reading - IMD 6,843 |
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| Southampton - IMD 855 |
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| Spurs - IMD 950 |
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| Stoke - IMD 2,171 |
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| Sunderland - IMD 6,291 |
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| Swansea - WIMD 374 |
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| West Brom - IMD 1,619 |
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| West Ham - IMD 3,593 |
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| Wigan - IMD 429 |
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| QPR - IMD 7,848 |
In Newcastle, the stadium is split between two areas, so I have given the deprivation ranks for both areas. The English Indices of Deprivation obviously only cover England so I have included a map for Swansea which uses the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation figure from 2011. More on that in
a previous post. Similar patterns exist in Scotland, as you can see from the bottom part of
this 2009 post. What does this tell us that we didn't already know? Not much, but it does provide some hard data and an overview of the contrast between the wealth of clubs and the poverty of many local areas they are located in.
* The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 are used here. They rank each of the 32,482 Lower Layer Super Output Areas of England from most deprived (a rank of 1) to least deprived (a rank of 32,482), taking into account such things as income, employment, education and health. There was a similar piece of analysis in Regeneration and Renewal in 2009 but this looked at the local authority areas only and not the specific location of stadia.
