Want to be able to see the future? All you need to do is figure out how much everyone is getting paid.
For all of the advances of in-game soccer data over the past decade, there's still one thing that predicts future results better than anything that actually happens on the field: the wages each team pays its players. The findings were most publicly established by the economist Stefan Szymanski, and it has since been confirmed by a number of other studies.
This isn't to say that you could turn, say, Jordan Morris into Arjen Robben just by quintupling his salary. Rather, in an unequal sport with no hard salary cap, the teams with the most money, over the long run, tend to win the most points and finish highest in the table. The legendary Johan Cruyff once said: "I've never seen a bag of money score a goal." But I've seen Erling Haaland score lots of goals, and he plays for Manchester City because he gets a bag with $500,000 in it every week.
And yet, there isn't a one-to-one correlation here, either. Brentford and Brighton routinely finish higher than expected in the Premier League table than their spending suggests they should, while Manchester United underachieve their spending almost every season.
One way you might fall below expectation, perhaps, would be for the players you're spending lots of money on to not actually play much soccer. That could be because they're not as good as you thought, your coach mistakenly believes they're not as good as you thought, or they're simply just injured. Whatever the reason, though, it all adds up to money being spent that's not actually contributing to the team's performance.
Which clubs are spending the most money on unused minutes? And which are getting the most out of their player investment? Let's rank all 20 Premier League teams on their spending, from best to worst.
But first, a note on how we came up with the rankings
Unlike the major American sports with players' unions, Premier League contracts aren't as publicly available. So we'll be using the estimated wage data from the site FBref. It's not perfect, but it's generally and comparatively correct, and that serves our purposes just fine.
We're also not including transfer fees, which are also a portion of total player costs. We're just focusing on how much Premier League teams are paying their players to play every week.
The only other question: how to decide the rankings. We calculated the cost of every unused minute by multiplying each player's salary by the percentage of minutes they haven't played. From there, there are two options: (1) rank them by the raw value of all of their unused minutes or (2) rank them by the percentage of their payroll that's going to unused minutes. Actually, there's a third option, and that's what we're using: combining the two.
The richest teams are going to have the most expensive unused minutes because their payrolls are so much bigger than everyone else's. But the sheer scale of wasted investment should also count for something. So, we're weighting the raw unused spending as 60% of the input and the percentage of unused payroll as 40%.
FBref has wage data for 526 players, so we added it all up to come up with this list. Landing higher on this ranking page is better, and our No. 1 team is the biggest money waster in the Premier League.
20. Everton
-Total unused payroll rank: 17th
-Percentage of unused payroll rank: 19th
Manager Sean Dyche has done a fantastic job in a near-impossible situation. Given the uncertainty over ownership and the generally disastrous financial situation, Everton haven't been able to make many external additions to the squad since Dyche took over. Pretty much every highly paid player at Everton plays a ton of minutes.
Talk to anyone who works in a front office in professional soccer, and they'll tell you that their biggest issue with their coach is that he doesn't get their best players on the field enough. While the actual quality of the players at Everton is dubious at best, Dyche gets his best talent on the field, week in and week out.
19. Fulham
-Total unused payroll: 16th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 17th
18. AFC Bournemouth
-Total unused payroll: 17th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 13th
17. West Ham United
-Total unused payroll: 9th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 18th
This one certainly surprised me. I view West Ham as the Manchester United of the midtable -- a team that should be finishing somewhere between sixth and 10th every season based on its spending power. But instead, they're a team that chases aging big-name players right as they're about to decline in order to replace ... the other big-name players they already have who have already declined
See: this summer's signing of Niclas Füllkrug to replace Danny Ings. They're two of the team's highest-paid players, and they've, respectively, played about 12% and 7% of the available league minutes so far this year.
However, outside of those two, most of the club's other big earners play a lot. And their two highest-paid players -- Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paquetá -- play a heavy majority of minutes. Such is the pay gap between England and everyone else that a lot of the players West Ham bring over from bigger and/or better European clubs -- Carlos Soler from PSG or even Füllkrug -- don't actually end up as the team's highest-paid players.
Mark Ogden believes that Liverpool and Chelsea have a free hit at the Premier League title because of the falloff of Manchester City and Arsenal.
16. Liverpool
-Total unused payroll: 6th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 20th
Want to be odds-on favorites to win the league before Christmas without the highest payroll in the league? Then get your best (and most expensive) players on the field more than any other team.
That's what Liverpool have done so far this season, but it also just speaks to, generally, how much better run this team is than most other big clubs. Liverpool have been quite efficient in the transfer market, and just as efficient with how they're distributing salaries. Their three highest-paid players are, yes, the three players who are all out of contract after the season, but also the three most important players on the team.
In terms of raw unused salary, only one Liverpool player is in the top 40 despite Liverpool being one of the highest-payroll teams in the league. And that's Federico Chiesa, who has played only 19 minutes since joining from Juventus over the summer. Other than that, the only other really notable lack of minutes comes from Diogo Jota and Alisson, who have both been injured for more than half of the season but who both returned against Fulham last weekend.
15. Ipswich Town
-Total unused payroll: 20th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 7th
They might have bested Everton atop this list if not for the presence of Kalvin Phillips, who carries a Manchester City-level salary and has played under 40% of the available minutes for Kieran McKenna's side.
14. Aston Villa
-Total unused payroll: 8th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 16th
13. Nottingham Forest
-Total unused payroll: 14th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 9th
Other than James Ward-Prowse, who is the team's highest-paid player according to FBref but has played only about 25% of the minutes this season, Forest get pinged simply because they have so many players on their roster. There are only so many minutes to go around.
I'd argue that a big part of the reason they're in fourth is because Nuno Espírito Santo has figured out the best collection of players inside this massive squad. So, perhaps they show an alternative, if chaotic, approach to team-building. Rather than being careful and precise with whom you sign and whom you pay, just sign everyone whose agent you know and hope you find a coach who figures out who most deserves to be on the field.
12. Crystal Palace
-Total unused payroll: 11th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 11th
11. Tottenham Hotspur
-Total unused payroll: 7th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 12th
This is an interesting one because their two biggest flops are attackers: Timo Werner (29% of minutes) and Richarlison (6.3%). Despite that, Spurs are tied for the league lead in non-penalty goals. How much better might they be had they turned both of these roster spots into players who contributed more to the other side of the ball?
10. Brentford
-Total unused payroll: 19th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 4th
9. Brighton & Hove Albion
-Total unused payroll: 12th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 5th
Some of this is injury-related, but since Brighton and Brentford are right next to each other and are both lower on this list than I expected, allow me to posit a theory. Both of these clubs are amazing at finding Premier League-quality players from the middle of nowhere. So many players lower down their payroll scales are contributing to both of these sides. But once you get to the teams' higher-paid players, neither team is doing all that well in finding reliable contributors. Given that these are the two most analytically sound teams in England, why might that be?
My guess is that there are only so many obviously world-class players and neither of these clubs is able to afford them. And so anyone Brighton or Brentford are willing and able to make their highest-paid player is going to be someone the rest of the world has already scouted and deemed not good enough for the Champions League. If the rest of the world hadn't already scouted them, then Brentford and Brighton wouldn't need to pay them as much money as they do.
These players, then, have lower ceilings than the other kinds of players Brighton and Brentford typically sign. And since they're more expensive, the teams can sign only a couple of them, and so they're more likely to all fail and hurt the teams in these rankings. When they're signing the lesser-known players, though, they don't have to pay as much money, so they can sign many of them. The ones who fail don't really hurt the bottom line, and the ones who succeed sometimes even become stars.
The way to fix this, of course, would be for these clubs to sign the Moisés Caicedos of the world to bigger contracts, rather than moving them on, but that just doesn't fit either team's business model. The player economy in world soccer is weird.
8. Newcastle United
-Total unused payroll: 5th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 10th
7. Wolverhampton Wanderers
-Total unused payroll: 15th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 2nd
6. Leicester City
-Total unused payroll: 10th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 3rd
5. Southampton
-Total unused payroll: 13th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 1st
This three-team cluster checks out quite nicely. The three teams with the three worst goal differentials in the Premier League are three teams who are leaving the highest portion of their payroll on the bench each week.
When you're not one of the richest teams in the Premier League, the easiest way to get relegated is to spend about 60% of your player salaries on players who don't even play.
4. Arsenal
-Total unused payroll: 4th
-Percentage of unused payroll: 14th
If we just look at unused payroll, the top four here have devoted, by far, the most money to players who don't play that many minutes. What differentiates Arsenal -- and Man City -- from the other two is that they combine massive payrolls with league-average player usage.
The big whiff for Arsenal, perhaps the defining transfer that has prevented them from winning any major trophies, was the signing of Gabriel Jesus. They paid a $50m transfer fee to Manchester City and then also made him one of the highest-paid players in the Premier League.
Since he joined in the summer of 2022, his production has been OK -- 0.59 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes is right around the bare minimum of what a title-winning team could get from its starting centre-forward. But the bigger issue is that he just hasn't played: 46.1% of the Premier League minutes over two-plus years. And this season, that number has dropped to just 19%. Per FBref's wage data, Arsenal have spent more on Jesus' total unused minutes than has been spent on all but one other player in the league.
Had the Gunners received requisite production from the money they devoted to this position, they'd probably have at least one league title already.
3. Manchester City
-Total unused payroll: 2nd
-Percentage of unused payroll: 15th
City's two biggest unused-minute outlays also sum up the problems with their squad composition as a whole.
The first: Kevin De Bruyne, whose total unused minutes cost more than those of any other player in the Premier League so far this season. Per FBref, he's the highest-paid player in the league, and he's been out there for only 43.5% of the minutes. De Bruyne is 33 years old, and of City's 11 highest-paid players, seven of them were 28 or older coming into the season. This team was built to win -- two years ago. The second, of course, is Rodri, who has played only 4.5% of the minutes, and that ranks him third behind Gabriel Jesus for the most expensive unused minutes.
Not only did City build a rickety, aging team, but they built it around an irreplaceable player with no backup plan. That's how you end up with a plus-5 goal differential through 16 games despite paying higher salaries than any other team in the league.
2. Manchester United
-Total unused payroll: 1st
-Percentage of unused payroll: 8th
In a massive upset, United did not finish first in a ranking of who's the best at spending money badly. What makes them stand out, however, is the sheer breadth of money that has gone to unused minutes.
Among the 50 most expensive unused minutes in the league, Man United have nine guys -- two more than the next most in the league. And those nine run the gamut of types of bad deals. You've got the old guys (Victor Lindelöf, Harry Maguire, Christian Eriksen and Casemiro). Then the injury-prone dudes (Mason Mount and Luke Shaw). Add in the $110m deal most people thought was terrible at the time (Antony), the very expensive $65m bet on a young star (Leny Yoro), and the former youth star who has been with the club since he was a kid but just got dropped by the new manager (Marcus Rashford).
How does a team with Manchester United's resources find itself in the middle of the table for the second season in a row? By wasting money at every phase of team-building.
1. Chelsea
-Total unused payroll: 3rd
-Percentage of unused payroll: 6th
You can take the Nottingham Forest section and pretty much apply it here. Chelsea have spent over $1 billion on what feels like approximately a billion players, and they've left it to Enzo Maresca to figure out whom to play and whom to leave on the bench. Given that they're currently in second place in the table, it's hard to argue that he has made the wrong decisions.
But there is just so much unused talent being employed by this club. Left-back Ben Chilwell is by far the highest-paid player in the league who hasn't played a single minute so far this season. And given his higher salary, Reece James's unused minutes -- he has played only 16.7% of available game time -- have actually cost Chelsea more than Chilwell's. It's not just the handful of players who were with the club before new ownership arrived, either. Christopher Nkunku, João Félix, and Carney Chukwuemeka all rank in the top 30 of the most expensive unused minutes.
All of this money devoted to players who don't play for Chelsea has to come back to bite them at some point ... right?