Quote Originally Posted by Fist of Lehmann View Post
By "naturally occurring" I mean the way in which players tend to get paid what they're worth. Considering the correlation between wage bill and final league position the natural conclusion is that overall wage bill is a very good indicator of squad quality, and that squad quality is the deciding factor in where you finish.

This is possible because the conditions for an efficient wage market are all there.

Transparency, i.e. football players conduct their business in full view of millions, everyone can see how good a player you are, and players and agents pretty much know how much their peers earn.

Transferability, i.e. their are lots of buyers and sellers, and players are able to move freely between clubs.

Therefore if a player performs above his wages he will either agitate for a wage increase or agitate for a transfer (on higher wages).
If a player performs at a level below where his wages suggest, he will tend to fall out of the team, be sold or agitate for a move elsewhere.

In this way players "naturally" will tend to gravitate to their proper wage and, we know this happens because otherwise the correlation could not exist.

A distortion then would if you overpaid players relative to their abilities.

Oh what is the point.
But we overpay our young players and it's based on potential while also trying to ward off poachers so I disagree with that. It has nothing to do with our league position, their worth or talent. It's all based on potential and bribery if we can call it that. That's what City are doing now. They pay higher wages because it convinces players that would normally go to Real Madrid to join them. There is nothing natural about the market and you can't blame everything on City for that. Before City and Chelsea came on the scene, we'd get into disputes with our players over our wage structure. Vieira, Pires, Henry and co weren't earning anywhere near as much as their counterparts at Man United and that used to piss them off. The fact that we have a wage structure in place defeats this whole idea of 'natural wage shape' anyway.