The following chart is meant to illustrate a typical breakdown of club expenses throughout a year. This example uses Chelsea's financial breakdown for the 2018/19 season. Beyond match day revenue and commercial sponsorships, teams also have large revenue streams through broadcasting rights and player sales to other clubs. Expected costs are the player wages, but clubs also have to account for long-term withstanding contracts and other termination fees, which represent a substantial cost. The chart below is interactive, so sections can be hovered over to see the total cost/revenue of that segment in Euros. Broadcasting, commercial, and matchday revenues makeup the vast majority of a club's revenues, and the value of each of these is directly correlated with a club's success. With a higher revenue budget, teams will be able to afford much better players, further cementing their top tier status in the EPL.
Each team has a tough decision in what positions to allocate their wages. The charts below show the spending by each team in 2020, broken down by position in a treemap. The bar chart on the left is interesting since soccer does not have salary caps that other sports have, so a team's spending is only limited by their amount of funds. It is clear that 5 teams, Manchester City specifically, spend significantly more than the other teams in the league. Whether or not this spending correlates to success in the Premier League will be investigated next. From the treemap, it can be seen that midfield players are valued the most by teams, which makes sense since midfield players can drift into both defensive and offensive rolls. Midfield and defensive positions are pretty evenly split in spending amongst the teams, with a larger discrepancy appearing in the attack and goalie position wages.
To take a deeper dive into what a team's spending means in the EPL, teams' wage spending is compared to their season point totals with a bar/line chart. At first glance, it is clear that the more a team spends does not directly correlate to their season point totals. Furthermore, there are several instances where a team's low spending year is their most successful year, for example Chelsea in 2017. Interestingly, spending seems to be trending down in the recent years. However, there does seem to be a minimum spending limit, around €2 million, for substantial success in the EPL. Pairing this visualization with the previous two budget graphics, it can be determined which positions are worth splurging on. As seen below, Liverpool won the EPL in 2020. Checking their positional breakdown, they were near the top of the league in attack and goalie spending, top 5 in defensive spending, and low in midfield spending. Interestingly, this is the opposite trend of what the rest of the league spends on their positional players. This shows that at least for 2020, attack players and goalies were the best positions to spend high wages on. Manchester City, who came in second in 2020, also spent high in these categories, although they are a tough comparison since they spent an exorbitant amount of money overall this year. A better comparison is Tottenham. Although they spent the fifth most total money on their players in the league, they did not spend a lot on their attack players, and emphasized their midfielders, which appears to have hurt them in 2020, as they placed 6th in the league, 50 points behind the 1st place Liverpool squad. Missing data points in the charts below show teams that were relegated and/or promoted in and out of the Premier League.