Today's Topics

Football finances are a game of two halves; bring revenue in and try not to spend too much. Lower ranked teams are struggling with both.
Tobacco. Big smoke is still big business, wherever you live.
The Game of Names; which Game of Thrones character are people naming their babies after?

The numbers behind the numbers:
3 charts, 788 words, 4 mins 45 seconds to read.

Premier League clubs took £4.8bn (almost $6bn) in revenue last year according to data from Deloitte. Combined, the 3 lower tiers of the English Football League (EFL) took less than £1bn... which often doesn't even cover their wage bill.

But it's easy to see why. Imagine you run a decent Championship team. You're one league below the Premier League with all its riches. You're desperate to win promotion so your team can get a slice of that £4.8bn pie, and you're willing to spend more on wages - for better players - to get to that promised land. Well, that's exactly what happens: the average Championship team spent 106% of their total revenue just on wages.

The same principal filters down the leagues. There's another 5x jump in revenue between the Championship and League 1, and this week there were two very real examples of clubs where costs, and ultimately debt, got out of control.

Bury FC, which was founded 134 years ago, was expelled from the EFL. Drowning in debt, the club was given two weeks to sort its finances out, but despite a number of last ditch efforts failed to find a buyer. Bolton, founded 145 years ago, was luckier. They were in a similar spot, but found a buyer just in time to be saved.

So as insane as some of the wages are in the Premier League (Mesut Ozil @ £350k a week?) the real insanity is sometimes found further afield, where every penny is spent in a bid for promotion, glory and the riches of the Premier League. ⚽

The cigarette industry is sometimes imagined on its death bed, squeezing out as much profit as it can before it vanishes into memory. This chart, using data from Tobacco Atlas, shows the reality; that smoking is alive, and even thriving, across vast swathes of the world, developed or developing.

We expected this chart to look different. We expected less developed countries to smoke only a handful of cigarettes (due to lower incomes), and we also expected more developed countries, which may have discouraged smoking with taxes, packaging and education, to also smoke less. We were wrong on both accounts. A typical person in some of the poorest countries on earth still gets through 250 cigs a year, and countries actually appear to smoke more, not less, as they become more developed.

So cigarettes are still truly global then - and that means big business. Indeed, just this week two tobacco titans announced they were thinking about a merger (Altria & PMI). Were they to join forces the result would be a 'baccy behemoth worth roughly $200bn. For some context, Netflix is worth $128bn, Nike $131bn and McDonald's $166bn. This is not some small operation on its death bed.

So despite the health concerns that have lingered now for 50 years, it seems reports of the death of smoking have been greatly exaggerated, and we haven't even got started on vaping yet. 🚬

[There's the odd spoiler ahead]

Game of Thrones finished a few months ago, but the kids called Khaleesi, Arya & Theon are going to be walking around for quite some time. Since 2011, when the show started, there have been 1872 new girls called Arya, and 167 boys named Theon in England & Wales.

Nice names, but spare a thought for the 402 babies called Khaleesi that are now named after a character who, whilst being a badass for most of the show, ends up as a mass-murderer-dictator. We're willing to bet the numbers for Khaleesi drop off a cliff when the 2019 data comes out.

Honourable shout outs to the 16 Sansas, the 5 Tyrions, the 9 Brans, and the 4 Briennes also born last year. We're just disappointed nobody named their child after the real hero of the series - Hodor.🚪

Data Snacks

1) Bookmakers now have the odds of a no-deal Brexit at roughly even (50% chance) after Boris Johnson decided to suspend parliament (Source: oddschecker).

2) "Deepfake" videos are entering the mainstream, and it's a bit terrifying. Check out this video of Bill Hader impersonating Tom Cruise that's got almost 5 million views in just a few weeks.

3) The Amazon is burning. Eager to help, the G7 nations pledged $20m in aid. A relatively small sum, it was rejected by Brazil's president Bolsonaro thanks to an ongoing feud between him and Emmanuel Macron.

4) Martin Scorsese's latest film The Irishman is set to be 3-and-a-half hours long. Scorsese is no stranger to long stories, but even his 2013 effort The Wolf of Wall Street only got to a 3hr runtime.

5) The 700 UK partners of financial services firm Deloitte will take home, on average, £882k (almost $1.1m) this year.

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That's all folks.
See you same time next week - have a great weekend.

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