What's your football age? (and star sign)

In this latest blog I touch on both sporting and scientific matters. However, the article is neither particularly sporty nor scientific. 

Instead, it is entirely and unashamedly whimsical... 






‘When I’ve nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along’

Bill Shankly

(Still the greatest ever manager of Liverpool Football Club)

Bill Shankly (1913 - 1981)
Manager of Liverpool Football Club, 1959 - 1974

Football league tables - a pleasant Sunday morning diversion

Like many football fans, one of my favourite Sunday morning pastimes involves poring over the football league tables from the sports supplement of the newspaper, to assess the impact of Saturday’s results and to see where my team is at in the greater scheme of things. Ruthlessly cutting through the soft and sentimental subjectivity of football supporters, the league tables give a cool, cruel and objective appraisal as to how good your team really is. 

This appraisal is all the more critical now, at the business end of the season, with remaining matches running out fast. As a Liverpool fan, this Sunday routine has been an especially enjoyable experience for me this season so far (despite the recent dip in form), frequently bringing to mind the quotation above from the great Bill Shankly himself (although, in comparison to looking down on Everton, I take much more pleasure from looking down on Manchester United).

'An Old Man Reading the Newspaper' (and perhaps checking up on the football league tables)

by Albert Anker (1831 - 1910) 

Now coming to the end of the first week of March, the phoney Premier League war of August and September, with its end of summer sun dappled pitches, is an age away. The precarious October and (traditionally in Liverpool’s case) November are now distant memories. Even the crucial landmark of Christmas and 'Boxing Day' (St. Stephen's Day in Ireland) is fading into memory. 

The two head to head matches with (in my opinion) our greatest nemesis Manchester United have come and gone, yielding a pleasing 4 points from the 6 available. And the January transfer window has been firmly shut, so now it’s all remaining hands on deck for this last stretch on the Premier League roller coaster. With the FA Cup and Champions League latter stages starting to take shape and the evenings getting longer, the league tables are becoming increasingly solidified in their final judgment on your team’s season.

For Irish sporting fans, a proxy measure for each stage of the English football season is the corresponding stage of the GAA Hurling and Gaelic Football inter-county championships, summer based competitions that reach red hot levels of tension and intrigue while English football slumbers through its summer hibernation. Around the time of the climactic All-Ireland Hurling and Gaelic Football finals in August/September, the English football leagues are barely even warming up; there’s no real need to worry too much about your team then, and you can still entertain optimistic fantasies about the season ahead. 

But if your team is in a battle of some sort (e.g. against relegation or to get into the top four) when the Munster Hurling Championship is about to start, then they've left things a bit late. No amount of hope, excuses or even prayer can make the Premier League table lie on the Last Day of Football Judgement (Sunday May 17th 2020 in the case of the Premier League this season). 

So it is that sporting fans keep in close communication with the natural universe around them and follow the stages and cycles of the year based on the different stages of sporting competitions.

Hippies 'getting in touch' with Nature and 'Mother Earth' at a summer solstice celebration in Stonehenge in the 1970s. Not needing such complex and 'mystical' rituals, fans of English football can simply look at the 'games played' column on the league table (or see when championship hurling in Ireland is starting) to check the stage of the season. 

Tipperary will play Waterford in the first match of the 2020 Munster Hurling Championship on May 10th 2020 - 

your Premier League team had better have their season sorted by then

If like me you pore over old-fashioned hardcopy versions of the league tables from your Sunday newspaper to see how your Premier League team is really doing (outside of your own ever hopeful imagination), then you will probably also enjoy ocassionally looking beyond the Premier League table and into the Championship and maybe even League One and League Two standings. Showing my age, I still like to refer to these top four tiers of English football as the first, second, third and fourth divisions, as they were known in my youth. 

Depending on your age, you may be old enough to support a team that actually competes in one of the lower three divisions (but who were perhaps in the top flight in your more halcyon days). 

In fact, the older you are, the more likely you are to support a lower division team, and that brings us (not so neatly) on to the ideas of entropy and radiocarbon dating.   

Entropy

Entropy can be very simply defined as the natural tendency of everything to move from apparent states of order to gradual and increasing disorder. And as it's always nice and seemingly erudite to add in a contribution from a Greek philosopher, some of whom were almost as witty, wise and epigrammatic as Bill Shankly himself, I will paraphrase Heraclitus by saying that (because of constant movement and change) you cannot step into the same river twice. 

So the football league tables of your childhood will have changed dramatically over the years, and the older you are the more dramatically they will have changed. These changes have been mediated by the constant promotions and relegations between the top four divisions, not to mention the teams that have dropped out of the top four divisions or even ceased to exist altogether (I’m thinking Wimbledon FC here, with some pleasure, having never forgiven them for that 1988 FA Cup Final). 

Entropy: basically, things change and go from order to increasing disorder over time

Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (535 - 475 BC) 

(The tokenistic inclusion of a reference to a Greek philosopher has been done to make this blog entry seem more erudite, as has use of the word 'erudite')

In a neat parallel with worldwide geopolitical changes over my lifetime, the current top four English football league tables bear about as much resemblance to the tables of the mid 1980s (when I first started my Sunday morning league table analyses in anger) as the current Russia and former Soviet states compare to the once apparently orderly and all-powerful USSR.  

The (apparent) order of the USSR becoming Russia and assorted neighbouring states (an example of geopolitical entropy, in my opinion)

Then combining the idea of Soviet geopolitical entropy and English football, see above the top flight table in English football (League Division One at the time) on December 26th 1991, the date of dissolution of the USSR - only 13 of the above 22 clubs remain in the top flight - and where's Wimbledon FC now? *

* In another example of football related entropy, Wimbledon FC is now (effectively) two clubs, both playing in the third tier League One: Wimbledon FC was dissolved in 2004 becoming Milton Keynes Dons, with fans of the former Wimbledon FC subsequently setting up AFC Wimbledon. As a Liverpool fan, I see this Carthaginian level of destruction of Wimbledon FC as the ultimate and enduring payback for the 1988 FA Cup Final, not that I'm in any way bitter. 

Radiocarbon dating

And that USSR analogy brings me (again, not so neatly) on to the idea of radiocarbon dating. All living material contains certain levels of Carbon 14. Once that living material dies, the Carbon 14 content gradually changes and reduces. The longer something has been dead, the lower its relative Carbon 14 content. Hence, measuring the Carbon 14 content of dead organic material can be used to determine its age, and thus can be viewed as a measure of entropic change.

  Radiocarbon dating explained visually

                        Another definition of radiocarbon dating

Bringing it all together (kind of) to find your football age

Then bringing the ideas of entropy, constant change and radiocarbon dating back to sporty matters and applying the analogy to football league tables, it follows that, the older you are, the more those tables will have changed in your lifetime. So if you have a look again above at the league table from St. Stephen's Day 1991 (the date of dissolution of the USSR, leading to geopolitical entropy in that region) you will see that only 13 of the 22 teams continue in the top flight and even among those 13, teams such as West Ham United and Manchester City have been relegated and promoted again since 1991. 

As already mentioned, Wimbledon FC no longer even exist. And does anyone, by the way, remember Notts County actually being in the top flight? (I've just checked, and in 1991-92 they were, but they're currently in the 5th level Vanarama National League. Incidentally, they're also apparently the oldest football club in the world, therefore the most resistant to entropic degradation of all clubs). 

In conclusion, just as radiocarbon dating can bring at least some ordered measurement to the natural disorder of entropy, I propose a football league-tables based measurement system to estimate your unique 'football age'. The methodology is straightforward. The next time you're going through the league tables on a Sunday morning, simply count up the number of teams in the Championship, League One and League Two who you remember at one stage in your lifetime competing in the top flight (i.e. Premier League or old First Division if you're old enough). 

You could also add to this number the teams currently in the Premier League who have been relegated and promoted again in your memory, along with the number of teams who were once in the top flight and are now outside the top four tiers of English football, but it just starts to get (even more) tedious at that stage. 

A quick look at the 4 tables reveals that, for me, 23 of the current 24 Championship (second tier) teams were in the top flight in my memory, along with 10 of the 23 League One (third tier) and 3 of the 24 League Two (fourth tier) teams, giving me a Radiocarbon football-league table (RFLT) age of 36. As with taxes and my likelihood of death, this number will rise steadily in the coming years. (However, based as it is on memory, the number may come down in my latter years, simply because of age related decline in being able to remember). 

With widespread use of the concept of 'RFLT age', things that now seem somewhat mysterious, e.g. that elderly neighbour who supports Derby County, will be quickly explained by that person's advanced RFLT age (along with the relative success of their club around the time they were eight or nine years old, the age at which most of us chose our club for life). 

And finally, some astrology...

Russell Grant (professional Astrologer) who, in a stunning demonstration of the power of his craft warned that, had Theresa May only consulted him in 2017 on the topic of Brexit, he would have uncannily predicted widespread 'disillusionment'.  

If the earlier (completely pseudo-scientific) RFLT approach to ageing yourself seems overly complicated and time consuming, you can always go completely unscientific and just embrace the warm fuzziness of astrology as applied to football. 

Using this method, go to the website https://www.11v11.com/league-tables/ then go to 'League tables' and in the section 'Historic league table generator' type in your date of birth and then 'Premier League' (if you were born in or after 1993) or 'League Division One' if you were born before 1993. This will give you the top flight league table on the day of your birth and using the (just developed) rules of football league-table based astrology, your footballing star sign is the team on top on that day. 

I was hoping that, with a sense of heavenly alignment, I would find that I was born under the sign of the majestic Liverbird. 

Unfortunately, I got Leeds United. 

Yuck.