英国最强足球城花落谁家？

The first, and in many ways the hardest task, is to define what a town is, in an age where the big conurbations have swollen to such an extent that they have largely sucked everything around them into their soulless, Frankie-and-Benny-branded, suburban orbits.

Manchester is a good example of this. If you take the whole Greater Manchester sprawl, you end up swallowing towns like Oldham, Bolton and Rochdale, all of whom have perfectly serviceable foo

And if you do that, then technically you have to regard Southampton and Portsmouth as the same place, because they’re part of the same “metropolitan area” too. Similarly, Wolverhampton becomes part of Birmingham. And oh gosh, they really don’t like that in Wolverhampton.

So we decided to be fair with our boundaries. We went by the very latest (2013) figures from the Office of National Statistics, which breaks down the population of England and Wales by municipal authority. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s consistent.

Two exceptions. According to the ONS, West Bromwich isn’t a town in its own right, it’s just a subsidiary of Sandwell (or the Democratic People’s Commonwealth of Sandwell, to give its official name). Similarly, the ONS doesn’t recognise Huddersfield except as part of the West Yorkshire Republic of Kirklees. So in both instances, we used the population of the actual town, taken from the 2001 census, which is the most recent data available.

The things you end up having to know in this job.

Measuring success

What people don’t often realise about English football is that it is a game essentially dominated by just three cities. Between them, Manchester, Liverpool and Leighton Buzzard London have won 70 of the 115 league titles, 66 of the 133 FA Cups and 23 of the 27 European trophies that have been won by English clubs. Since the 1920s, the English league title has never gone more than three seasons without being won by a Manchester, Liverpool or London club.

If anything, their grip has tightened in recent years. If Manchester, Liverpool and London clubs instantly seceded from English football, the current Premier League title would become a three-horse race between,  and .

But then, in a way, you’d expect those three cities to dominate. They’re huge. By adjusting success for population, we can get some idea of which cities have punched above their weight and which haven’t.

So, how to measure success? We wanted to recognise trophies, and success in Europe, but also smaller clubs that had stayed in the top division for long periods of time. We didn’t want to ignore previous eras entirely, but we wanted to make sure more recent success was rated more highly. ’s three titles in the last decade are surely more relevant than Wolves’s three titles in the 1950s, and more relevant still than Huddersfield’s three in the 1920s.

So we set two cut-off points: 1945 and 1992. Trophies won after the Second World War were weighted twice as highly as trophies won before. Success since 1992 was weighted twice as highly again.

On the basis that every season there are 20(ish) teams in the top flight, one champion and two domestic cup winners, this was the scoring system we settled on.

The other rule was that we only looked at clubs that were still in existence in 1992. This allowed us to exclude teams like the Wanderers (five FA Cups in the 19th century) while including teams like Wimbledon (one FA Cup in the 20th century and one bad documentary in the 21st).

The southward shift

As football began to take hold in the traditional industrial strongholds of England, the south – where football originally struggled to gain a foothold against more popular pursuits like whiff-waff, carp-fishing and canasta – was initially left behind. Before 1945, London was being comfortably outperformed by Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield and even Sunderland.

The years after the war saw a much more even geographical spread, with clubs from London vying with Manchester, Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Leeds for major honours. But if we’d stopped the clock at 1992, there would have been a clear winner. Liverpool was the undisputed footballing capital of England. It wasn’t even close.

So, let’s spool the tape forward to the present day. English football, more than ever, is in the grip of a London-Liverpool-Manchester chokehold. Only Blackburn has won a Premier League title from outside those three cities. And in fact, only five other cities have even won a domestic trophy in the post-1992 era: Birmingham, Leicester, Portsmouth, Swansea and Wigan.

And yet, the Premier League roadshow has been to some pretty out-of-the-way places in its time. It’s been to Norfolk and Suffolk and Wiltshire and south Wales, to London commuter towns like Reading and Watford, and to former northern industrial powerhouses like Hull and Barnsley. Which at least maintains the illusion of geographical diversity, even if the big prizes are still something of a carve-up.

If you’ve got even the most perfunctory working knowledge of English footballing history, that’s pretty much as you’d expect. But now comes the interesting part: where we adjust each city’s score for its population. The results may surprise you, but only if you’re reading this in order.

Manchester sneak it, just ahead of Liverpool, just ahead of about 25 furlongs of clear air. Blackburn’s success – and we’ve included Darwen in its population – is remarkable for a town of its size. Burnley and Ipswich are also small towns that have punched considerably above their modest weight.

At the other end, you’ll mostly find cities where football has traditionally had to compete with another sport, be it rugby union (Bristol, Northampton), rugby league (Bradford) or cheese-rolling (Carlisle). But Bristol, in particular, really needs to buck its ideas up. Life isn’t all about nice bridges, repertory theatres and trip-hop, you know.

And if you’re scanning the table for the capital city of Great Britain, then you’re going to have to scan quite a long way down. London, for all its considerable financial, political and footballing clout, is decidedly middleweight when it comes to football.

When you think about it, that makes sense. It’s about seven times as big as anywhere else in the country. Virtually everyone who lives south of the Trent and north of the Loire commutes there for work. By rights, London should be blowing every other city out of the water. But like many other curiously success-starved capital cities of Europe – Paris, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm - it’s not. Although it does have a cereal café, so swings and roundabouts.

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