Mrs B is certainly an-a-Count-ant.

What, the average that was mentioned once until you started this stats-fest you mean?

Neil Hudgell reported that Rovers lost £450k last November, so why would actually filing those accounts make any difference to what I've already posted, other than taking the average down a bit? Unless the "improvement" he referenced is in the region of +£250k it won't change Rovers relative position to the other clubs. It won't alter the fact that 4 clubs have turned in a profit this year vs 1 last year and a further 3 are around(ish) breakeven, of which one is Wigan who have confirmed a return to profitability this year. It also won't change the fact that Harlequins are a statistically significant outlier from the rest of the clubs who have filed. The point you make on Saints/Hudds/Leeds being excluded on a whim is a great one, because if you run Grubbs against data for everyone excluding Harlequins, there are no significant outliers in this population that may be excluded.

I've never talked about club x's profit / loss being greater or less than a certain multiple of the next nearest, that was you, cockle. A shame then that this was shot down by the key statistical test for determining outliers.

Using a separate argument, just in case you now say I'm trying to muddy the waters, I do commercial finance for a living. I do it pretty well and get paid pretty well for doing it. One of the key things I look at is relative performance, whether by geography, channel, brand, category, you name it, and I define control groups on all these dimensions on a daily basis. I can tell you now that from a performance review perspective I'd be discredited if I reported a benchmark that included an outlier of this magnitude. I could report both, but there would be a demand to strip one out also to see a more representative average performance.

You seem rather unwilling to discuss the key point here which is that on the face of it, results generally speaking are a bit better. I think this is a good thing, although as Derwent correctly points out, a bit of a crude measure, but nonetheless one that has been used in the past. Do you think it's encouraging? Even if include Harlequins, add in £450k loss for Rovers (this being worst case given the improvement still to be added in) and £1m for Crusaders, the average loss is -£370k, so an improvement. But the real improvement surely is from a position in 2009 of only one club in profit and Hudgell's Sun article saying "everyone is losing £500k a year", it seems perhaps we are now in a better place than that. Or am I being too naive?

Who said it would?



And if you exclude Saints and Hudds "in your opinion" Leeds becomes an outlier. Does that mean they're no longer a SL club suitable for inclusion in the data set 'SL clubs finacial results 2009'? What this does is reveal the nonsense of your method. As does including a loss (not confirmed) for Crusaders of £1,000,000 because then Quins are no longer an outlier using Grubbs technique.

But I stress, the use of Grubbs is erroneous, again you choose to ignore this because it highlights your lack of statistical rigour. Grubbs would be used to check if a result belongs in a data set i.e it is not an erroneous result from a different data set that has crept in by mistake. Unless you are arguing that it is a fundamental mistake to include Quins in the financial results of all SL clubs, which might be the case if say the results of the Union club had been used or some other error had been made. But that is not the case.











Well done you.





You wouldn't, because you've only just learned about Grubbs. If you used this test (wrongly, presumably since you are here

) in your everyday work, you wouldn't need to exclude Quins "in your opinion" in the first place, or make up some arbitrary cut off point around the median, when I questioned your method.





If you include Crusaders supposed loss of £1,000,000 you HAVE to include Quins by your own methodology. This is the absurdity of your position. Quins aren't a SL club but if Crusaders are included then Quins become a SL club again.



Your hanging off Neil Hudgell's every word is not really a revelation.

Not at all.

If you have the balance sheet you can work out the OCF quite easily from the movements in working capital and the annual EBITDA. So long as you have the opening and closing balances for debtors, creditors and stock then you can work out what the cashflow was from normal operating activities though in some cases you'd have to have an educated guess at EBITDA due to lack of a detailed P&L.

You could exclude Hudds and Saints because it makes about as much sense as excluding Quins.



I asked for a better reason to exclude Quins than "in your opinion" you invented a couple including "Look at the chart. Look at the banding of 10 clubs within the two lines showing £1m and -£1m, also +/- £1m around the median." Which proves absolutely nothing. "Look at the chart" FFS!



Then you stumbled upon Grubbs and decided it solved your problem, you don't know what it's for or how to use it correctly do you? Oh hang on I forgot!









Are you seriously suggesting that Quins are not a part of the data set SL clubs? Are you saying that they do not fall within +- 3 standard deviations of the Mean? Exactly where we would expect the vast majority of clubs results to fall?

If you are, I hope your boss doesn't know your user name on here.







On average every club was losing £500K that is what an average tells us, the average result for the whole data set. There is likely no single result that exactly matches the average, some will be higher and some lower. Some may even be a lot lower but that does not mean they should not be included regardless of whose opinion it is.



On a like for like basis (i.e. not excluding any given club for spurious and statistically false reasons) if the average is less of a loss this year compared to last, then of course (bearing in mind the many ways financial results can be massaged) that is good news.

What we can't do is compare an average using a spurious and statistically incompetent method this year against an average calculated in a different way for last year.

Quite easy with a full set of accounts. Much harder with abbreviated accounts, especially where you have non-recurring transactions or financing activities that are not disclosed.

Can I suggest that BB and Mrs B retire to PM? I'm an accountant myself, yet with this war of attrition I lost the will to live about two pages back...

I'm doing A-level maths (which includes a module on statistics), but reading the last few pages of this thread is making me want to tear my fingernails out.

Fair enough.


Whilst it is good news that fewer clubs are making losses and the average loss (whichever way you calculate it

) appears to be reducing, you do have to wonder whether it's coincidence that this has happened when these are the last accounts to be filed before the next set of franchises are decided.

Which is why I was talking about OCF and not Net Cashflow as you wouldn't know the financing activities or capital expenditure. In my experience OCF is a pretty good indicator of a business' normal everyday performance.

All I'm getting from this is that you can make figures show whatever you want - which as a retired Royal Mail statisticain I knew already!