But in your next interview, just know that this is not the most computationally efficient way to generate the sequence.
Now if in twenty one years the distribution has been maintained, there’s one new team and all the other teams have won Fib(n+1) - Fib(n) titles, or one team has won 21 straight titles, reproducing the sequence, I’ll come back in 2046 and eat my hat.
If anyone needs tonight's winning lottery numbers, let me know ...
| Club | Premier League Titles |
+---------------------+------------------------+
| Blackburn Rovers | 1 |
| Leicester City | 1 |
| Liverpool | 2 |
| Arsenal | 3 |
| Chelsea | 5 |
| Manchester City | 8 |
| Manchester United | 13 |
+---------------------+------------------------+
https://www.ilpost.it/2025/04/22/avellino-promosso-morte-di-...
It’s a funny thing, fandom.
That's a stretch. Just because the rights were sold differently doesn't mean football was "fundamentally different" from one year to the next. Some tweaks to the game (and the ball) have been made over the years, but the game is fundamentally the same.
Nah, it didn’t. You’re overstating.
My memory of that time was general confusion of “why the name change?” And not much else. The game has certainly been tweaked, but your claim of it being fundamentally different doesn’t bear scrutiny.
Nah, it's just a lazy justification for breathless pundits and journalists to hail "the best ever" this or that, dropping 20th-century football history into a memory hole. The likes of Chelsea or Manchester City can "break records" every other year, generating easy work for the commentariat classes, and reminding little people that the only thing that matters is money. "Oh, your club was a league founder? But you're in the bananarama league now, sucks to be you."
I don't know what the exact odds are, but if you waited until one team had won 13 times, you'd often end up with a distribution fairly similar to this.
(I'm not holding my breath - my prediction would be the lightest slap on the wrist possible. Maybe a transfer ban for one window. Probably a 10 point deduction for Everton.)
mutual exclusivity most subtle
o11c•10h ago
Fibonacci numbers are just a rounded version of phi^x. So the only coincidences are 1. that the number of teams is such that phi is a good base, and 2. that the rounding all happened to go the right way.
brookst•10h ago
emmelaich•9h ago
smcin•9h ago
If you redo this table to quote PL first/second/third/fourth position per £ pound invested, (or total points in a season (3 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss)) you get a different picture, e.g. for 2023-4 season: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-13446423/...
philwelch•7h ago
Scarblac•4h ago
Without rules, every club is going to invest huge sums betting on achieving a top result that would give return on investment, and only a few can achieve that each year.
Investors throwing lots of money at the sport is a feature, not a bug, from the viewpoint of the people involved in the sport. So by itself that doesn't need to be prevented.
zimpenfish•4h ago
Sadly aren't even succeeding at that given City's 115 charges (dating back to 2008!) and various clubs with their self-sponsorship shenanigans.
andrepd•2h ago
Unless you have enough oil money to just... not care about the rules.
notphil•9h ago
Any theories why this might be the case?
> 2. that the rounding all happened to go the right way.
+1. See how close some title races are: 2013-2014 comes to mind.
class700•8h ago
o11c•7h ago
The number of teams is constrained by "we need enough teams so there's actually variety" and "we can't have so many teams that we can't keep track of them all".
ganiszulfa•8h ago
rich_sasha•7h ago
yk•7h ago
lordnacho•6h ago
dmurray•5h ago
There's a fair bit of churn in these numbers: 51 clubs in total have been in the premier league in the period of interest (the last 33 years).
After some small threshold, I think the number of clubs doesn't matter. You could get the same result if the top 100 or all 40,000 clubs played in the same league every year, ignoring the minor scheduling problem this would cause. Resources are distributed approximately in a power law, as you suggest. What matters is the level of inequality near the top, which is apparently such that each team has approximately phi times the resources (measured over a long period) of the team below.
adammarples•4h ago