Three of the country’s biggest football clubs would be relegated if their placement was based on public health statistics.
A new league table created by Durham University’s Centre for Health and Inequalities Research shows that only one team from the north of England would feature in the premiership if it was correlated to health.
Professor Clare Bambra drew on the famous Bill Shankly quote about football being more important than life and death, and studied figures from each local authority around the clubs’ grounds.
She ranked the clubs for factors such as smoking rates, obesity, alcohol-related hospital admissions and life expectancy, and found that Chelsea would retain the Premier League trophy.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea had the best health statistics of the Premier League teams. Also in the top four were Crystal Palace, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur.
Chelsea’s figures showed men and women living there would be expected to live seven and six years longer than their counterparts living near Manchester City.
Joint bottom of the table were Liverpool and Everton – deemed to have identical records as the clubs are situated half a mile apart and are in the same local authority.
Source: SNAPPA
