Following Theresa May’s decision to call snap elections in the UK in April 2017, several articles were published in the sports media claiming that the English Premier League title was over and proclaiming that Chelsea has won it. In actual fact, Chelsea were flying high at the top of the table by then and went to clinch the title. In April few were betting against them. However, the stories published were coming from a different angle, and their authors made their predictions by correlating the UK election years with the Premier League winners (e.g. Does this year’s election mean Chelsea have already won the title? & The freaky fact that links Chelsea and the General Election).

While the story can be amusing for few seconds, I find it odd that people can get away with generating headlines manipulating statistics and generating meaningless correlations. This practice is on the rise in sports’ related media, and the facts go often unchecked.

Here I just present the facts to prove that any claims relating winning premier league title to UK election year are nonsensical. Since the start of the English Football League in 1888, the top tier competition was contested 118 times. In the same period, 33 UK general elections took place. As can be seen in Figure 1 below 13 different teams won the title, with Liverpool winning it on 7 different occasions. Looking at the graph illustrates that no correlation exists.

Figure 1: Number of Football Tier 1 title wins by team in UK election years

Extending the analysis further, results in Figure 2 show that 24 teams have won the title, with just over 50% winning it in an election year sometimes. It can be seen the team with the most wins Manchester United only won 2 titles in an election year, that’s a 10% rate, while Manchester City won 4 times, none of which happened in an election year. It is only a coincidence that Chelsea won 5 titles in election years with 83.3%, and no conclusions need to be drawn from this.

Figure 2: Number of Football Tier 1 title wins by team

I leave it to the readers to make-up their minds prior to believing these pseudo-statistical relationships, and trust headlines designed to grab attention.