This website is brilliant. Wages of Wins is a book published in the USA that analyses atheletes indiviual performances in team sports and works out the correlation between performance (i.e. no of wins produced) vs their salary.

I'm not really sure how to do the site and the concept justice in this post but I thought it was well worth highlighting how well they have taken the statistics of sport and applied them very accurately to gauging just how good an athelete is.

An example is this:
* Players who do many things well – like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, and Kevin Garnett – are very productive players, just like most people believe.
* Players who only score, though, or have deficiencies in their game (i.e. low shooting efficiency, high turnover rates) – like Allen Iverson, Antoine Walker, and Carmelo Anthony – are not as productive as people believe.
* Players who are prolific rebounders – like Dennis Rodman, Ben Wallace, and Marcus Camby – are more productive than people tend to believe.

Wages of Wins calculates a players ability based on 'wins produced' or a 'win score'.

As a decent footballer myself I appreciate that it is often the most unspectacular players that are the most important to the team (e.g. Makelele) and it would be very interesting to see just how footballers came up were the wages of wins theory to be applied to the beautiful game.

Here's my favourite post, just for the record.

I'm sure the theory has an application to advertising and marketing (beyond the usual metrics), I just can't quite work out what it is yet.