Put on your smartest dressing gown, dim the lights and brace yourself. You are cordially invited to the Fink Tank Manager of the Year award.

Over a magnificent repast, you are about to witness the unveiling of the winner of the only truly objective soccer management prize, an award derived entirely from data.

Asking round for guesses about who had emerged from our calculations as top dog, I was intrigued that nobody guessed correctly. But when I revealed the answer, there was general agreement that it made sense - testimony that this year's winner is not the subject of the fuss he deserves.

First things first. You have to settle on a measure. You can't just use points or cups for an obvious reason - it doesn't account for money. A manager may have bought success rather than spurred his team on to it. You need to look at how a manager's side has performed given the amount of their wage bill.

So Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have plotted the number of points of each club against the size of their wage bill. From this a clear relationship is shown. The more a club spend, the more points they tend to get, but at the top it takes more extra money to win each point.

There is one serious flaw in this work - the wage bill numbers came from May 2007. This means that the managers of clubs with big summer spends - Manchester United and Manchester City - are flattered by the figures. Fortunately this does not affect the overall result.

The Fink Tank is then able to calculate for each club how many points they should have won given how much they spent. This can be compared with the points each side actually scored. I believe that this is the best measure available of the contribution made by the manager.

Last season the winner was Steve Coppell, of Reading; in 2005-06 it was Paul Jewell, then the Wigan Athletic manager; in 2004-05 David Moyes, of Everton. Arsène Wenger carried off the prize (there isn't a prize, actually, but you know what I mean) in 2003-04 and in its first year Claudio Ranieri was victorious with Chelsea. How did some of these characters fare this year?

Coppell remains an above-the-line manager. In other words he wins more points than the wage bill would lead you to expect. Surprisingly, although Jewell, now of Derby County, was below the line (together with Billy Davies) he wasn't bottom - Derby's wage bill is so small that their paucity of points was almost to be expected.

Sven-Göran Eriksson is above the line too, but this may be because of the money spent by Manchester City that is not recorded by us yet. As ever, he remains an enigma.

Wenger may not be at the top of the table but he shows up above the line again, as he has been every year since we started the calculations.

Roman Abramovich (whose Chelsea side now have a 29 per cent shot at winning the title, up from 11 per cent last week) essentially gets what he pays for. Avram Grant's record was just slightly better than José Mourinho's and this puts him in the middle of the manager table.

The winner of the sixth Fink Tank Manager of the Year? Moyes lifts the trophy and becomes the first manager to win the silverware twice. If he wins it again he can keep it.