SO PREMIERSHIP football is boring, is it? I admit that it has been a tough week. The surprise news that fashion models use cocaine and all the excitement of the Liberal Democrat conference debate about the Post Office have combined to make football seem tame.

Yet I have to say that the last time I went to a match, everyone seemed pretty animated. Perhaps they would have been knitting if taking needles in had not been banned.

The Fink Tank has been investigating the idea that the Premiership has become predictable and tediously defensive, leading to lower attendances for the opening matches of the season.

It was not too hard to measure whether games have become more defensive — Dr Henry Stott simply calculated the goal rate for the past five seasons. Indeed, last season was, very slightly, the lowest of the five (2.57 goals per game as opposed to, say, 2.61 in 2000-01).

However, the trend was not consistent (the rate went up and down over the period) and the difference is not statistically significant. Given these figures, it is difficult to believe that greater defensiveness is depressing attendance.

Measuring the extent to which the Premiership contest has become predictable is a trickier job. I think, however, that we’ve cracked it.

Stott placed each of the Premiership teams on a graph, with their ranking in the division on one axis and their strength on the other. Both these measures were provided by the Fink Tank Predictor model, which uses goals scored and conceded as well as shots on target and then weights them so that recent results count more strongly.

With all the teams mapped on the graph, Henry was able to calculate the speed at which the strength of teams drop away as you go through the ranks. The quicker the strength drops away, the more dominated the league is by the top sides. The Fink Tank could then use a collection of such graphs to determine whether domination is increasing or not and how dominated the Premiership is compared with other European leagues. Unsurprisingly, the data shows that the Premiership is pretty skewed (in other words, dominated by the top clubs). You do not need our new work to prove that — the chances of Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea winning the league is 99.9 per cent. The work also shows that the skewness got worse after 2000-01.

However, before anyone gets carried away, over the past ten months skewness has been getting less pronounced and in recent weeks has returned to roughly the same as at the beginning of the period. A comparison between 11 European leagues shows that last season there were six countries with a more predictable league than ours. However, it is concerning that the French, Spanish and Italian leagues were all considerably less skewed.

Overall it seems unlikely that predictability and defensiveness are producing low attendances. So what is happening? Very possibly, nothing.

Like all things, crowd numbers fluctuate. It is too early in the season to be certain that attendances are down significantly. If, however, numbers do turn out to be lower this season, Stott and his team have an alternative theory that may explain why. It is the consumer downturn.

In these circumstances, some work that the Warwick University team have developed on consumer perceptions of corporate personality are interesting. Designed to map attitudes to commercial concerns, the study exposed the low regard in which big football clubs are held, in terms of their honesty and their willingness to innovate. These measures turn out to be closely related to financial performance.

In other words, whether or not the Premiership has become more predictable and more defensive, clubs will need to raise their game in a tougher commercial environment. Everything from ticket prices to comfort to performance on the field must be re-examined.

The competition will be tough. There was not a single empty seat for Charles Kennedy’s speech at the Liberal Democrat Party conference.

finktank@thetimes.co.uk