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The increasing use of league tables to summarise the relative performance of universities suggests an explicit analogy with association football. The extent to which this analogy is useful is explored through a comparison between the operation of the Premier and Nationwide Football Leagues and Universities and Colleges in England and Wales. This comparison considers issues such as what the league tables actually measure, how performance is linked to rewards or penalties, what mechanisms are available for improving performance, and what similarities there are between the locations of more or less successful football clubs and universities.
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Malcolm Tight (2000) studied this question.
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