Do league tables really tell you anything about a firm/how good/culture besides actual $Value of deals?

It seems like everyone is obsessed with league tables and just the general ones from financial times and WSJ but do they really tell you that much? All it really seems to tell you is $Value of deals the firm has done and ranks firms that way... but that does not tell you about complexity of deals/partners involved etc right?

Why is everyone so obsessed with these? It seems like some bulge brackets are not even listed on the tables?

Trying to decipher top M&A players: https://markets.ft.com/data/league-tables/tables-and-trends

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League tables give you rough approximation of deal flow but other than they are rather in uninformative especially when it comes to deal attribution for balance sheet banks like the big BBs. Banks that are on the acquisition financing side will often ask their clients to give them fees attributable to M&A even though they have nothing to do with the actual M&A advisory, just so they can juice their league table numbers. Additionally, there are quite a number of deals that go undisclosed due to client guidance and may not be counted within the league tables.

 

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