“But it’s always been like that.”
That tends to be the knee-jerk response when you mention that the Premier League’s three promoted clubs look destined to be relegated straight back to the Championship.
Except it hasn’t always been like that.
Typically, newcomers struggle to survive in the Premier League, especially in recent years — there’s nothing new there. But last season was the first time since 1998, and only the second time ever, that all three promoted Premier League clubs were relegated to the Championship.
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Should we be worried if, as looks likely, history repeats itself this season?
What is clear is that it was another miserable weekend for Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Southampton. Three home defeats, four goals conceded in each case, and a growing sense of inevitably about the way the table will look come the end of May, even if there is almost a third of the season remaining.
The outlook feels particularly bleak at Southampton and Leicester, where the latest setbacks were greeted with an air of resignation.
Asked what went wrong in the 4-0 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion, the Southampton manager Ivan Juric said “everything” and described the performance as a “disaster”.
Juric’s comments about the players felt even more damning. “We have to be honest, they tried to play in one way and it was bad (under the management of Russell Martin), now we try to change — and it’s still bad.”
The tone wasn’t much different on Friday at the King Power Stadium, where Leicester were beaten 4-0 by Brentford – a sixth successive home defeat in the Premier League without scoring — and some fans left before half-time. “We have to accept that we are in a position now where every week we face a better team,” Ruud van Nistelrooy, Leicester’s manager, said.
To provide some context to just how difficult it has been for Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton, last season’s relegated trio provide an unflattering reference point. Statistically, Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton Town were the worst bottom three in Premier League history. They picked up 66 points between them — 10 points fewer than the next lowest on record.
Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton are currently on course to finish with a cumulative total of 63 points. They have two fewer wins than Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton at the same stage of the season and have conceded 174 goals compared to 178.
Even allowing for the fact that Southampton’s dreadful campaign (only nine points on the board) distorts those figures to an extent, Ipswich and Leicester are, at this rate, projected to finished the season with 25 points each — a tally that would never give them even an outside chance of staying up in the Premier League.
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The financial numbers are interesting, too, and, in many ways, highlight what promoted clubs are up against now. Ipswich spent £106million ($134m) in the summer — the 13th-highest outlay in world football during that window, according to data compiled by Transfermarkt. Bayern Munich were one place above Ipswich in that table and Saudi Arabian club Al Ittihad one place below them — a snapshot of the modern game if ever there was one. Next on the list was Southampton (£99m). Leicester, for the record, spent £73m (not insignificant, but the sixth-lowest in the Premier League).
If the instinct among some is to read those figures and wonder how they are struggling so much, the reality is that promoted teams are now playing a game of catch-up that it feels almost impossible to win — all the more so in the case of Ipswich, who had been out of the top flight for 22 years and were hosting Forest Green Rovers in a League One game on this weekend two years ago.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that the chasm that has opened up between the Premier League and the Championship is widening every season — it looks like that on paper and also when you regularly watch games at both levels — and, realistically, that means one summer splurge isn’t going to come close to bridging the gap in quality, squad depth and wages (a figure that is often overlooked amid all the talk of spending) that has built up over an extended period of time with mid-table clubs, let alone the top six.
Naturally, there will be Leicester and Southampton supporters who refuse to be so defeatist, bearing in mind that both clubs enjoyed lengthy spells (nine and 11 seasons respectively) in the Premier League before being relegated in 2023. Why, they might ask, can’t they do what Fulham and Bournemouth did two years ago: return to the Premier League, survive and then thrive?
It’s a question they can only partly answer themselves because it also depends on another Premier League club badly losing its way — something that happened to both Leicester and Southampton in that same 2022-23 season.
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That phrase ‘badly losing its way’ doesn’t mean failing to hit the 40-point mark — a mythical figure that has little relevance in the modern game. Nottingham Forest, who finished in 17th place last season, survived with 32 points; in reality, 27 points would have kept them up. In fact, it’s actually quite hard for an ‘established’ Premier League club to get relegated now. Wolverhampton Wanderers are averaging well under a point per game and still have breathing space.
Forest, interestingly, were also promoted alongside Bournemouth and Fulham in that 2021-2022 season and provide the most recent example of a club returning to the top table after a long absence and also finding a way to stay there.
Whether signing 22 players at a cost of £150m and being docked four points for breaching Premier League profit and sustainability rules (another significant factor in all of this and something that, rightly or wrongly, makes it harder to compete) is a blueprint that anyone else would want to follow is another matter. Almost certainly not.
Ultimately, though, the gamble worked for Forest and the wisdom of spending so much money on some of those signings — the noise around the fee that was paid for Morgan Gibbs-White comes to mind, in particular — is no longer questioned, especially when the club is chasing a place in the top four this season.
Another important aspect to all of this is the fact Sheffield United and Burnley were out of their depth in the Premier League last season but are currently second and third in the Championship respectively, behind the leaders Leeds United, and with every chance of winning promotion back to the Premier League.
In the summer, Burnley spent at least 10 times as much as half of the 24 clubs in the Championship (12 successive clean sheets don’t come cheap), which is partly down to the success of their player trading in the wake of relegation, but also helped by Premier League parachute payments cushioning the fall.
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The three teams relegated to the Championship received £49m from the Premier League. In contrast, solidarity payments for Championship clubs are little more than 10 per cent of that figure, fuelling the argument that it’s an unfair playing field in the EFL (Luton, bottom of the second tier at the moment and in danger of suffering back-to-back relegations, are doing their best to disprove that theory).
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Ipswich last season and, ironically, Luton the year before, showed that it’s possible to ‘beat the system’ in the Championship without that parachute money, but it’s an entirely different story trying to compete in the Premier League.
Leicester, by general consensus, were a Premier League team playing in the Championship last season. The departure of both their manager Enzo Maresca and best player Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea last summer was clearly a blow, but it’s still been alarming to see the way everything has unravelled on and off the pitch at the club.
Their great escape of 2015, when Leicester — a newly promoted Premier League club at the time — engineered a remarkable upturn in results late in the season to climb to safety, provides a welcome reminder to the bottom three that strange things can happen during the run-in.
The worry, though, is that we’ve seen this movie before and already know how it ends — and that can’t be good for English football.
(Top photo: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
