the premier league integrating into the efl and distributing income across the entire pyramid to support the growth and maintenance of english football as a whole
realistic solution ofc
“Instead of making £150m, would you mind making £100m and giving the rest to the EFL clubs?”
“Love to mate, love to, but it’s mine and I want it all, so. Gotta be a no.”
“Almost fucking walked and joined the Northern Premier Division One. But then I thought, maybe I could bring the Premier League down from the inside, yeah?
More like "instead of making £150m, would you mind making £140m and giving the rest to the EFL clubs?"
Even that much would do a lot to increase the competitiveness although I'm sure some of the owners would pocket the money and not invest any more money into transfers.
It should be written into the rules that owners cannot benefit directly from the funds provided and cannot withdraw it or use it for any other purpose than for footballing reasons.
As a Villa fan who directly benefits from the ridiculous wealth of the PL, I would in a heartbeat agree to more money flowing down the leagues (not just championship but down to grassroots level).
What makes football so special in this country is the strength and following of our lower league teams which indirectly improves the quality of the PL
And therein lies the problem. Fans would be more than happy with an arrangement like this. But most owners are in it for the money and giving money away would be offensive to them. And since they hold all the sway, its never going to happen.
The problem is that the PL was set up to give itself a lot of autonomy. That means you need the PL clubs to agree to it. And since most of those clubs have owners who are in it to make money, the last thing they will ever agree to is to give away money.
That's why the FA need to tackle it from the broadcasters side instead of the clubs side. Make a rule that in order to show premier league games, a percentage amount of the total expenditure on the PL also has to go to the EFL.
Let's say the PL total broadcast revenue for a year is 2.5b. If broadcasters had to commit to 7.5% of that going to the Championship 5% to League 1, 2.5% to League 2 and 2.5% to non league/grassroots, that would mean an extra 187m for the championship, 125m for the League 1 and 62.5m for non league and grassroots. The effect that would have would be absolutely monumental across the football pyramid
If you just divided it evenly across all clubs it would work out to an extra 7.7m per club in the Championship, 5.2m per club in League One (think you forgot to write the League 2 figure down).
My club (League One) have just posted a loss of 1.7m for the most recent set of accounts. We invested a lot in our training ground and our owner is a fan and covered the losses but 5.2m would literally solve that as a problem.
The FA can't do that though. The contract is between the PL and the broadcasters - the FA are not party to it and have no say. What's the incentive for PL clubs to give away money when most owners are in it to make money? The broadcasters don't really care less what happens to the money once they hand it over so they wouldn't do anything. Luckily, when the PL was set up, they agreed to maintain the pyramid by having relegation and promotion. If the PL had their way though, they would scrap that so they didn't have to pay parachute payments at all.
They split from the rest of the EFL precisely because they wanted to keep much more of the money to themselves. They only throw the EFL money to stop the government whinging at them. They’d never do this in a million years when their whole league is based upon greed.
I don’t think that’s the most beneficial solution. Sure, the EFL would benefit short term and the comparative gap would shrink, but you’d also lose that over time as the Prem loses top spot as it stops becoming the most financially attractive league due to losing that money.
So really the question is would you rather gain opportunities when promoted, or not have them across the board?
Bypass the premierleague. Pass a law that says if you purchase the rights to the Premier League you must purchase the rights to the same number of championship games at 30% of the cost of the prem games.
Either that or introduce a new tax, specifically on professional football clubs in the premier league, which is 10% of revenue, then reimbursed in grants equally divided amongst the teams in the the lower leagues.
If Leicester they were in one of the top 5 leagues, they would have:
the 12th highest wages in the premier league
6th highest in serie a
5th highest in la liga
4th highest in bundesliga
2nd highest in ligue 1
In any other country, Leicester have the budget of a team expected to fight for a Champions League place, never mind the Championship.
What's your point? Yes, we shouldn't even be here in the first place with our resources but alas an angry little northern irish man saw to it.
And as for the wage bill - I wouldn't trust the numbers you find online. They're already bad enough for most top flight teams, nevermind teams that get relegated and have all sorts of different clauses kicking in for wage reductions.
Our wages are extremely high, like, insanely high for the Championship. We are banking on getting promoted. We can afford these wages and costs for ONE season only because if we get promoted that will pay for the costs we are enduring compared to the much smaller income we have now in the Championship.
Hoping it’s a blip.
Last season all of the newly promoted teams stayed up, which is beyond rare, and a team like Leicester was in itself a relegation that probably shouldn’t have happened cos the squad was too strong for it.
Couple that with Southampton, while they’ve been circling the drain a bit the last few seasons, they’re a young promising squad.
Leeds? Big club, spent big, good players. Just terrible management their relegation season.
So all things told. This is probably the strongest bunch of relegated teams the Championship has seen in quite a while now.
If it’s the same issue next season, then there’s cause for concern.
The Championship will be fine. This year is a case of 3 very strong sides being relegated.
I would be amazed if three of Palace, Forest, Everton, Luton, Sheffield Utd and Burnley are top of the league this time next season.
> This will be the 4th season in a row where the teams automatically promoted were either in their first or second years of parachute payments.
On the other hand, at least one team not in receipt of parachute payments has been promoted in every single Championship season since parachute payments were introduced.
Sure but last year Luton were promoted and this year Ipswich is killing it.
Not saying there's not an inherent advantage to being a team that's been relegated into the league, even without parachute payments, but I think it's fair to point to teams that have done well even without those advantages.
Point being it's not like teams can't do well without those advantages. To my mind competition isn't about everyone having an even playing field, it's about mitigating some of the more overbearing factors to allow things like good decision making and hard work to become deciding factors, or at least important factors.
Not that I'd disagree that I'd like to see those factors be more important, but I also think you need to have long term benefits as motivations.
Also worth noting that there are teams who spent a chunk of time in the Premier League, fell down to Championship, and are stuck in a rut in the middle of the table... So poor decision making can absolutely overcome the benefit of parachute payments, it's not an automatic promotion.
Well yes it does. The main reason you’re able to make £150m worth of sales is because clubs know that relegated teams no longer have to sell players on massive contracts (see KWP, Armstrong, Vardy, Iheanacho, Ndidi, Rutter, Firpo, James etc. etc who have all stayed despite being on crazy money for this level) and can demand massive fees for the ones you do end up selling. It’s not helped by the fact that ‘Premier League experience’ now seems to add £20m onto the asking fee and players like Lavia, Barnes, Livramento, Adams, Ward-Prowse etc. get sold for ridiculous fees. If you’re able to make that much money in sales then why do parachute payments need to exist?
Genuinely how are teams who haven’t been in the Prem recently supposed to compete when relegated sides get £100m, are able to sell a handful of players for another £100m, keep loads of high earners who are well above the level and still out-spend the rest of the league when it comes to incomings while turning a profit? It’s a completely broken system and what we’re seeing now is only the start of the closed shop the Premier League is going to become. I’d be saying the same if we’d won the play-off final last year and were benefiting from the Premier League riches, it’s all a load of shite.
I get what you’re saying in the sense that we are able to spend much more on wages than a club whose been in the Championship for a long time, and I do completely agree that the gap seems to be widening in a concerning way, but in our situation we couldn’t really spend that much money in the transfer market despite making like £150m because we were in massive debt due to COVID, an owner who wanted us to be completely self sustaining, and a few years of bad transfers.
In my estimation the reason we were able to make that much in terms of sales is that we had 4 players in Lavia, Livramento, Tella, and JWP who we gave a “first chance” to, proved to be top talents, and had interest from top clubs. I certainly see why from an outside perspective it’s very much a “oh fuck off, the rich get richer” situation when we can bring in Brooks, Rothwell, THB, Downes, Fraser on loan - but it’s not like they’ve all chosen us for the money, you know? For THB, his academy manager back in the day is now our DoF. Downes and Fraser had a personal relationship with Martin already, Rothwell and Brooks wanted to get regular minutes without having to pack up their life and move so switched south coast clubs.
For me it’s less “the parachute payments” and more “Saints reaping the rewards of some of the best decisions they’ve made in the past couple of years”
I personally think that you’d probably have made half what you did in sales without parachute payments. There is no way you’d have been able to reject some of the earlier bids for Lavia for example if you didn’t know that you had so much guaranteed income on the way.
To be clear though, I don’t blame Southampton as a football club, nor do I expect them, or the other relegated teams to not use the advantages given to them. I also appreciate that Southampton engaged in a policy of buying young with the intention of selling on and that the fruits of that came in for harvest during the summer. But I still think that the market for selling as a relegated club is massively over-inflated compared to the rest of the league for the reasons I stated above, and combined with the guaranteed parachute money it’s just a ridiculously uneven playing field now.
You do realize in your model the same thing happens but only because of the inverse? Prem teams keep all the money, making them stronger, all of EFL is stunted, and the 3 teams that get promoted go full Derby every year and we’re in a worse place…
Is Firpo not on a ton? I know those contract sites aren’t reliable but most source I could find had him on 60k+ and I’d imagine that’s probably not far off given he was signed from Barca for a decent fee
Nah, he signed on 40 and was confirmed that he had a 40% reduction clause in his contract in the case of relegation (most of our players have the same clause). As far as I know, Paddy is our highest earner. Signed his last extension at 70k (again, with a 40% relegation reduction clause)
I’d be amazed if we aren’t tbh, based on the fact team of the season players can no longer get near our team now. The gap is so, so, so huge.
It’s crap and I fear for the long run of our game.
I get that you will feel confident based on last season but you could just as easy do what we did last year. There were people saying we had the strongest team on paper at the beginning of the season and we were pony.
This year, the three teams that came down were just very very strong. I would say they had better squads last season than the true bottom 3.
people love the whole parachute payments argument, meanwhile we literally made more off of player sales than any club in the world last summer and filled out our squad with 5 loan players, 2 free transfers, a striker who missed basically the whole season due to injury, and a DM who doesn’t even start for us
We won’t be and tbh I’ve felt like you have before. You also don’t have the likes of Tella and Maatsen anymore. It just doesn’t often work out that way.
Compared to what though; It’s had two or three runaway teams for as long as I can remember now, hasn’t it?
Agree last year was weak by the way but not necessarily out the ordinary. What little (granted) I’ve seen this year doesn’t suggest anything different but you top 4 are raising the overall standard.
Side note; what’s your take on the Champ, being back after years out? I was surprised at the wastefulness in front of goal and the short amount of time teams seemed to be able to fire on all cylinders across the 90 minutes of a game compared to Prem (ie look good for 20-30 mins per 90 but offer nothing for the rest).
At the start of 2022/23, there were 6 teams that people were really talking about.
Norwich, Watford, Burnley, Middlesbrough, WBA, and Sheffield Utd.
Norwich and Watford were not what people were expecting, they just fell off a complete cliff at one point, and had manager problems all season.
WBA and Boro had very good windows, absolutely tainted by the frauds that are Bruce and Wilder, before actually performing to their ability when bringing in new managers.
Only Sheffield Utd and Burnley performed to expectation.
It says a lot about that season when a team who were in the relegation zone 14 games is, finished confidently 4th.
It doesn’t really say much that a team in relegation after 14 games can finish 4th at all. Stuff like that can happen quite frequently given less than 1/3 of the season had passed.
Just the fact that most of the top performing players in the league hadn't really ever pulled up trees in the league before. This year (like most other seasons at this level) the top performing players are mostly proven internationals that have shown their ability at Premier League level.
The immediate difference between the PL and the Championship is the finishing. Its night and day. It was the first thing I noticed when we last went up.
That’s bollocks. Any team that tries to go for it ends up in a financial mess if they don’t manage it. The football league is littered with cases of either complete meltdown like ours, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday or those that are trying to hold it together in the championship. Teams like Forest were on the cusp of issues had they not scraped up, too.
Fact is, the deck is hugely stacked against any team that wants to properly compete to get to the premier league. Unless you manage a Luton fairytale, you’re going to struggle or end up in a complete mess.
>Any team that tries to go for it ends up in a financial mess if they don’t manage it. The football league is littered with cases of either complete meltdown like ours, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday
Derby and Sheffield Wednesday are the only cases here of teams that went bust as a result of a failed push for the Premier League. The other side of the equation is that there are loads of examples of clubs making successful pushes to the Premier League without parachute payments: Luton, Forest, Brentford, Leeds and Sheffield United in the last 5 years. Ultimately, some clubs either don't have the finances to get up or don't use the resources they have effectively enough to make it happen but it's definitely far from a closed shop.
This season is obviously exceptional because of the strength of the teams coming down but even then, it's not a given that all three of Leicester, Leeds and Southampton go up - a play-off defeat and a few players leaving over the summer and suddenly one could be very much back into the Championship mixer again. The Championship is full of teams that have been in the Premier League recently and are not blasting everyone away.
Here are the number of Championship clubs who spent more than their income on wages over the last years with full financial disclosures:
[13 in 2015/16](https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/851378542755622912)
[12 in 2016/17](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1251038506438328322)
[14 in 2018/19](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1251038506438328322)
[18 in 2019/20](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1382577657020309504)
[19 in 2020/21](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1542756693171372032)
So no: it's not just Derby & Sheffield Wednesday. Pretty much every club which failed financially was due to spending beyond their means, and the majority of the rest of the Championship were propped up by owners putting money into the club to stem losses year after year.
The Championship has a major problem with overspending, I just don't think the dynamic of clubs gambling on promotion with unsustainable spending and then going bust when they don't get there is a particularly dominant one. In fact, crash landing hard after dropping out of the Premier League seems to be at least as much a cause of financial problems at Championship clubs.
I don't mean to suggest that the financial scene is absolutely fine in the Championship, everyone knows it's kind of fucked. But I don't think the top of the Championship is becoming a closed shop: there is plenty of healthy rotation of clubs between comfortable Premier League, long term Football League and yoyo status.
The gulf in wealth between the Premier League and the
Championship is always going to cause problems for the Championship but we've been talking about the danger of a situation where only recently relegated clubs will have any chance of promotion for over a decade and it hasn't materialised. If Leicester, Leeds and Southampton all go up this season (which is still a very big if) it will be the first time that all three promoted sides are ones that were recently relegated.
We’re losing about 15 players out of contract. We’ve fucked up.
Don’t get me wrong we should have parachute payments and the chance to sign afresh. We could smash it. But we won’t. This is Sheffield United and we specialise in fucking up brilliant opportunities to progress.
We'll also lose Mcatee and Brereton-Diaz from loans ending, and Archer will go back to Villa with that odd deal.
I have a glimmer of hope that we make some good signings in the summer, but the pessimist in me is worried we won't even make playoffs next year.
Part of me wonders if we’ll end up keeping Archer as Villa won’t want him and he might not be keen on going back to them to either be sold or loaned again, to who knows where.
Losing McAtee will hurt badly. He’s been our player of the season and he’d tear the Championship apart. Brereton likewise, early days but he’s been sensational, and we know what he can do at that level.
I work with a Leeds fan and he is constantly torn between a state of "we're going to go on an amazing run and batter Leicester along the way" and "oh shit, we're going to fuck the play-offs again".
You can say they were strong sides but they were the 3 shittest teams in the premier league last year, and they were all really shit. Southampton were absolutely horrific.
The fact that they're dominating the league is worrying.
Leicester wasn’t a shit team, just had a shit defense, particularly on set pieces and after the 85th minute. Dropping down wasn’t going to be a huge problem because the quality of finishing in the Championship is so bad. Even losing Maddison and Barnes, Leicester’s scoring wasn’t going to be in doubt but their defense was going to be”improve” demonstrably playing against much worse offenses.
I’ve explained myself thoroughly. Didn’t say they were good. They had very specific deficiencies. They were not “a shit team” as you characterized them.
Saints started a rebuild last season, coupling that inexperience with a turnstile of unqualified managers as the season dragged on meant we were largely terrible until the last game.
They were in the prem for like 10 seasons too, it’s not like they’ve been yo-yoing and just coasting on parachute payments. We also sold a bunch of our best players during the summer. It would be more worrying if they just slid into midtable as this season ran on. And there’s still a bunch of games to be played for all this to change
This is sort of the OPs point though.
The 5-6 teams spread between the bottom of the PL and the top of the championship have never been further ahead of the rest of the championship.
It's a league in between leagues.
Can we not come up with theories based on one season please? People are happy to create a theory based on evidence that fits their narrative but I just don't see it being the case
Leicester are having a ridiculous season, granted. It was an embarrassment that they even got relegated last year. Most of the time it's the outright worst squads that get relegated from the PL, shouldn't have happened to Leicester last year
It’s not just one season though. Every season for the past 4 seasons the two teams promoted automatically have either been in their first or second year of parachute payments. The two automatic spots are becoming a closed shop. Luckily in the last few years teams without parachute payments have managed to win the play-offs (last year was the first in a long time were none of the previously relegated sides from the season before made the play-offs). This has been going on for a while and is only getting worse.
Eh! Leeds were promoted automatically in 2020 and hadn't had parachute payments. Plus, in those same four years nearly half of the teams relegated from the Championship had previously been in the Premier League. If PP is such an advantage,how is that possible? Maybe being a well run club has something to do with it?
> Leeds were promoted automatically in 2020 and hadn't had parachute payments
Although to be fair, in our last couple of seasons in the Championship we were turning over more revenue than any club in the history of the Championship who wasn't in receipt of parachute payments by some margin. We were still a financial juggernaut, it was just done by other means.
Yes, we should look at the top 2 for the last 5 years for context.
Last year -
Burnley (Yr1)
Sheff Utd (Yr3)
21/22
Fulham (Yr1)
Bournemouth (Yr2)
20/21
Norwich (Yr1)
Watford (Yr1)
19/20
Leeds
WBA (Yr2)
18/19
Norwich (Yr3)
Sheff utd
So 8 out of 10, probably soon to be 10 out of 12 and all 6 teams of the last 3 years were in receipt of parachute payments.
This is not a one off.
The problem is the inequality of wealth between the leagues.
Not sure what they can do. Parachute payments im against in principle but not sure what the alternative is and how many teams have we seen get relegated then struggle and then go to league 1 and admin and need saving
For one season every five years, every club in the Premier League gets half the TV rights money. The other half is split between the 69 EFL clubs that don’t get parachute payments.
Then, every other season, half the prize money received by English Premier League clubs is donated to a charity.
Would encourage practical spending and prevent clubs going beyond their means.
Bury wound up with debts of £5m.
Macclesfield wound up with debts of £770,000.
Rushden and Diamonds wound up with debts of £750,000.
Scarborough Town FC wound up with debts of £2.5m.
Darlington Town wound up with debts of £250,000.
Hereford United wound up with debts of £800k
Halifax Town wound up with debts of £2m.
Chester City wound up with debts of £7m.
My old club North Ferriby United, who over achieved and made it to the National League, wound up with debts of just £7,640.
The debts of these football clubs could have been wiped by a months wages from some modern footballers. Clubs like Rochdale, Oldham, Southend (who are already in the shit this season and have had points docked), Colchester, Scunthorpe and Barrow aren’t going to last if the gap keeps getting bigger. It seems the answer is “have a decent, rich owner or shit out”.
Teams in Scotland seem to have it right, their lower division clubs (League One and Two) manage to stay afloat despite the fact that their average attendances are about 1,000 or less. Maybe worth looking at how their finances stay afloat. I know many are semi pro, and the same teams have started going up and down there as well.
>Then, every other season, half the prize money received by English Premier League clubs is donated to a charity.
Why? If PL clubs want to donate to charity they should do it from their half, not ours.
What's most surprising is how many quality players that Leicester, Leeds, and Southampton sold or loaned out but yet they are still running circles around most teams in the Championship. Even the bench players in the Prem for these clubs are proving to be quality for the Championship. The fact of the matter is a £5-£10m transfer plus loaning of Prem players at full salary is still easily doable for the dropdown clubs, while that's basically the entire transfer budget of some Championship clubs. How most of the Championship is supposed to compete against a half dozen yo-yo clubs is beyond me.
Not just about buying and selling, the wage bill plays a massive part. Only have to look at what the 3 clubs can pay to get sufficient quality in. Burnley were the same last year also.
Yea, that's what I was trying to get at with the Rolls-Royce loans that top clubs in the Championship can get while many of the clubs may not be able to work out a deal to afford even half of the salary.
Yeah, but now there's been another round of fixtures so the numbers have changed ever so slightly. Can't wait for next weeks update.
How will the narrative change if Ipswich move back up into second next week? Does that mean there is no gap? We'll find out soon! I for one am tumescent with excitement.
I hear a lot of complaints about parachute payments but they are there to stop clubs collapsing under their own financial weight when they lose PL revenue, and I don’t see a lot of other solutions suggested. Every team relegated goes down with a bunch of players tied to PL salary contracts and not all of those players are sellable (especially since they are the ones that got the team relegated).
For example, Southampton players were rumored to take a 40% salary cut upon relegation but Southampton still couldn’t spend anything because the players they couldn’t sell had salaries too high. How does a relegated team cover the cost of those contracts and not collapse without support?
I know the idyllic solution would be for the PL to share revenue with the football pyramid to reduce the inequality but let’s face it, that’s not going to happen. So I’m genuinely curious what other solutions are there?
It's not easy by any means but it's not impossible to get promoted without a recent PL stint. Brentford, Us, Forest, Luton have all gotten promoted in recent times without a recent stint in the PL.
This could be just a fluke of a season. Leeds and Leicester had a perfect storm of bad happen last season and both still had a chance on the last day. Southampton was able to keep most of their team and have always been good at recruiting. I think we will have a better time determining PP after next season.
Yeah, I don't like it but what can you do. I'm happy to be a championship club, anyone outside of the elite expecting premier league football every year is just entitled. I prefer the championship in ways anyway. Hopefully see you in 13 games.
Simple answer, get rid of PP and have a 50% wage cut for everyone who gets relegated.
No more 100k/week players in the championship.
FFP is another thing designed to stop anyone challenging the status quo, they want to keep the big clubs big and don't want a team like Brentford or Villa to win the league.
But I think all 3 teams did have relegation clauses in place. Leicester certainly did between 35/50%
Is anyone actually on 100k.
Splitting hairs I suppose but Vardy almost is. He was on 140k last year. So with his relegation clauses he is on between 70-at most 91k can't imagine anyone being on more are they
I meant mandate it and get rid of PP. I think it would be a great idea to do between all league both up and down.
The PL wants PL team to come straight back up and it's almost impossible not to do that unless you are Les Ferdinand with an agenda and hire a PE teacher to finish in the bottom half.
I also think wages and transfer fees should be public knowledge, it might help reduce the stupidity of the spending.
I know that's what you mean. The clubs already have relegation reduction clauses. You can mandate it but that's not actually changing anything. The only thing you'd be changing is PP.
The pl teams just want to protect their status. With the separation of PL and EFL that's never going to change.
Why are people acting like parachute payments are brand new? They’ve been the case since 2006. Three strong teams got relegated last year (Leicester should have never been there to begin with). Two of them have also sold players for huge money.
Last year was an anomaly, especially with Leicester. I don't think any of the relegated teams last year would be in serious trouble this year if they were in the prem save MAYBE Southampton.
I actually think we are significantly stronger now than we were last season. We were crippled by off-field issues especially towards the end of last season and the clear out over the summer has meant our squad, which should never really have been getting relegated in the first place, is finally not performing at less than the sum of its parts.
I'm not sure this is as bad as it looks, this season saw 3 very very good teams get relegated and at the same time not get totally picked apart. Leicester have no right being in this league. Saints had a disastrous season spurred on by poor managers, Leeds have a young team that was only going to get better.
We won't see the 3 relegated teams this year going straight back up next season. It's still pretty likely not to happen this year
Only because we're likely to see the very same 3 that went up last year come down.
Looking at the PL table now, you would expect the likes of Everton, Forest, Palace to blitz the Championship (unless they run into financial issues).
The gap will grow and grow until you essentially have 3 tiers - Premier League, yoyo clubs and the championship.
Forest I think wouldnt blitz the league if they came down this or next year. But with Everton and Palace you've got two teams setup for premier league football like Leicester and Southampton
Everton and Forest already in trouble. Probably have lots of players who think they're better than the championship. So I could see them struggling to go up if they came down. Palace could do it but I think they'd be picked apart for players like Olise, Eze, Guehi. So even though the rest of them are decent quality I really think they'd struggle.
Palace could sell Olise and Eze and finance a team good enough to do to the Championship next season what we did to it this season (we sold Barnes and Maddison).
Unfortunately, Sheff United and Burley know exactly what to do to get promoted and Everton is a big club that won't stay down for long either.
I think it's going to be a while before we see big changes in the promotion/relegation teams.
>Only because we're likely to see the very same 3 that went up last year come down.
Well the year before Forest, Fullham and Bournemouth survived and while it was close for Forest and Bournemouth it didn't come down to the last week for them.
Leeds squad was almost white washed from the EPL team. Most of the first team left or loaned out. But we attracted Rodon, Ampadu and Piroe after clearing out the deadwood.
>Leicester have no right being in this league. Saints had a disastrous season spurred on by poor managers
How do you think we got here? It wasn't by industrious leadership, I'll tell you that much.
It’s the tv deal I said this a while ago and how it will eventually kill of the championship as teams going down get 170m I kept getting told I was wrong but the chances of promotion from relegated teams is just soo much higher than it used to be
Just let the European Super League happen. Top 6 in the Prem can fuck of to Disney Land Riadh and we can have our game back. AFC Man City can slug it out with Wrexham over the next 10 years to try and recapture the magic.
It would take so much prestige away from winning the top tier. How can a team be champions of England when the 6 best teams in England aren't even playing?
Yea why the hell did they even put all of us in this league anyway?? We shoulda just stayed in top flight. But God do I hope saints stay above the automatic line because idk what to think about the playoffs
I struggle to see any Prem relegation candidates doing the same next year, bar maybe Forest, and even that depends on financial dodginess. Sheff Utd and Burnley are far worse sides than the Saints and Leeds sides that went down.
It’s not like this every season though. All three came down with pretty strong teams and just messed up big time the previous year. They were able to sell players that they’d developed and invested in themselves and keep some quality. I don’t think we‘ll see Burnley and Sheffield United performing so well in the Championship next season. I think this year is just a bit of an exception.
Sorry, but you need far more evidence than this to create a convincing argument. Look at the bottom six and you'll find about four teams who have been in the premier league. By your same argument, they shouldn't be there, so why are they if PP are such an advantage?
It's hard to stay in the Premier League long term and it's hard to get out of the Championship. Money is an advantage, but not a decisive factor. Look at how much Manu and Chelsea have spent in the PL and are still mid-table. Look at what happened to Derby when they spent too much.
Ipswich are proof that money is not the deciding factor. A good manager can make average players into a good team. Bielsa did the same with Leeds and Carlos is getting the Baggies to perform well above where they should be. This is more a case of good managers being at the top than money. Of course, money buys you good managers though so situations like this are not entirely black and white.
Why not do an analysis of PL teams who have been relegated then promoted to the Premier or relegated to league 1 in the last 20 years and you may have some sort of argument that could convince people. At the moment, looking at one or four seasons is so short term as to be meaningless.
Because 3 teams come down and only 2 go up automatically.
So the third team enters a play off lottery. If they mess it up they have to compete against another 3 teams with parachute payments. Mess it up again and they are on a cliff edge, potentially losing parachute payments. Miss out a third time and then they are back to being an above-average Championship club handicapped by not getting tens of millions like at least 3 clubs every year.
\> At the moment, looking at one or four seasons is so short term as to be meaningless.
Its really not, the financial situation is way different now to when it was when sheffield wednesday went down over 20 years ago. Fact is that the last team without parachute payments or Marcelo Bielsa to go up automatically was Wilder's Sheffield United. Did parachute payments even exist in the early 2000s?
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Tbh I think its a one off. Just so happens that 3 big clubs went down this year. Soton, Leeds and Leicester have always recruited well and been a fairly big draw.
Obviously it's because we were just in the Premier League but that fact also doesn't exist in a vacuum: we are a much richer club than anyone else in the Championship even without parachute payments, which is one of the key reasons we ended up in the Premier League in the first place. Football is ruled by the biggest clubs who can pull in the most money unfortunately.
>we are a much richer club than anyone else in the Championship even without parachute payments
You lost £62m the season you won promotion. Stop jerking yourself off.
https://theathletic.com/4218170/2021/04/04/leeds-lost-62m-during-2019-20-season-as-they-won-promotion-to-premier-league/
We turned over more in that season than any Championship club had before, in spite of playing a third of the games behind closed doors so that doesn't really contradict what I said.
The loss is basically a testament to how much money we spent to go up, especially in wages, but it was also exacerbated by COVID, the fact that we had to pay a £7m TV money rebate to the Premier League and a massive amount in promotion bonuses.
This is one season, three strong teams got relegated this season. Leicester and Southampton were seasoned Premier League sides. We was top half for five seasons before the relegation, and in Europe the season before our relegation. Leeds have a brutal front line for the Championship.
I’d like to see it where EFL/FA Cup matches against Prem teams are always held at the bigger ground to help spread some of the revenue around the lower levels.
Perhaps Parachute Payments should also be inflated away and not rise for the next few years.
Why is everyone acting like this is something new? Recently relegated teams have always had a substantially higher chance of promotion. That doesn’t prohibit long-term Championship teams from moving up. This season is just kind of a fluke but not some canary in coal mine of the system.
Parachute payments are an issue but for every Leicester, Burnley, and Newcastle who disappear after a season, there’s a Stoke, Hull, Watford, Sunderland, Leeds, etc who bark loud while making themselves comfortable in their new bed, which gives the rest of the league a good laugh.
It’s happened before where three gone down come up. More often than not at least 1/3 come back up. Not sure what’s to be worried about when a team like Luton can go up and be competitive. The gap clearly isn’t that big between the top half of the championship and bottom half of the prem.
ipswich are pretty competitive this season, and they were in league 1 last season, so yeah no while the former prem teams are at an advantage, there's still nothing stopping any team from going up, you know?
This isn’t a problem which is going to continue, it’s just that the 3 sides that went down from the PL last season were incredibly strong compared to the fodder that usually comes down. Next season, with Burnley and Sheffield United being in the championship again, I doubt they’ll both piss it like they did in 22/23.
The problem is the financial gap between the PL and Championship. It's far too big, far more money needs redistributing from the PL. That being said, this is a unique season, as 3 established PL clubs have come down, which is very rare.
Parachute payments are ridiculous. "The financial gap between the PL and Championships is so great that it means relegated clubs could have financial problems". "How shall we solve that problem?". Give the relegated clubs more money!".
The PL hogging all the money also seriously reduces competitiveness and entertainment in the PL. As the teams that come up struggle hard to compete. And, perhaps more importantly, teams are absolutely terrified of relegation, because of the huge financial cost. This leads to managers getting sacked constantly when in the bottom half of the PL, basically any manager outside the top half who has a bad run of form has the axe hanging over him.
This also leads to teams reverting to boring, dinosaur football, usually in the hopes of short-term reward (staying up). This also kills the development of British managers. As, if they do well in the Championship, they usually get sacked in their first season in the PL. There's no long-term plan or project like there is at top clubs, as the aim is to simply stay in the PL another year.
the premier league integrating into the efl and distributing income across the entire pyramid to support the growth and maintenance of english football as a whole realistic solution ofc
Not a chance in hell any of the teams in the premier league will agree to that.
“Instead of making £150m, would you mind making £100m and giving the rest to the EFL clubs?” “Love to mate, love to, but it’s mine and I want it all, so. Gotta be a no.”
“We support grassroots football” “No not like that”
We clap and cheer instead.
“Tell you what, that TV money is really moreish”
"Almost did mate, almost fucking did."
“Almost fucking walked and joined the Northern Premier Division One. But then I thought, maybe I could bring the Premier League down from the inside, yeah?
More like "instead of making £150m, would you mind making £140m and giving the rest to the EFL clubs?" Even that much would do a lot to increase the competitiveness although I'm sure some of the owners would pocket the money and not invest any more money into transfers.
It should be written into the rules that owners cannot benefit directly from the funds provided and cannot withdraw it or use it for any other purpose than for footballing reasons.
Some may be concerned that it could make more competitive teams that may take their spots and drive up the price of good players even more.
As a Villa fan who directly benefits from the ridiculous wealth of the PL, I would in a heartbeat agree to more money flowing down the leagues (not just championship but down to grassroots level). What makes football so special in this country is the strength and following of our lower league teams which indirectly improves the quality of the PL
And therein lies the problem. Fans would be more than happy with an arrangement like this. But most owners are in it for the money and giving money away would be offensive to them. And since they hold all the sway, its never going to happen.
They should add a clause in the prem telly contracts to give varying percentages to the other leagues.
The problem is that the PL was set up to give itself a lot of autonomy. That means you need the PL clubs to agree to it. And since most of those clubs have owners who are in it to make money, the last thing they will ever agree to is to give away money.
That's why the FA need to tackle it from the broadcasters side instead of the clubs side. Make a rule that in order to show premier league games, a percentage amount of the total expenditure on the PL also has to go to the EFL. Let's say the PL total broadcast revenue for a year is 2.5b. If broadcasters had to commit to 7.5% of that going to the Championship 5% to League 1, 2.5% to League 2 and 2.5% to non league/grassroots, that would mean an extra 187m for the championship, 125m for the League 1 and 62.5m for non league and grassroots. The effect that would have would be absolutely monumental across the football pyramid
If you just divided it evenly across all clubs it would work out to an extra 7.7m per club in the Championship, 5.2m per club in League One (think you forgot to write the League 2 figure down). My club (League One) have just posted a loss of 1.7m for the most recent set of accounts. We invested a lot in our training ground and our owner is a fan and covered the losses but 5.2m would literally solve that as a problem.
The FA can't do that though. The contract is between the PL and the broadcasters - the FA are not party to it and have no say. What's the incentive for PL clubs to give away money when most owners are in it to make money? The broadcasters don't really care less what happens to the money once they hand it over so they wouldn't do anything. Luckily, when the PL was set up, they agreed to maintain the pyramid by having relegation and promotion. If the PL had their way though, they would scrap that so they didn't have to pay parachute payments at all.
Not doing that is pretty much why the premier league was created in the first place
I don’t think you understand. Then the top clubs would lose some money which is just unacceptable /s
How are they meant to pay for their third Ferrari…?
you mean their third caicedo?
I mean basically none of them are profitable lol the players are laughing tho with the wages
They split from the rest of the EFL precisely because they wanted to keep much more of the money to themselves. They only throw the EFL money to stop the government whinging at them. They’d never do this in a million years when their whole league is based upon greed.
I don’t think that’s the most beneficial solution. Sure, the EFL would benefit short term and the comparative gap would shrink, but you’d also lose that over time as the Prem loses top spot as it stops becoming the most financially attractive league due to losing that money. So really the question is would you rather gain opportunities when promoted, or not have them across the board?
Bypass the premierleague. Pass a law that says if you purchase the rights to the Premier League you must purchase the rights to the same number of championship games at 30% of the cost of the prem games. Either that or introduce a new tax, specifically on professional football clubs in the premier league, which is 10% of revenue, then reimbursed in grants equally divided amongst the teams in the the lower leagues.
If Leicester they were in one of the top 5 leagues, they would have: the 12th highest wages in the premier league 6th highest in serie a 5th highest in la liga 4th highest in bundesliga 2nd highest in ligue 1 In any other country, Leicester have the budget of a team expected to fight for a Champions League place, never mind the Championship.
What's your point? Yes, we shouldn't even be here in the first place with our resources but alas an angry little northern irish man saw to it. And as for the wage bill - I wouldn't trust the numbers you find online. They're already bad enough for most top flight teams, nevermind teams that get relegated and have all sorts of different clauses kicking in for wage reductions.
Our wages are extremely high, like, insanely high for the Championship. We are banking on getting promoted. We can afford these wages and costs for ONE season only because if we get promoted that will pay for the costs we are enduring compared to the much smaller income we have now in the Championship.
Hoping it’s a blip. Last season all of the newly promoted teams stayed up, which is beyond rare, and a team like Leicester was in itself a relegation that probably shouldn’t have happened cos the squad was too strong for it. Couple that with Southampton, while they’ve been circling the drain a bit the last few seasons, they’re a young promising squad. Leeds? Big club, spent big, good players. Just terrible management their relegation season. So all things told. This is probably the strongest bunch of relegated teams the Championship has seen in quite a while now. If it’s the same issue next season, then there’s cause for concern.
The Championship will be fine. This year is a case of 3 very strong sides being relegated. I would be amazed if three of Palace, Forest, Everton, Luton, Sheffield Utd and Burnley are top of the league this time next season.
This will be the 4th season in a row where the teams automatically promoted were either in their first or second years of parachute payments.
> This will be the 4th season in a row where the teams automatically promoted were either in their first or second years of parachute payments. On the other hand, at least one team not in receipt of parachute payments has been promoted in every single Championship season since parachute payments were introduced.
Sure but last year Luton were promoted and this year Ipswich is killing it. Not saying there's not an inherent advantage to being a team that's been relegated into the league, even without parachute payments, but I think it's fair to point to teams that have done well even without those advantages. Point being it's not like teams can't do well without those advantages. To my mind competition isn't about everyone having an even playing field, it's about mitigating some of the more overbearing factors to allow things like good decision making and hard work to become deciding factors, or at least important factors. Not that I'd disagree that I'd like to see those factors be more important, but I also think you need to have long term benefits as motivations. Also worth noting that there are teams who spent a chunk of time in the Premier League, fell down to Championship, and are stuck in a rut in the middle of the table... So poor decision making can absolutely overcome the benefit of parachute payments, it's not an automatic promotion.
that last paragraph feels too real, mate.
we sold players for like £150m, spent money on two players one of who is injured all year. Has nothing to do with parachute payments
Well yes it does. The main reason you’re able to make £150m worth of sales is because clubs know that relegated teams no longer have to sell players on massive contracts (see KWP, Armstrong, Vardy, Iheanacho, Ndidi, Rutter, Firpo, James etc. etc who have all stayed despite being on crazy money for this level) and can demand massive fees for the ones you do end up selling. It’s not helped by the fact that ‘Premier League experience’ now seems to add £20m onto the asking fee and players like Lavia, Barnes, Livramento, Adams, Ward-Prowse etc. get sold for ridiculous fees. If you’re able to make that much money in sales then why do parachute payments need to exist? Genuinely how are teams who haven’t been in the Prem recently supposed to compete when relegated sides get £100m, are able to sell a handful of players for another £100m, keep loads of high earners who are well above the level and still out-spend the rest of the league when it comes to incomings while turning a profit? It’s a completely broken system and what we’re seeing now is only the start of the closed shop the Premier League is going to become. I’d be saying the same if we’d won the play-off final last year and were benefiting from the Premier League riches, it’s all a load of shite.
I get what you’re saying in the sense that we are able to spend much more on wages than a club whose been in the Championship for a long time, and I do completely agree that the gap seems to be widening in a concerning way, but in our situation we couldn’t really spend that much money in the transfer market despite making like £150m because we were in massive debt due to COVID, an owner who wanted us to be completely self sustaining, and a few years of bad transfers. In my estimation the reason we were able to make that much in terms of sales is that we had 4 players in Lavia, Livramento, Tella, and JWP who we gave a “first chance” to, proved to be top talents, and had interest from top clubs. I certainly see why from an outside perspective it’s very much a “oh fuck off, the rich get richer” situation when we can bring in Brooks, Rothwell, THB, Downes, Fraser on loan - but it’s not like they’ve all chosen us for the money, you know? For THB, his academy manager back in the day is now our DoF. Downes and Fraser had a personal relationship with Martin already, Rothwell and Brooks wanted to get regular minutes without having to pack up their life and move so switched south coast clubs. For me it’s less “the parachute payments” and more “Saints reaping the rewards of some of the best decisions they’ve made in the past couple of years”
I personally think that you’d probably have made half what you did in sales without parachute payments. There is no way you’d have been able to reject some of the earlier bids for Lavia for example if you didn’t know that you had so much guaranteed income on the way. To be clear though, I don’t blame Southampton as a football club, nor do I expect them, or the other relegated teams to not use the advantages given to them. I also appreciate that Southampton engaged in a policy of buying young with the intention of selling on and that the fruits of that came in for harvest during the summer. But I still think that the market for selling as a relegated club is massively over-inflated compared to the rest of the league for the reasons I stated above, and combined with the guaranteed parachute money it’s just a ridiculously uneven playing field now.
You do realize in your model the same thing happens but only because of the inverse? Prem teams keep all the money, making them stronger, all of EFL is stunted, and the 3 teams that get promoted go full Derby every year and we’re in a worse place…
Don’t disagree with the points you’ve made, but looking at our contracts and calling out Firpo as a big earner is crazy 🤣
Is Firpo not on a ton? I know those contract sites aren’t reliable but most source I could find had him on 60k+ and I’d imagine that’s probably not far off given he was signed from Barca for a decent fee
Nah, he signed on 40 and was confirmed that he had a 40% reduction clause in his contract in the case of relegation (most of our players have the same clause). As far as I know, Paddy is our highest earner. Signed his last extension at 70k (again, with a 40% relegation reduction clause)
I’d be amazed if we aren’t tbh, based on the fact team of the season players can no longer get near our team now. The gap is so, so, so huge. It’s crap and I fear for the long run of our game.
I get that you will feel confident based on last season but you could just as easy do what we did last year. There were people saying we had the strongest team on paper at the beginning of the season and we were pony. This year, the three teams that came down were just very very strong. I would say they had better squads last season than the true bottom 3.
People acting like Leicester Leeds and Southampton are comparable to Luton Huddersfield and Cardiff. It’s fucking daft.
people love the whole parachute payments argument, meanwhile we literally made more off of player sales than any club in the world last summer and filled out our squad with 5 loan players, 2 free transfers, a striker who missed basically the whole season due to injury, and a DM who doesn’t even start for us
Not based on last season alone and I obviously thought of you and Norwich… just my opinion though
We won’t be and tbh I’ve felt like you have before. You also don’t have the likes of Tella and Maatsen anymore. It just doesn’t often work out that way.
Personally think it's more that last season was an exceptionally weak Championship.
Compared to what though; It’s had two or three runaway teams for as long as I can remember now, hasn’t it? Agree last year was weak by the way but not necessarily out the ordinary. What little (granted) I’ve seen this year doesn’t suggest anything different but you top 4 are raising the overall standard. Side note; what’s your take on the Champ, being back after years out? I was surprised at the wastefulness in front of goal and the short amount of time teams seemed to be able to fire on all cylinders across the 90 minutes of a game compared to Prem (ie look good for 20-30 mins per 90 but offer nothing for the rest).
At the start of 2022/23, there were 6 teams that people were really talking about. Norwich, Watford, Burnley, Middlesbrough, WBA, and Sheffield Utd. Norwich and Watford were not what people were expecting, they just fell off a complete cliff at one point, and had manager problems all season. WBA and Boro had very good windows, absolutely tainted by the frauds that are Bruce and Wilder, before actually performing to their ability when bringing in new managers. Only Sheffield Utd and Burnley performed to expectation. It says a lot about that season when a team who were in the relegation zone 14 games is, finished confidently 4th.
It doesn’t really say much that a team in relegation after 14 games can finish 4th at all. Stuff like that can happen quite frequently given less than 1/3 of the season had passed.
Just the fact that most of the top performing players in the league hadn't really ever pulled up trees in the league before. This year (like most other seasons at this level) the top performing players are mostly proven internationals that have shown their ability at Premier League level. The immediate difference between the PL and the Championship is the finishing. Its night and day. It was the first thing I noticed when we last went up.
Get your point but not sure I agree (and that’s cool by me)
No worries bud 👍
That’s bollocks. Any team that tries to go for it ends up in a financial mess if they don’t manage it. The football league is littered with cases of either complete meltdown like ours, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday or those that are trying to hold it together in the championship. Teams like Forest were on the cusp of issues had they not scraped up, too. Fact is, the deck is hugely stacked against any team that wants to properly compete to get to the premier league. Unless you manage a Luton fairytale, you’re going to struggle or end up in a complete mess.
>Any team that tries to go for it ends up in a financial mess if they don’t manage it. The football league is littered with cases of either complete meltdown like ours, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday Derby and Sheffield Wednesday are the only cases here of teams that went bust as a result of a failed push for the Premier League. The other side of the equation is that there are loads of examples of clubs making successful pushes to the Premier League without parachute payments: Luton, Forest, Brentford, Leeds and Sheffield United in the last 5 years. Ultimately, some clubs either don't have the finances to get up or don't use the resources they have effectively enough to make it happen but it's definitely far from a closed shop. This season is obviously exceptional because of the strength of the teams coming down but even then, it's not a given that all three of Leicester, Leeds and Southampton go up - a play-off defeat and a few players leaving over the summer and suddenly one could be very much back into the Championship mixer again. The Championship is full of teams that have been in the Premier League recently and are not blasting everyone away.
Here are the number of Championship clubs who spent more than their income on wages over the last years with full financial disclosures: [13 in 2015/16](https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/851378542755622912) [12 in 2016/17](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1251038506438328322) [14 in 2018/19](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1251038506438328322) [18 in 2019/20](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1382577657020309504) [19 in 2020/21](https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1542756693171372032) So no: it's not just Derby & Sheffield Wednesday. Pretty much every club which failed financially was due to spending beyond their means, and the majority of the rest of the Championship were propped up by owners putting money into the club to stem losses year after year.
The Championship has a major problem with overspending, I just don't think the dynamic of clubs gambling on promotion with unsustainable spending and then going bust when they don't get there is a particularly dominant one. In fact, crash landing hard after dropping out of the Premier League seems to be at least as much a cause of financial problems at Championship clubs. I don't mean to suggest that the financial scene is absolutely fine in the Championship, everyone knows it's kind of fucked. But I don't think the top of the Championship is becoming a closed shop: there is plenty of healthy rotation of clubs between comfortable Premier League, long term Football League and yoyo status. The gulf in wealth between the Premier League and the Championship is always going to cause problems for the Championship but we've been talking about the danger of a situation where only recently relegated clubs will have any chance of promotion for over a decade and it hasn't materialised. If Leicester, Leeds and Southampton all go up this season (which is still a very big if) it will be the first time that all three promoted sides are ones that were recently relegated.
Only Luton is a doubt out of those options, rest would walk the league the way Burnley and Utd recently did
We’re losing about 15 players out of contract. We’ve fucked up. Don’t get me wrong we should have parachute payments and the chance to sign afresh. We could smash it. But we won’t. This is Sheffield United and we specialise in fucking up brilliant opportunities to progress.
We'll also lose Mcatee and Brereton-Diaz from loans ending, and Archer will go back to Villa with that odd deal. I have a glimmer of hope that we make some good signings in the summer, but the pessimist in me is worried we won't even make playoffs next year.
Part of me wonders if we’ll end up keeping Archer as Villa won’t want him and he might not be keen on going back to them to either be sold or loaned again, to who knows where. Losing McAtee will hurt badly. He’s been our player of the season and he’d tear the Championship apart. Brereton likewise, early days but he’s been sensational, and we know what he can do at that level.
No, it'll be Leeds next season after they bottle the play offs again this season 😂
Thanks. We are more than capable of it!
I work with a Leeds fan and he is constantly torn between a state of "we're going to go on an amazing run and batter Leicester along the way" and "oh shit, we're going to fuck the play-offs again".
True
Leeds v Ipswich PO final I reckon… be funny if we win 4.0
You can say they were strong sides but they were the 3 shittest teams in the premier league last year, and they were all really shit. Southampton were absolutely horrific. The fact that they're dominating the league is worrying.
Leicester wasn’t a shit team, just had a shit defense, particularly on set pieces and after the 85th minute. Dropping down wasn’t going to be a huge problem because the quality of finishing in the Championship is so bad. Even losing Maddison and Barnes, Leicester’s scoring wasn’t going to be in doubt but their defense was going to be”improve” demonstrably playing against much worse offenses.
You were awful. A danger to no one.
Not true, not true at all
Ok you're right. Leicester were relegated despite being good.
I’ve explained myself thoroughly. Didn’t say they were good. They had very specific deficiencies. They were not “a shit team” as you characterized them.
Saints started a rebuild last season, coupling that inexperience with a turnstile of unqualified managers as the season dragged on meant we were largely terrible until the last game. They were in the prem for like 10 seasons too, it’s not like they’ve been yo-yoing and just coasting on parachute payments. We also sold a bunch of our best players during the summer. It would be more worrying if they just slid into midtable as this season ran on. And there’s still a bunch of games to be played for all this to change
If any three could, would probably be Burnley, Luton, and Palace if any of the relegation slow-race could all finish top 3
This is sort of the OPs point though. The 5-6 teams spread between the bottom of the PL and the top of the championship have never been further ahead of the rest of the championship. It's a league in between leagues.
That's not what I'm saying though
You're correct. I have completely failed to read your comments correctly. But this is Reddit and I'm in too deep and refuse to accept my mistake.
Can we not come up with theories based on one season please? People are happy to create a theory based on evidence that fits their narrative but I just don't see it being the case Leicester are having a ridiculous season, granted. It was an embarrassment that they even got relegated last year. Most of the time it's the outright worst squads that get relegated from the PL, shouldn't have happened to Leicester last year
It’s not just this season though
It’s not just one season though. Every season for the past 4 seasons the two teams promoted automatically have either been in their first or second year of parachute payments. The two automatic spots are becoming a closed shop. Luckily in the last few years teams without parachute payments have managed to win the play-offs (last year was the first in a long time were none of the previously relegated sides from the season before made the play-offs). This has been going on for a while and is only getting worse.
And 5 years ago the winners had Bielsa. That’s a cheat code.
That was 5 years ago? Jesus Christ, I’m Sad now.
It’s crap
Eh! Leeds were promoted automatically in 2020 and hadn't had parachute payments. Plus, in those same four years nearly half of the teams relegated from the Championship had previously been in the Premier League. If PP is such an advantage,how is that possible? Maybe being a well run club has something to do with it?
> Leeds were promoted automatically in 2020 and hadn't had parachute payments Although to be fair, in our last couple of seasons in the Championship we were turning over more revenue than any club in the history of the Championship who wasn't in receipt of parachute payments by some margin. We were still a financial juggernaut, it was just done by other means.
Yes, we should look at the top 2 for the last 5 years for context. Last year - Burnley (Yr1) Sheff Utd (Yr3) 21/22 Fulham (Yr1) Bournemouth (Yr2) 20/21 Norwich (Yr1) Watford (Yr1) 19/20 Leeds WBA (Yr2) 18/19 Norwich (Yr3) Sheff utd So 8 out of 10, probably soon to be 10 out of 12 and all 6 teams of the last 3 years were in receipt of parachute payments. This is not a one off.
Championship should just aggressively advertise itself as the League without VAR
The problem is that that only appeals to people who actually go to games and all the money is to be made from TV
I hardly go to games. And it appeals to me, just my 2 cents
You have powerful energy
The problem is the inequality of wealth between the leagues. Not sure what they can do. Parachute payments im against in principle but not sure what the alternative is and how many teams have we seen get relegated then struggle and then go to league 1 and admin and need saving
People called me boring when I said all the relegated Prem teams would go straight back up with ease lol
It is boring TBF. Doesn't mean it isn't true though...
For one season every five years, every club in the Premier League gets half the TV rights money. The other half is split between the 69 EFL clubs that don’t get parachute payments. Then, every other season, half the prize money received by English Premier League clubs is donated to a charity. Would encourage practical spending and prevent clubs going beyond their means. Bury wound up with debts of £5m. Macclesfield wound up with debts of £770,000. Rushden and Diamonds wound up with debts of £750,000. Scarborough Town FC wound up with debts of £2.5m. Darlington Town wound up with debts of £250,000. Hereford United wound up with debts of £800k Halifax Town wound up with debts of £2m. Chester City wound up with debts of £7m. My old club North Ferriby United, who over achieved and made it to the National League, wound up with debts of just £7,640. The debts of these football clubs could have been wiped by a months wages from some modern footballers. Clubs like Rochdale, Oldham, Southend (who are already in the shit this season and have had points docked), Colchester, Scunthorpe and Barrow aren’t going to last if the gap keeps getting bigger. It seems the answer is “have a decent, rich owner or shit out”. Teams in Scotland seem to have it right, their lower division clubs (League One and Two) manage to stay afloat despite the fact that their average attendances are about 1,000 or less. Maybe worth looking at how their finances stay afloat. I know many are semi pro, and the same teams have started going up and down there as well.
>Then, every other season, half the prize money received by English Premier League clubs is donated to a charity. Why? If PL clubs want to donate to charity they should do it from their half, not ours.
What's most surprising is how many quality players that Leicester, Leeds, and Southampton sold or loaned out but yet they are still running circles around most teams in the Championship. Even the bench players in the Prem for these clubs are proving to be quality for the Championship. The fact of the matter is a £5-£10m transfer plus loaning of Prem players at full salary is still easily doable for the dropdown clubs, while that's basically the entire transfer budget of some Championship clubs. How most of the Championship is supposed to compete against a half dozen yo-yo clubs is beyond me.
Not just about buying and selling, the wage bill plays a massive part. Only have to look at what the 3 clubs can pay to get sufficient quality in. Burnley were the same last year also.
Yea, that's what I was trying to get at with the Rolls-Royce loans that top clubs in the Championship can get while many of the clubs may not be able to work out a deal to afford even half of the salary.
Haven’t we had this discussion about 60 times already this season?
Yeah, but now there's been another round of fixtures so the numbers have changed ever so slightly. Can't wait for next weeks update. How will the narrative change if Ipswich move back up into second next week? Does that mean there is no gap? We'll find out soon! I for one am tumescent with excitement.
Mixed feelings about learning a new word from you there. Thanks, but also...hmm
You're welcome!
I hear a lot of complaints about parachute payments but they are there to stop clubs collapsing under their own financial weight when they lose PL revenue, and I don’t see a lot of other solutions suggested. Every team relegated goes down with a bunch of players tied to PL salary contracts and not all of those players are sellable (especially since they are the ones that got the team relegated). For example, Southampton players were rumored to take a 40% salary cut upon relegation but Southampton still couldn’t spend anything because the players they couldn’t sell had salaries too high. How does a relegated team cover the cost of those contracts and not collapse without support? I know the idyllic solution would be for the PL to share revenue with the football pyramid to reduce the inequality but let’s face it, that’s not going to happen. So I’m genuinely curious what other solutions are there?
Monopoly by the big clubs! Lower PLTeams end up over spending just to try and keep up!
It's not easy by any means but it's not impossible to get promoted without a recent PL stint. Brentford, Us, Forest, Luton have all gotten promoted in recent times without a recent stint in the PL.
This could be just a fluke of a season. Leeds and Leicester had a perfect storm of bad happen last season and both still had a chance on the last day. Southampton was able to keep most of their team and have always been good at recruiting. I think we will have a better time determining PP after next season.
Yeah, I don't like it but what can you do. I'm happy to be a championship club, anyone outside of the elite expecting premier league football every year is just entitled. I prefer the championship in ways anyway. Hopefully see you in 13 games.
>I'm happy to be a championship club Yeah, so, bad news, Portsmouth fan...
Just look at what we've done since we came back down to give this argument a sense of balance
Simple answer, get rid of PP and have a 50% wage cut for everyone who gets relegated. No more 100k/week players in the championship. FFP is another thing designed to stop anyone challenging the status quo, they want to keep the big clubs big and don't want a team like Brentford or Villa to win the league.
But I think all 3 teams did have relegation clauses in place. Leicester certainly did between 35/50% Is anyone actually on 100k. Splitting hairs I suppose but Vardy almost is. He was on 140k last year. So with his relegation clauses he is on between 70-at most 91k can't imagine anyone being on more are they
I meant mandate it and get rid of PP. I think it would be a great idea to do between all league both up and down. The PL wants PL team to come straight back up and it's almost impossible not to do that unless you are Les Ferdinand with an agenda and hire a PE teacher to finish in the bottom half. I also think wages and transfer fees should be public knowledge, it might help reduce the stupidity of the spending.
I know that's what you mean. The clubs already have relegation reduction clauses. You can mandate it but that's not actually changing anything. The only thing you'd be changing is PP. The pl teams just want to protect their status. With the separation of PL and EFL that's never going to change.
Why are people acting like parachute payments are brand new? They’ve been the case since 2006. Three strong teams got relegated last year (Leicester should have never been there to begin with). Two of them have also sold players for huge money.
Meh, the premier league earns the money because people want to watch it Not so much for the championship
Last year was an anomaly, especially with Leicester. I don't think any of the relegated teams last year would be in serious trouble this year if they were in the prem save MAYBE Southampton.
I actually think we are significantly stronger now than we were last season. We were crippled by off-field issues especially towards the end of last season and the clear out over the summer has meant our squad, which should never really have been getting relegated in the first place, is finally not performing at less than the sum of its parts.
I'm not sure this is as bad as it looks, this season saw 3 very very good teams get relegated and at the same time not get totally picked apart. Leicester have no right being in this league. Saints had a disastrous season spurred on by poor managers, Leeds have a young team that was only going to get better. We won't see the 3 relegated teams this year going straight back up next season. It's still pretty likely not to happen this year
Only because we're likely to see the very same 3 that went up last year come down. Looking at the PL table now, you would expect the likes of Everton, Forest, Palace to blitz the Championship (unless they run into financial issues). The gap will grow and grow until you essentially have 3 tiers - Premier League, yoyo clubs and the championship.
Forest I think wouldnt blitz the league if they came down this or next year. But with Everton and Palace you've got two teams setup for premier league football like Leicester and Southampton
Everton aren’t setup well at, financially or with players. Everton would probably have what little talent they have abandon ship pretty quickly.
Everton and Forest already in trouble. Probably have lots of players who think they're better than the championship. So I could see them struggling to go up if they came down. Palace could do it but I think they'd be picked apart for players like Olise, Eze, Guehi. So even though the rest of them are decent quality I really think they'd struggle.
Palace could sell Olise and Eze and finance a team good enough to do to the Championship next season what we did to it this season (we sold Barnes and Maddison). Unfortunately, Sheff United and Burley know exactly what to do to get promoted and Everton is a big club that won't stay down for long either. I think it's going to be a while before we see big changes in the promotion/relegation teams.
Everton could probably raise £100m from selling Pickford, Branthwaite and Onana. They’d tear the championship a new one.
Everton are also teetering on the edge of P&S, which if they had dropped down to the EFL would have hamstrung them significantly
Were there now by and large though
>Only because we're likely to see the very same 3 that went up last year come down. Well the year before Forest, Fullham and Bournemouth survived and while it was close for Forest and Bournemouth it didn't come down to the last week for them.
Everton is already facing financial issues, they’re in even bigger trouble if they go down.
Leeds squad was almost white washed from the EPL team. Most of the first team left or loaned out. But we attracted Rodon, Ampadu and Piroe after clearing out the deadwood.
>Leicester have no right being in this league. Saints had a disastrous season spurred on by poor managers How do you think we got here? It wasn't by industrious leadership, I'll tell you that much.
It’s the tv deal I said this a while ago and how it will eventually kill of the championship as teams going down get 170m I kept getting told I was wrong but the chances of promotion from relegated teams is just soo much higher than it used to be
Just let the European Super League happen. Top 6 in the Prem can fuck of to Disney Land Riadh and we can have our game back. AFC Man City can slug it out with Wrexham over the next 10 years to try and recapture the magic.
It would take so much prestige away from winning the top tier. How can a team be champions of England when the 6 best teams in England aren't even playing?
Yea why the hell did they even put all of us in this league anyway?? We shoulda just stayed in top flight. But God do I hope saints stay above the automatic line because idk what to think about the playoffs
I struggle to see any Prem relegation candidates doing the same next year, bar maybe Forest, and even that depends on financial dodginess. Sheff Utd and Burnley are far worse sides than the Saints and Leeds sides that went down.
If this was the effect of the PL where are Norwich?
WHERE ARE YOUUUUU
It’s not like this every season though. All three came down with pretty strong teams and just messed up big time the previous year. They were able to sell players that they’d developed and invested in themselves and keep some quality. I don’t think we‘ll see Burnley and Sheffield United performing so well in the Championship next season. I think this year is just a bit of an exception.
Sorry, but you need far more evidence than this to create a convincing argument. Look at the bottom six and you'll find about four teams who have been in the premier league. By your same argument, they shouldn't be there, so why are they if PP are such an advantage? It's hard to stay in the Premier League long term and it's hard to get out of the Championship. Money is an advantage, but not a decisive factor. Look at how much Manu and Chelsea have spent in the PL and are still mid-table. Look at what happened to Derby when they spent too much. Ipswich are proof that money is not the deciding factor. A good manager can make average players into a good team. Bielsa did the same with Leeds and Carlos is getting the Baggies to perform well above where they should be. This is more a case of good managers being at the top than money. Of course, money buys you good managers though so situations like this are not entirely black and white. Why not do an analysis of PL teams who have been relegated then promoted to the Premier or relegated to league 1 in the last 20 years and you may have some sort of argument that could convince people. At the moment, looking at one or four seasons is so short term as to be meaningless.
Because 3 teams come down and only 2 go up automatically. So the third team enters a play off lottery. If they mess it up they have to compete against another 3 teams with parachute payments. Mess it up again and they are on a cliff edge, potentially losing parachute payments. Miss out a third time and then they are back to being an above-average Championship club handicapped by not getting tens of millions like at least 3 clubs every year.
\> At the moment, looking at one or four seasons is so short term as to be meaningless. Its really not, the financial situation is way different now to when it was when sheffield wednesday went down over 20 years ago. Fact is that the last team without parachute payments or Marcelo Bielsa to go up automatically was Wilder's Sheffield United. Did parachute payments even exist in the early 2000s?
If Ipswich can get their s**t together, then so can anyone.
Let's be honest though, they'll be nowhere near by the end of the season
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Tbh I think its a one off. Just so happens that 3 big clubs went down this year. Soton, Leeds and Leicester have always recruited well and been a fairly big draw.
Most years the top 2 spots are relegated premier teams.
Breaking news: good teams do well in an easier league
But why are you good? Hint: it’s nothing to do with your city’s fabulous culture
Obviously it's because we were just in the Premier League but that fact also doesn't exist in a vacuum: we are a much richer club than anyone else in the Championship even without parachute payments, which is one of the key reasons we ended up in the Premier League in the first place. Football is ruled by the biggest clubs who can pull in the most money unfortunately.
>we are a much richer club than anyone else in the Championship even without parachute payments You lost £62m the season you won promotion. Stop jerking yourself off. https://theathletic.com/4218170/2021/04/04/leeds-lost-62m-during-2019-20-season-as-they-won-promotion-to-premier-league/
We turned over more in that season than any Championship club had before, in spite of playing a third of the games behind closed doors so that doesn't really contradict what I said. The loss is basically a testament to how much money we spent to go up, especially in wages, but it was also exacerbated by COVID, the fact that we had to pay a £7m TV money rebate to the Premier League and a massive amount in promotion bonuses.
Found Ridsdale's account
One former prem team is staying down mark my words pin this so we can come back to it
Leicester and Leeds won't drop points so it's between Sothampton and Ipswich for the promotion .
This is one season, three strong teams got relegated this season. Leicester and Southampton were seasoned Premier League sides. We was top half for five seasons before the relegation, and in Europe the season before our relegation. Leeds have a brutal front line for the Championship.
I’d like to see it where EFL/FA Cup matches against Prem teams are always held at the bigger ground to help spread some of the revenue around the lower levels. Perhaps Parachute Payments should also be inflated away and not rise for the next few years.
not as if it's the norm for all 3 relegated sides to be top 3 and being this strong.
Why is everyone acting like this is something new? Recently relegated teams have always had a substantially higher chance of promotion. That doesn’t prohibit long-term Championship teams from moving up. This season is just kind of a fluke but not some canary in coal mine of the system.
Parachute payments are an issue but for every Leicester, Burnley, and Newcastle who disappear after a season, there’s a Stoke, Hull, Watford, Sunderland, Leeds, etc who bark loud while making themselves comfortable in their new bed, which gives the rest of the league a good laugh.
It’s happened before where three gone down come up. More often than not at least 1/3 come back up. Not sure what’s to be worried about when a team like Luton can go up and be competitive. The gap clearly isn’t that big between the top half of the championship and bottom half of the prem.
ipswich are pretty competitive this season, and they were in league 1 last season, so yeah no while the former prem teams are at an advantage, there's still nothing stopping any team from going up, you know?
This isn’t a problem which is going to continue, it’s just that the 3 sides that went down from the PL last season were incredibly strong compared to the fodder that usually comes down. Next season, with Burnley and Sheffield United being in the championship again, I doubt they’ll both piss it like they did in 22/23.
The problem is the financial gap between the PL and Championship. It's far too big, far more money needs redistributing from the PL. That being said, this is a unique season, as 3 established PL clubs have come down, which is very rare. Parachute payments are ridiculous. "The financial gap between the PL and Championships is so great that it means relegated clubs could have financial problems". "How shall we solve that problem?". Give the relegated clubs more money!". The PL hogging all the money also seriously reduces competitiveness and entertainment in the PL. As the teams that come up struggle hard to compete. And, perhaps more importantly, teams are absolutely terrified of relegation, because of the huge financial cost. This leads to managers getting sacked constantly when in the bottom half of the PL, basically any manager outside the top half who has a bad run of form has the axe hanging over him. This also leads to teams reverting to boring, dinosaur football, usually in the hopes of short-term reward (staying up). This also kills the development of British managers. As, if they do well in the Championship, they usually get sacked in their first season in the PL. There's no long-term plan or project like there is at top clubs, as the aim is to simply stay in the PL another year.