Three up three down is a sign of the Premier League times
It's the first time in 26 years that all three promoted clubs have been relegated straight back, and this doesn't feel like a coincidence.
It’s not quite mathematically guaranteed, of course. On the final day of the season, there remains a possibility that Burnley could shovel goals past Nottingham Forest while Luton Town catch light against Fulham. Forest will go into their final game at Turf Moor three points above Luton and twelve goals in terms of difference better off and, well, you never know, do you?
You do, of course. There’s no way on God’s green earth that Luton are going to overcome twelve goals on the final day of the season, even presuming that they win their match while Forest lose theirs. I’ve mentioned on these pages before that if you’re at the point of saying that if something is not quite mathmetically guaranteed, it’s essentially guaranteed. Luton Town are, to all intents and purposes, basically relegated.
This season will mark the first time in 26 years that all three clubs promoted into the Premier League were relegated straight back, which feels all the more surprising because we’re so consistently told what a calamity the newly-promoted teams will be at their new, elevated level. If the newly-promoted teams were actually as bad as everybody thought they were going to be before the start of the season, this would be a far more regular occurrence than it actually is, wouldn’t it?
Of course, the Premier League is a somewhat different place to that which it was 26 years ago. By the last day of the 1997/98 season, two of the three promoted teams—Barnsley and Crystal Palace—were already down, and that Bolton Wanderers joined them was only a matter of goal difference after Everton drew 1-1 with Coventry on the last day of the season. And Bolton went down with forty points that season, a figure that feels inconceivable in 2024.
This sort of change in the constitution of the division takes a long time to percolate through to the culture that surrounds it. Remarkably, you will still find the occasional pundit, who presumably hasn’t checked a final league table in the last quarter of a century, breezily determining that 40 points is the cut-off point at which relegation can safely be dismissed. The number of clubs relegated with that number of points over the last two decades has been precisely zero, while over the last four seasons only three of the twelve clubs to have been relegated have managed more than 30.
And this, no matter how much the supporters of ‘bigger’ clubs might not like the idea, is very bad for the Premier League. One of league’s bigger selling points throughout its years of rapid expansion was meeting that fine balance between catering for the wants of supporters of the biggest clubs and competitive balance within the division.
On the one hand, new supporters into the division—and especially from abroad, the market with the capacity for enormous growth, with the domestic market effectively saturated—didn’t want unpredictability. They wanted—and still do want—the comfort blanket of knowing that their team was The Biggest. You only have to look at the caterwauling whenever Chelsea or Manchester United have failed this season to see that.
But at the same time, on the other hand, that sense of jeopardy—however slight it might be—is necessary to maintain interest in the League. Being so predictable that it’s hardly worth tuning in to find out what happens in a match is hardly what either the League or broadcasters would want. The more there is to play for, the more people subscribe and watch. The more people subscribe and watch, the more money they make. It’s not a complicated calculation.
If you ever maintain a degree of surprise that the Premier League has not simply detethered itself from the rest of English football altogether, this is the most likely single explanation, certainly far more likely than the League considering it the ‘right thing to do’, or any woke, Communist nonsense like that. It is in the Premier League’s interest not to break away completely, otherwise they would have done so by now, although it should be added that with new owners so many clubs who are very much used to walled gardens, how long that remains the case may become is far from guaranteed.
Such a seismic change wouldn’t come from the biggest clubs. They don’t care, because put simply, it won’t affect them. Manchester United, for example, go into meltdown whenever they drop below sixth place in the Premier League. The idea of them being humilatingly relegated, as they were fifty years ago this very month, is just about inconceivable in the football world that kowtows to the whims of the biggest clubs at just about every turn.
The Premier League tried to rein this gap in through its distribution of television money, but even this feels like a paper tiger, these days. Domestic television and prize money remains fairly equitably shared between clubs, with the most that be earned being around 1.6 times the lowest. But overseas rights money is not calculated the same way.
Overseas revenues had been shared equally among the Premier League clubs since 1992, when that income was negligible. However, as football has become a global entertainment product, the significance of international TV rights has become evident. As a consequence, the “big six” clubs demanded a greater share of the income, claiming that they were the ‘pull’ for global audiences.
A compromise was reached in 2018. Since 2019 the current level of revenue from overseas TV rights sales will still be shared equally, but any increase on top of that has been distributed according to their league position in the given season. At the time that this agreement was first reached, the total amount of overseas television money was £3.3bn.
This rose to £5.05bn, an increase of over 50%, in just five years, while the biggest clubs also draw in the most sponsorship and commercial revenue, far greater match day revenues, and all that extra money from European football. Small wonder that the gap is huge and continuing to grow, and with the implicit threat of Super Leagues and the like continuing to hang in the air (and with more or less everything that UEFA has done since fans fought off the 2021 European Super League proposals confirming that they weren’t interested in the betterment of the game, only in controlling the money themselves), the likelihood of that getting much better is as slim as it ever has been.
What’s critical is that supporters start to understand that the owners of football clubs have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of the game as a whole in this country. If Evangelos Marinakis—who, to be fair, has been almost impressive in the extent to which he’s turned Nottingham Forest from one of the more widely-beloved clubs in the the Premier League into a perpetual whining machine—thought the could get the numbers to make it a closed shop, you can bet a pound to a penny that he would.
And it's worth briefly mentioning that there are extenuating circumstances surrounding two of last season's promoted clubs. Sheffield United were (and remain) a basket case for reasons that have little to do with which division they happen to be playing in at any given time, while Luton Town were a non-league club a decade ago, albeit a temporarily embarrassed one. It's a little more tenuous, but you could build a case that Burnley's leveraged buyout takeover of several years ago changed the profile of that club from Premier League mainstays to yo-yo club.
This has already been reflected in the mixed feelings of supporters upon promotion. Excitement at promotion is naturally going to be tempered, should it be just about certain that you'll be unlikely to win as many as a quarter of your games the next season. Even those staying up's relief at having done so often seems tempered by the likelihood of no improvement the following season. It's exactly the sort of the predictability that the Premier League spent thirty years yeti trying to swerve, a fight that it's starting to feel they're starting to abandon.
And this precisely why I have very little time for the PL, its not a competition any more.
An excellent piece and I’d point out that there is a lot of very careful Not Noticing going on when it comes to the equality of competition. (And to be fair, any game for the Big Clubs that isn’t against another Big Club is treated by their manager, players and armchair supporters as an irritating distraction from the midweek Champions League trip to Denmark or Belgium.)
As for Burnley, we were still a yo-yo club under Dyche, just that we got lucky in that there were usually other teams who were more inept and would go down. Once that stopped - and the squad ran out of steam for various reasons - our time was up. We could never consider ourselves established in the top flight, not even compared to, say, Crystal Palace, let alone West Ham or Everton.