Luton, Coventry and Forest among Championship’s well-run clubs

Ian King
Luton Town play Bristol City in the EFL Championship

The Championship is often portrayed as a chaotic sewer, but it also contains well-run clubs and even some owners who’ve changed their spots.

 

With the exception of free-scoring Fulham at the top of the table, the EFL Championship is starting to congest again. Just four points separate second, third and fourth in the table, while the race for a play-off place is just as tight, with six points separating Huddersfield Town in sixth place – the final play-off spot – and Stoke City in 11th. To put it another way, with almost 60% of the season played, almost half the teams in the division still have a realistic possibility of promotion into the Premier League.

There’s a lot of talk about the EFL Championship, and much of it focuses on the problems within the division. At one end of the table there’s the financial basket-casery of Derby County, who’ve been in administration for more than four months and who’ve already been deducted 21 points for their previous financial chicanery. And at the other, there’s ongoing conjecture about the future of parachute payments, the financially distorting financial assistance received by relegated Premier League clubs which leaves every other club in the division fighting an uphill battle to stay in touch with those fortunate enough to receive them.

But it is also worth pointing out that not every club owner in the division is an incompetent, shovelling bank notes onto an ever-growing bonfire of players’ wages and agents’ fees because their lack of imagination leads them to believe that it’s the only way that they can reach the promised land of the Premier League. There are clubs in the second tier which are well-run, and there are even club owners who seem to have learned from the mistakes of the past.

In the former of these two categories, we may put Luton Town. Luton are an object lesson in the importance of having people who care about a club being in charge of said club. When they entered administration in November 2007, Luton had just been relegated from the Championship into League One, but despite the sale of the club to the Luton 2020 consortium, swingeing points deductions meant that by the summer of 2009, Luton Town were a non-league club again for the first time in 89 years.

If anyone at Luton was expecting the National League to be a breeze, they were sorely mistaken. Luton took five years to get back into the EFL and failed twice in the play-offs before finally clicking and winning the title by 18 points in 2014. But the club’s revival didn’t end there. Two successive promotions got them – appropriately, considering the name of the consortium that had rescued the club – back into the Championship in 2020, and they remain there now, in tenth place and six points from the play-offs, and with plans to build the new ground that the club has been crying out for for the last 40 years now finally moving forward.

There also seems to have been a trend towards the bad owners of the past learning their lessons and doing better. Blackburn Rovers have gone from chickens being thrown onto the pitch to serious candidates for a Premier League return, but perhaps the most salutary lesson comes from Coventry City, where the hedge fund owners Sisu twice moved the club out of their home city – first to Northampton and then to Birmingham – over an interminable row over their stadium. On the pitch, meanwhile, the team dropped as low as League Two in 2018.

But in the summer of 2021 the club signed a ten-year agreement to return and plans for a new stadium remain alive, if not progressing very quickly. Sisu seem to have stepped back from the public eye, leaving the day-to-day running of the club to CEO Dave Boddy. Two promotions in three years pushed the club back from League Two to the Championship, and Coventry are now four points from a play-off place.

It’s now been more than 20 years since Coventry City were last in the Premier League, and the same can be said for Nottingham Forest, who ended up spending three years in the third tier between 2006 and 2008. Under the ownership of Kuwaiti businessman Fawaz Al-Hasawi, the club descended into chaos several times in the last decade, but he sold the club to Evangelos Marinakis in 2017 after they avoided relegation back to League One by goal difference.

Improvement on the pitch at The City Ground has been a long time coming, but the appointment of Steve Cooper as manager in September has proved something of a masterstroke. Forest were bottom of the table when Chris Hughton was relieved of his duties in September, but they’ve lost just three of the 20 league matches they’ve played since then and are now just a point from the play-offs themselves, while plans are also in place to upgrade the club’s facilities. Marinakis has baggage of his own, but on the pitch Forest seem in a better shape than they have been for years.

There are undoubtedly issues related to the way in which some clubs in the Championship have been run in recent years. Derby County, Reading and Birmingham City are current examples, and there are plenty more historical ones. But it should also be recognised that most of the pressures put upon clubs in the second tier are external, and the biggest of these remains the financial discrepancy between the Premier League and the EFL. At present – and as it has been for many years – the team that finishes in 20th place in English football’s hierarchy will make just short of £100m in television and prize money, while the club that finishes 21st will make around £8m. Add parachute payments to that mix, and overspending starts to look more like a necessity than recklessness alone. For all that there are reasons to be concerned about the health of the Championship, there is plenty to admire and enjoy as well.