Promoted clubs’ predictable relegation is a further sign the Premier League has broken English football
In May 2024, I was one of several thousand Ipswich fans that ran onto the pitch at Portman Road. The sun was beating down, flags were waving and blue flares filled the Suffolk sky. The whole day had been one of relief, of celebration, of the club returning to the top flight after 22 years in exile.
I hugged strangers, I hugged players, I waved to my dad in the crowd. For a football fan who will likely never experience trophies or league titles, it was the best you could have ever asked for.
Every fan of every one of the 72 clubs that make up the English Football League has an ultimate goal: reach the Promised Land of the Premier League. English football is built on the idea that, in theory, any club can climb to the top of that pyramid and so that dream is open to everyone. It was why the Super League was rejected so ferociously. The concept of a closed club competition was one that goes against everything English football stands for.
Or what it claims to stand for.
Ipswich were last relegated from the Premier League just four days after my seventh birthday. I had no memory of them at Old Trafford or Anfield or any of the other big grounds and so when a remarkable back-to-back promotion happened, my first thought was visiting all these stadiums I never thought I’d see them play at in my lifetime.
The season started with a visit of Liverpool to Portman Road with the town in a carnival mood. The team may have lost 2-0 to the eventual runaway league leaders but no-one dressed in blue and white was too fussed.
Next was a trip to the Etihad and Sammie Szmodics’ opening goal away at the league champions sent the 3,000 travelling Town fans into euphoria. Of course, City bit back. Three goals in four minutes gave the game to the home side before Erling Haaland scored his third in the 88th minute but again, no Tractor Boy or Girl really cared.
The club knew it would be a tough task but unlike our neighbours to the north, they at least put their hands in their pockets. Town spent over £100million in the summer, the sixth most of any club in the league, but considering we were losing to the likes of Lincoln two years before, it was needed.
But regardless of the spend, the result has been similar to what each of the last six promoted clubs has felt: being the punchline of the party.
Ipswich have won four games all season; only Southampton have won fewer. It took until April for the club to win in 2025. They have conceded 65 goals, scoring just 31 times in return and our early-season matches of promise without the result have faded, making games an exercise of masochism rather than sporting engagements.
Optimism has been replaced by gallows humour. The fans remain behind Kieran McKenna, as they well should, but all fun and joy of the game has been sucked from us and every Town fan would happily see our season end now so we can get back to the familiar surroundings of the Championship. Ipswich fans are not alone in this feeling.
Barring a miracle, the 2024-25 season will be a repeat of the 2023-24 in that the three promoted clubs go tumbling back down. If once was a coincidence, twice suggests a pattern is emerging.
The reason as to why is obvious – money.
Recent UEFA figures showed Premier League clubs shared a revenue of £5.9bn for the 2023-24 season, 60% higher than the Bundesliga and three times that of Serie A and La Liga. This is not just the top teams either. Nottingham Forest, who finished 17th, reported a record revenue of £155million. Ipswich in the same period recorded a revenue of £18.17million.
Saying that the Premier League has money is not a groundbreaking revelation but while that wealth has created a gap between the league and its European counterparts, it has now created an uncrossable chasm between themselves and the league that plays a vital role in the existence of the competition: the Football League.
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Premier League CEO Richard Masters doesn’t care, of course. He has paid lip service to the Football League, recently dismissing the six promoted clubs’ swift return as anomalies. In the past, he has talked of giving more money to the lower leagues but it is easy to see that as his way of convincing the government an independent regulator is not needed rather than it being any serious measure of goodwill.
It is a familiar pattern of behaviour. During Covid, and when a number of Football League clubs faced genuine existential questions, Masters and the Premier League proudly announced a fund of £50million would be given to Leagues One and Two. Boil it down though and it came to £375,000 for each League One club and £250,000 in League Two, a drop in the ocean of their financial problems. The Championship, meanwhile, was offered £200million but only on a loan basis.
Seven months later, the Premier League announced their clubs would be sharing a revenue of £2.5billion. It was a patronising tap on the head, like a banker who takes the moral high ground because he once gave a homeless person a tenner on his way to buy another Porsche.
Since 1992, the Premier League has always had this dismissive big brother feel towards the Football League because frankly, life would be easier if those pesky clubs simply go away. The structure of the Premier League means every club is a shareholder with voting rights so why would they vote for anything that could financially weaken their own position? The Premier League is a gravy train that clubs happily spend hundreds of millions of pounds to stay aboard. Some Championship clubs are willing to risk putting themselves out of business just to make it.
The financial chasm is only getting wider. Parachute payments provided to the relegated clubs has separated the Championship into have and have nots, making Ipswich’s promotion all the more remarkable, but the fate of Premier League new boys is making Football League fans reconsider their ultimate goal.
In 1962, my club won the league having been promoted the year before. In the Premier League era, the club finished fifth in their first year back in 2001. But such a feat now not only seems unlikely but almost impossible.
If we consider winning games as the main point of football, promoted clubs have experienced that in just 11% of the matches they have played in the past two seasons. If Leeds fall apart this season and lose in the play-offs, the pain of such an embarrassment will be softened with the thought that ‘at least we won’t get battered every week next year’.
Leicester City walked the Championship last year meaning even with a late wobble, they finished seven points clear of the play-offs, but this season they have become one of the worst teams in memory, only saved true embarrassment by Southampton who got promoted too soon and with a decent, if not spectacular, Championship squad.
And regardless of what the likes of Dean Saunders may say on talkSPORT, it is not a problem of the promoted teams’ own making.
Russell Martin may have set the team up for failure by keeping his total football approach in a tougher division but Ipswich were not a possession team even in the Championship. The year they got promoted, they were sixth in the average possession rankings having had the ball for a little over half the time. This year they are 18th with only Everton and Forest having had the ball less.
Questions of why do promoted teams pass out from the back should be answered with the response that if we kick it long, the 6ft 5ins Virgil van Dijk will head it right back into our half and put us under pressure once again. McKenna has set the team up to play to our strengths, to get plenty of men behind the ball but to use our quick wingers and the strength of Liam Delap and yet Ipswich’s fate will most likely be the same as Southampton’s.
Ipswich will lose Liam Delap in the summer with the moderate sum of £40 million reportedly enough to get him; that figure accounts to roughly 6% of Manchester United’s annual turnover, and it is back to square one for McKenna and the club.
The 2025-26 Premier League season will have 17 clubs that have been in the league for at least two seasons, giving them a 100-yard head start against the three clubs silly enough to get themselves promoted. It is easy for fans of the big clubs to dismiss it as Championship clubs moaning about not being good enough but Forest’s plan of spending so much that you are docked points may become the blueprint for any hope of survival.
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On Tuesday, Arsenal’s 3-0 demolition of Real Madrid was celebrated as a victory for the Premier League but it should come with a warning of what it represents. Premier League fans used to point and laugh at the likes of La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 in particular for being ‘farmers’ leagues’, too easy for the big clubs to dominate but the Greatest League in the WorldTM has become exactly that.
The bombastic and sudden nature of the European Super League was one of the reasons it was met with such disgust but the Premier League’s transformation has been much more subtle. Profits that are only ever going in one direction has made the top flight focus on the top clubs and how the league can attract the world’s best players but it is becoming an increasingly closed community, hostile to anyone who dares move in.
Masters and co. will continue to pay lip service to the Football League that props up England’s top division but the same fans that found himself in the streets protesting a Super League are already supporting clubs that are part of it.
