Business With Blain: Mind The Gap
The financial might of the Premier League means those coming up have little chance.
By JohnB
When Leicester City secured promotion to the Premier League in May 2024, they did so with 97 points, scoring 89 goals and conceding 41 in a 46-game season, pipping Ipswich Town by one point.
The Tractor Boys scored more goals than Leicester (92), but also conceded more (57), as they returned to the top table of English football after a break of more than 20 years.
At the time of writing, and after 27 games in the Premier League, Ipswich are 18th in the division, with 17 points; they have already conceded the same number of goals as they did across the whole of last season.
Meanwhile, Leicester have the same number of points in 19th place, but have conceded 20 more goals than they did in the entirety of 2023-24. Both teams are five points from safety, while for their part, the other promoted club — Southampton, who secured their place in the league through the play-offs — are adrift, having secured only nine points. There is a fair chance the Saints could fail to surpass the league’s lowest-ever points tally of 11, which was set by Derby County in 2007-08.
At this time, it seems inevitable that all three teams promoted from the English Football League (EFL) last season will return immediately to the second tier for the second consecutive year. Before 2023-24, that had happened only once, back in 1998.
It looks like all three of the promoted teams will be hard-pressed to hit the 30-point mark this season, and the traditional safety target of 40 points to remain in the Premier League is now outdated.
In fact, as More Than A Game detailed in this piece back in September, the average points total to stay up since the start of 2019-20 season is just 32, and last year, 18th-placed Luton Town finished on 26 points — a historic Premier League low mark.
What does that tell us? Well, it suggests the gap between the standards of the Premier League and EFL is growing year on year, and may already be simply too big to breach with any consistency.
Certainly, the financial gap is huge, with Ipswich, for example, previously having a turnover of less than £22million (Financial Year 2022-23), and yet in this Premier League season, their broadcast income alone is likely to be around £100m.
For years now, the EFL has been concerned about the financial gap, and specifically the advantage that those relegated from the Premier League enjoy in the form of parachute payments.
The EFL wants a fairer distribution of the Premier League’s TV money, with reports suggesting its members think the current sum of around £120m annually should be increased to over £400m.
The Premier League, for its part, has been reluctant to agree to the EFL’s demands, arguing that it already supports the EFL through solidarity payments, and other contributions, with a resolution to the current stand-off expected before the start of next season.
Meanwhile, the Premier League is likely to come under increasing government pressure because of the imposition of an Independent Regulator for English Football when the Football Governance Bill completes its passage through parliament later this year.
The Premier League is lobbying hard to mitigate the powers of the proposed regulator, and so from a sporting perspective, the mountain between the EFL and the Premier League is simply too big for many clubs to conquer, with relegated teams having a distinct advantage when it comes to immediately returning to the top flight. There will of course be exceptions — Luton are facing back-to-back relegations after a dismal campaign following their Premier League adventure — but the relative financial power that those relegated clubs enjoy compared to the rest of the Championship gives them a huge edge.
This season, Leeds United, for example, reportedly have the second-highest wage bill of any Championship club in history, behind only… Leeds themselves, last term.
It seems highly possible that several teams in the top flight and EFL may, then, become yo-yo clubs, bouncing backwards and forwards between the divisions, while those in the top half of the Premier League increase the gap even further between the haves and the have nots. This will especially be the case if, over time, the majority, if not all, of the top half enjoy some form of European competition.
If this happens, traditionalists like me will feel sad that in real terms, the 92-club pyramid that has been sustained by the dream that a team could go from the bottom to the very top, will be gone.
More worryingly for the 72 clubs outside the Premier League, is that this pyramid may fracture, and football in England as we know it will also go forever.