Premier League II?
DAVE PAGE suggests the Championship is rapidly turning into a division of haves and have-nots…
THE prospect of the Championship being dubbed ‘Premier League II’ sounds like some kind of nightmare for most with an interest in the Football League, with previous plans for such an idea derided far and wide.
But it seems that, effectively, something like this may actually be happening without the prompting of a rebrand.
For over the last few years it’s been hard not to notice the changing fortunes of the clubs that enter the division after promotion from League One.
For one reason or another, the gap in quality between the two levels just appears to be widening further and further.
Cast your mind back five or six years ago, and it’s not hard to recall Norwich (2010-11) and Southampton (2011-12) taking the Championship by storm and securing back-to-back promotions, their stay in the second tier a very short one for all the right reasons.
This helps to show just how fluid the two divisions once were. For instance, in that 2011-12 campaign Brighton finished tenth, and in 201011 the two remaining newly promoted sides, Leeds and Millwall, were right in the top six shake-up, eventually ending up seventh and ninth respectively.
The year prior to that, Leicester made the play-offs in their first season after bouncing back from the third tier, giving us the cherished hilarity of Yann Kermorgant’s failed ‘panenka’ penalty in their semi-final defeat against Cardiff.
But cases like these are fast fading and increasingly rare. In the last five seasons, only one of the 15 new arrivals from League One has made the Championship play-offs, that being Brentford in 2014-15.
What happened next was perhaps telling, with key men like Andre Gray, James Tarkowski and Moses Odubajo being snapped up by Burnley and Hull, who were willing to pay lofty parachute payment-fuelled sums of money.
And that is most probably where the problem lies. So many of the clubs in the Championship are still receiving that Premier League money from previous stints there that the financial gulf becomes increasingly difficult to bridge.
Without this top flight pay packet, or a good, decent chairman who is willing to put his own money in (the case for Brighton and Huddersfield), coming up to the Championship and chasing another shot at promotion seems nigh on impossible now.
Of course, parachute payments have existed for some time now, but these cash injections being extended to cover a longer period of time have had a stark effect.
Wigan remain a good and very recent example. They came up for the season just gone on the back of a brilliant first half of 2016 in the league below, and held on to their key players that had produced such great results.
But funds for strengthening the squad were low and they’ve just endured a miserable season, sacking two managers (Gary Caldwell and Warren Joyce), barely able to buy a goal and looking doomed since about February onwards.
On the other side of the coin, there are similar outcomes. Bolton were a total mess when they fell through the Championship trapdoor just last year, in ruin financially and lacking quality on the pitch.
Yet, just 12 months later they’re back in the second tier after proving too good for League One.
Nigel Clough’s Burton, who came up with Wigan, deserve enormous credit for staying up last term and are an inspiration for clubs with a small ground and a very tight budget.
On the other hand, it is difficult to see them holding their own in the Championship on a long-term basis. Sadly, money talks eventually, and they are up against teams with plenty of it.
What we are now seeing in the Championship is a situation similar (though obviously not as severe yet) to one that has long existed in the Premier League, where clubs coming up have a task on their hands just to stay out of the relegation rat race, rather than harbour aspirations of making their mark on the league. Sheffield United will be a decent acid test for this theory in the coming season. They’ve just romped to the League One title and hit the 100-point mark, but they will need reinforcements to cope with the step up and proven Championship players are very costly nowadays.
It is genuinely difficult to imagine them finishing any better than lower mid-table. Meanwhile, you can expect to see the sides relegated from the Premier League – Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Hull – getting the chequebook out on a regular basis over the summer, even if it may not lead to success.
The Championship remains brilliant, enthralling and unpredictable, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting bigger all the time, with the consequence that promoted teams from the division below are struggling far more often than not.
The saying goes ‘anyone can beat anyone here’, but if these recent trends continue then this might not be true for too much longer…