The Premier League is Really, Really Difficult
Leeds United has earned promotion to the Premier League… and now they are well and truly screwed.
I do not want to exaggerate the jump from the Championship to the EPL, but I think it is fair to call it the single biggest jump in quality between domestic leagues in any country, and probably in any sport.
Let’s put it like this, Major League Baseball is specifically designed that the minor league teams work for the benefit of the parent clubs. If a player is good enough to play in the majors, he gets promoted to the league before the team does.
And even in this rigged system, modern statistical analysis starts from the assumption that there is enough freely available talent that a Major League team would win about 48 games. That means a random AAA team could get promoted, en masse, and have a puncher’s chance of winning 50 games.
Well, the three BEST teams get promoted every year to the Premier League every season… and they are increasingly getting flat out obliterated. The last two seasons, the three promoted clubs at the start of the season were the three relegated clubs the end of the season.
In fact, it seems the only way to stay up is to go the route Nottingham Forest tried: essentially replace your entire team in the transfer market, take the points deduction for violating Financial Fair Play regulations, and hope you win enough to stay up. That’s a strategy that, if it doesn’t work… well, ask a Leeds fan over 40 years of age what happens when you mortgage the future and then you can’t make the payment.
Last year was particularly terrible. The three promoted clubs not only got relegated, it wasn’t even competitive. 17th placed Tottenham was thirteen points clear of the drop zone. So, Leicester missed safety by just shy of five wins.
The three relegated squads combined point totals was 59, which would have only have been good for 8th place in the league. But their sheer level of non-competitiveness is best displayed by their goal differential. They were outscored by a combined 153 goals. They were so routinely blown off the pitch that only five other teams had a negative goal differential, and that was for a combined -44.
The most dispiriting thing about this is not that the three promoted squads were so ruthlessly crushed by the rest of the Premier League, but that the three promoted squads were coming off perhaps the best season in Championship history.
Leicester and Ipswich both had 97 and 96 points, respectively, in 2023/24. It was the best performance by points of the two automatically promoted teams in the league’s history. They didn’t just get promoted, they crushed the league. Southampton was fourth, the less said about that the better, but they were at 87 points as well. These were dominant teams.
And then the reality of the Premier League exposed just how big of a gap there is between those leagues. Being a great team in the Championship means less than nothing next season. You are cannon fodder.
The richer and richer the Premier League gets, the bigger the gap will get between the leagues, and the harder it will be to make the leap and actually stay in the league after promotion. It’s no longer just Arsenal and Man United who have way more resources than you, it’s now Aston Villa and Brentford as well.
It is a rigged game, and the only way to stay up is if a team already in the Premier League implodes. Maybe we can encourage Wolves to hire Jesse Marsch or something, because that’s what it’s going to take to stay up.
The celebration is over. Time for the next morning, and that hangover is a doozy.
