Luton Town’s defeat at West Ham and Burnley’s at Tottenham on Saturday mean that, barring something astonishing on the final weekend (a Luton win over Fulham and a Nottingham Forest defeat at Burnley with a goal-difference swing of 12), the three sides who came up last season will be the three teams who go down. For those who fear the gulf between Premier League and Championship is becoming impossible to bridge, that is a worrying sign.
The truth is that, but for Forest’s four-point deduction for breaches of the league’s Profit and Sustainability rules, it wouldn’t even have been close. The other interest at the bottom came from Everton, before their recent run of 13 points from five games. But they wouldn’t have been in the mix either had it not been for their own 10-point deduction, subsequently reduced to six. The feeling that if you had to have points deducted this was the season to do it has been proved accurate.
Should Sheffield United lose at home to Spurs on the final weekend, their tally of 16 points would be the third worst in Premier League history, level with Huddersfield in 2018-19 but with a goal difference that is already 12 worse. The 101 goals they’ve conceded is already the worst ever in a Premier League season. But what makes this season stand out is that the 24 points Burnley have are the joint 10th-lowest in Premier League history and Luton’s 26 points the joint 16th-worst; the average of the three with one game to go is 22 points; the previous lowest average for the three promoted sides after 37 games was 27.3 in 2007-08 (Sunderland, Birmingham, Derby). On only one other occasion has the average been under 32 – in 2021-22 when Brentford, Watford and Norwich managed 30.3.
That two of the worst three performances ever have come in the past three years is a cause for concern, but each of the three sides who came up last season had their own problems. Luton, with a tiny budget and their ramshackle old ground with its 12,000 capacity, were always likely to struggle and, although they have run out of steam recently, they at least seem to have had fun: they may have ended up only taking a point from the three games, but they led at home against each of Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool.
Sheffield United lost three of their best players from their promotion campaign on the eve of this season, with Iliman Ndiaye and Sander Berge sold and Tommy Doyle’s loan from Manchester City coming to an end. Only their Saudi owners will know why they conducted their business like that, but it meant manager Paul Heckingbottom was fighting a steep uphill battle from the start.
In terms of the Championship’s capacity to compete, Burnley are the big worry. It’s true that they lost Nathan Tella, who had been on loan from Southampton but ended up joining Bayer Leverksuen and their Bundesliga success, and some of their other business perhaps looks a little naive in retrospect – a lot of bright young promise and not much Premier League experience – but given how impressive they had been in winning the Championship, far more was expected of them. They ended up being undone by the number of mistakes they made at the back, particularly when trying to play out.
They’ll be among the favourites for promotion next season and, if Vincent Kompany can develop a slightly less idealistic streak, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if his second crack at the Premier League provides rather more successful than his first. There have long been mezzanine clubs, located somewhere between the Premier League and the Championship; the fact that three of last season’s relegated sides finished in the top four in the Championship suggests their status may be becoming more sharply defined.
Only once before, in 1997-98, have all three promoted sides gone down – and it’s worth bearing in mind that last season all three promoted sides (Fulham, Bournemouth and Forest) stayed up. That said, there have been 12 occasions when two or more of the promoted sides have gone down immediately, and three of those have come in the last four seasons, six in the last 10. The days when a Blackburn, a Newcastle or a Forest could come up and finish in the top four, as happened in the first three seasons of the Premier League, are long gone; Wolves in 2018-19 are the only promoted side to finish in the top eight in the past 17 seasons.
Does it matter? Perhaps not. Modern football is designed for the elite and there’s clearly a section of the audience who don’t much care who they’re beating. But one of the great joys and strengths of the game in England is the pyramid, the idea that the biggest club and the smallest village side all compete in the same vast structure and that everybody can move up or move down according to form. It’s also a proven means of talent development. But a pyramid has to be relatively smooth; if there are vast, almost unscalable steps, it becomes something else altogether.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition
