We're used to hearing that the Championship is the toughest league in world football. And there's certainly a strong case to be made for England's second tier, a notoriously tricky division to get out of and one which the adage that 'anyone can beat anyone' really does hold true.
But what if we were to tell you that there's an even more difficult league? One which has reached brutally competitive new heights in recent years?
Introducing League One: the third tier of English football and the new hardest league in the world. There are three promotion places up for grabs – and seemingly half of the 24 teams in the division expect to clinch one of them.
Five weeks into the 2024/25 season, the top six of League One – comprising the two automatic promotion spots and four play-off berths – perfectly epitomises the current make-up of those gunning to reach the promised land of the Championship.
You've got the recently minted upstarts leading the pack: Hollywood-adjacent Wrexham; hot on their heels, the big club aiming for an immediate return to the Championship: Birmingham, now boasting NFL superstar Tom Brady as one of their owners; in third, the former established Premier League side who've spent most of the past decade at this level: Charlton; and occupying the final play-off position, the more pragmatically financed 'smaller' club with grand aspirations: Lincoln.
Throw in fourth-placed Huddersfield – who were in the top flight just five years ago – and – fifth-placed Stockport – who, like Wrexham, came up from League Two last term and look decidedly upwardly mobile – and it becomes quite clear what a titanic tussle it could be to escape from League One. And we've only touched on a quarter of the division...
Barnsley, Blackpool, Peterborough and Wigan have all been Championship outfits in very recent times – and the latter, now out of financial crisis once again, could be an outside shout for a play-off finishes. The other three all ought to be very real contenders.
Then there's two of the 92's three Wanderers: Bolton and Wycombe. The former agonisingly lost out to Oxford in last season's play-off final, just five years after staring extinction in the face; the latter, now owned by Georgian tech billionaire Mikhail Lomtadze, might just smell a chance of promotion to the second tier for only the second time in their history, having combined shrewd loan acquisitions with the marquee re-signing of Fred Onyedinma this summer.
You're beginning to see our point, aren't you? This is the 3,000m steeplechase of promotion races – making the equivalent Championship battle look like a Sunday stroll by comparison.
Several clubs we haven't mentioned would probably also vociferously stake their claims to a 2024/25 promotion push. This is a division that teams yearn to go up from.
And it's not too hard to see why: the Championship, while no longer the toughest league on the planet, is one of the most prestigious – a division watched in the stands and on TV – more than many European countries' top flights and offering a marked increase in revenue for those fortunate enough to play in it. That and the fact that, you know, it's just one level below the best league in the world: the Premier League.
Admittedly, it's a somewhat concerning indictment on the often bewilderingly capitalist nature of modern football that the likes of Birmingham are willing to absolutely shatter the third-tier transfer record – paying Fulham an initial £10m for Jay Stansfield, scorer of a brace in their box-office 3-1 win over Wrexham on Monday night – in their pursuit of promotion as fast as the structure of the game allows, but that also shows an awareness of how tall an order it is to climb out of League One. And it doesn't look like it's going to get any easier any time soon.
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