At the weekend, Leicester City became the second team to suffer relegation from the Premier League to the Championship. In reality, the Foxes had looked doomed to go down for a long time.
However, weekend results just mathematically confirmed the fact. The Midlands outfit was not the first team to suffer relegation this season from the top flight, as bottom club Southampton’s fate had already been sealed.
All three promoted clubs going back down
Both Southampton and Leicester City were promoted from the Championship last season, along with 18th-place Ipswich Town. Unfortunately for the Tractor Boys, they look set to join their promoted counterparts back in the second-tier next season.
Ipswich are not yet mathematically relegated. However, they are 15 points adrift of 17th-place West Ham, with just five games remaining in the English top-flight season.
It’s the sort of situation that means, to all intents and purposes, Ipswich are already relegated to the Championship. Kieran McKenna’s team would need to win all their remaining league games and hope that West Ham fails to pick up a single point.
Considering that the team from Suffolk has won just four league games all season, that scenario looks highly unrealistic. Then there is West Ham’s vastly superior goal difference, which is 20 goals better than Ipswich’s.
Out of the three promoted teams, Ipswich were the best of a bad bunch, although that doesn’t say much considering the competition. Southampton are even stuck on the dreaded 11 points tally earned by Derby in season 2007/08, which is the joint lowest points tally in the history of the Premier League.
The Saints still have five games to avoid being labelled the joint-worst team in the history of the English top-flight in its current guise. Considering their form, the South Coast club very well may be stuck on 11 points and match the unwanted record in the process.
A worrying trend
Unfortunately, the three promoted teams have illustrated that there isn’t just a big gap between the Premier League and the Championship but rather a massive chasm.
The worrying thing for clubs coming up is that it now seems to be a trend that those that come up must go down. It looks like, for a second successive campaign, all three promoted clubs have gone straight back down.
Last season, the promoted trio of Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton Town all went straight back down after just one season in the top-flight. Luton finished in 18th place with 26 points in that campaign, six points adrift of Nottingham Forest, who finished 17th.
However, that comes with the caveat that the Midlands outfit had also suffered a deduction of four points due to PSR issues. If Forest hadn’t been handed that punishment, then Luton would have finished ten points adrift of the Tricky Trees.
That gap in points illustrates the big difference between the bottom three and the teams closest to them in terms of the bottom of the table.
Ipswich, who is in a similar position this season to Luton in the previous campaign, could very well end the campaign with even fewer points and an even bigger gap between themselves and the teams above them.
The lack of competitiveness at the bottom of the table heading towards the end of the season is highly concerning.
In previous years, there has been the drama of last-day relegation battles. However, during the last few seasons, teams in 16th or even 17th place have been relatively comfortable, not having to look over their shoulders nervously at the relegation zone in the final few games.
The Premier League is very much considered a ‘product’ now, as much as a football league. It is not a good look with nothing really on any of the games at the bottom, and the title already almost decided at the top.
Will this trend change next season?
Maybe not surprisingly, the three teams that were relegated from the Premier League last season are the Championship’s top three this season.
Leeds United and Burnley have already confirmed automatic promotion by finishing as the league’s top two. Sheffield United are currently third and will have to go into the lottery of the play-offs, where teams that finish third don’t usually prosper.
It seems that many teams are in a place where they are too good for the Championship, but not good enough for the Premier League. Burnley is a good example of this theory.
Since season 2013/14, the Clarets have won promotion three times and suffered relegation four times. In their last two Championship campaigns, they have looked outstanding, which has given everybody connected with the club hope that they can survive. Only time will tell if they can beat the drop this time around.
The same goes for Leeds and whichever club comes up through the end-of-season play-offs.
However, the last few seasons have shown that even with the newly founded riches of Premier League football, most newly promoted clubs have struggled to remain that competitive. The lack of competitiveness has shown that the gap between England’s top two football divisions is now bigger than ever.