Usually, at least one of the three promoted sides avoids relegation, but Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich are all heading back to the Championship at the first time of asking.
For the second season in a row, the three teams who had earned promotion to the Premier League only a year before will be heading straight back down to the Championship.
After Luton Town, Sheffield United and Burnley were relegated from the top flight last season having only just come up, Southampton have been confirmed as down already this term and fellow promoted sides Leicester City and Ipswich Town look all but certain to join them.
That’s not to say survival is completely impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely. In the Opta supercomputer’s latest round of 10,000 simulations of the rest of the 2024-25 season, there was just one alternate reality in which Leicester escaped the drop (0.01% chance of survival), and only five simulations in which Ipswich did (0.05%).
On first viewing, this might not be that surprising. The three teams that come into the Premier League are the worst three over the course of the next season? Sure, makes sense.
But history suggests it is far from common. Rarely do two, let alone all three, promoted clubs go straight back down to the second tier.
From 1898-99, the first season in which automatic relegation was introduced as punishment for the bottom two teams in the First Division, until 1996-97 in the Premier League, not even once did all of the promoted teams suffer immediate relegation.
In fact, it took until 1974-75 – by which time three teams were promoted to/relegated from the top tier – for two of the promoted teams to go straight back down. And it didn’t happen again until 1991-92.
Two of the promoted teams also went down in 1994-95, but that was the season when four teams were relegated to reduce the size of the Premier League from 22 to 20, so only 50% of promoted teams were relegated.
1997-98 was the first season in the history of men’s football in England in which 100% of the promoted sides were relegated, meaning there were 99 campaigns of promotion and relegation before it ever happened.
Ever since, it has been common for two of the three promoted clubs to go down, occurring 10 times in the 26 seasons from 1998 to 2023. But all three going straight back down? That hadn’t occurred even once more after the 1997-98 season… until last campaign.
In 2023-24, Sheffield United conceded more goals than any team ever has in a Premier League season (104). Burnley barely even hinted that they might stay up. Luton flirted with the idea of survival before winning only one of their last 17 games and sinking without trace. All of them finished at least six points adrift of safety, and accrued at least 10 points fewer as a collective (66) than any other group of relegated teams in Premier League history.
This time around, though, it doesn’t appear as though last season will be – like 1997-98 eventually proved – a one-off. Instead, the bottom three in 2024-25 are giving last season’s contingent a run for their money.
Southampton have already set a new record for the earliest ever relegation in terms of games left to play, and the other two are both at least 12 points from safety. If every team in the league continues at their current points-per-game rate, the bottom three will be confirmed as down with four games of the season still to play.
That would be the first time that has ever happened in the Premier League era. In all but one of those seasons, the fate of the final team (or teams) to be relegated has been decided with at most one game left. The exception was 2020-21, when all three were confirmed as down with three games to go.
The bottom three in 2024-25 are also on course to earn a collective total of just 57 points (based on current points-per-game rates), which would be nine fewer than the previous worst, which – you guessed it – was set last season.
This season’s group could therefore set two unwanted records for the Premier League’s relegated clubs. The now-former Southampton manager Ivan Juric insisted before his team’s relegation was confirmed that they had the motivation of avoiding being “the worst team in the history of Premier League.” It turns out that there’s reason for Leicester and Ipswich to be concerned about joining Southampton in making up the worst trio of relegated clubs.
All of the promoted clubs going straight back down isn’t just a rare occurrence in England, either.
Looking across Europe, things are complicated slightly by their use of relegation play-offs, which mean a team can finish in the bottom two or three but end up surviving. So, for the purposes of our research, we’re just going to look at occasions when 100% of the promoted teams took up all of the lowest possible positions in the table at the end of the regular season, regardless of the result of any play-offs.
But even with those criteria, it still doesn’t happen much. It has only occurred once in each of La Liga and Serie A, way back in 1966-67 in Spain and 1985-86 in Italy. It has never happened in Ligue 1.
In the Bundesliga, it has happened four times, but only one of those was in a season when three teams were promoted/relegated, and the most recent of any of them was 1992-93.
Clearly, it’s not a modern-day issue in any of the other top European leagues like it appears to be in the Premier League, where the gap between the top flight and the Championship appears, on the evidence of the last two seasons at least, to be growing. It certainly looks like it is more difficult for promoted sides to establish themselves in the Premier League.
So, will this trend continue, or is this a two-season anomaly that will end up as a mere footnote in the history of the Premier League?
For the competitiveness of the top flight, we should all be hoping it is the latter, and that next season’s contingent will have learned from past mistakes. At least two of Leeds, Burnley and Sheffield United will be promoted next month, and they’ll be able to draw on past experiences in their fight against the drop.
All three have all been in the Premier League in the last two seasons and, remarkably, have each finished in the top half of the top flight inside the last six seasons: Leeds in 2020-21 and both Burnley and Sheffield United in 2019-20. All three finished exactly two points behind Arsenal when securing those top-half finishes, so an optimist might take hope from how quickly things can clearly change at this level.
If Arsenal can go from a mid-table team to title challengers in a few short years, while Nottingham Forest, who finished 17th last season, can go from relegation battlers to Champions League shoo-ins, then maybe the next batch of promoted sides can do something just as unlikely and avoid relegation.
It would only be good for the Premier League if even one of them can manage it.
The Three Promoted Premier League Sides Will Be Relegated Again – This Never Used to Happen Opta Analyst.
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