This will be the second successive season all three promoted clubs are relegated straight back to the Championship from the Premier League. Is it a problem?
Apologies if it sounds like we’re repeating ourselves, but the 2024-25 Premier League season won’t go down as a classic that saw everything go to the wire.
Although it does at least look as though the battle for UEFA Champions League places will provide drama over the final weeks, the title race has pretty much been over since late February, and the typical dogfight at the bottom has resembled something closer to fisticuffs among toddlers.
But the fact the bottom three are so far adrift is notable even if it doesn’t necessarily convey an image of entertainment and jeopardy throughout the Premier League table.
It raises the question of whether a problem is emerging.
Leicester City lost 1-0 to Liverpool on Sunday, confirming the Foxes’ long-foreseen relegation. Southampton had their fate confirmed earlier this month, becoming the first team in Premier League history to be relegated with as many as seven matches remaining. And Ipswich Town will only avoid the drop if they win all of their final five matches of the season and West Ham lose their remaining games. As unimpressive as the Hammers have been this term, such a scenario means Ipswich are as good as gone after their 4-0 loss to Arsenal.
For instance, it might technically be possible for Ipswich to survive, but in the latest 10,000 season simulations conducted by the Opta supercomputer, there wasn’t a single occasion of Kieran McKenna’s men staying up.
Of course, those three teams in the relegation zone also happen to be the clubs who were promoted from the Championship last season.
That means this will be the second successive Premier League campaign in which all three promoted clubs go straight back down to the Championship; before the 2023-24 campaign, that had last occurred in 1997-98. Prior to 1997-98, there’d been no occasions of all promoted teams being relegated straight back to the second tier.
The 2023-24 season was an especially bad one for the promoted teams, then.
Luton Town, Sheffield United and Burnley all struggled considerably. There ended up being a six-point gap between Luton in 18th (26 pts) and Nottingham Forest (32 pts) in 17th, but it was only as close as that because Forest were deducted four points for breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules.
Collectively, they managed just 66 points. Sheffield United (16 pts) were a big part of that being such a measly total, of course, but neither Burnley nor Luton were exactly huge improvements on them.
Between them, they ended up averaging just 0.58 points per game. That was the joint-worst cumulative PPG total of the relegated teams in top-flight history, level with the 1891-92 season when Darwen were the only team to go down.
Therefore, 2023-24 holds the record for lowest cumulative PPG total of relegated teams during a top-flight season in which more than one team went down.
But not for much longer.
* 2024-25 ongoingFollowing Matchday 33 in the 2024-25 Premier League, the three teams in the relegation zone are collectively averaging just 0.51 PPG. If they maintain that rate between now and the end of the season, it’ll be the lowest cumulative PPG total of relegated teams in top-flight history (based on three points for a win).
Collectively, they’ve lost 69.7% of their matches to date, which would also be a record for a season in which more than one club was relegated. The next highest in that respect was the 68.4% recorded in 2018-19 when Cardiff City, Fulham and Huddersfield were all relegated, while 2023-24 (66.7%) comes next among seasons in the Premier League era.
* 2024-25 ongoingAt the time, there was an argument that last season’s three promoted clubs were among the best ever in the Championship.
Southampton had to go up via the play-offs, for instance, despite earning 87 points. Before that, only four teams had failed to go up automatically with more than 87 points going back to the 1995-96 season.
Similarly, last season was the first time in second tier history that each of the top two managed to accumulate more than 95 points (Ipswich – 96, Leicester – 97).
The season before didn’t paint quite the same picture, though Burnley’s 101 points has only been bettered four times.
This will be the second season in a row that the Premier League has chewed up and spat out the best the Championship has to offer. There’s also a very real possibility that two of the clubs who come up next season will be among those who were relegated last term, as Burnley look safe in the top two and Sheffield United appear set for the play-offs.
There’s a sense, then, that the gulf between the Premier League and Championship is widening, and at a quicker rate than ever before.
While that doesn’t necessarily reflect well on the Championship, it’s arguably even more of a problem for the Premier League, which wants the average standard of the competition to be as high as possible.
It won’t be a great look come June if the collective records of the three relegated teams in each of the past two seasons are the worst on record and happen to be posted solely by promoted clubs.
Southampton could yet equal Derby County’s record for the fewest points (11) in a Premier League season, and that would come just a year after Sheffield United accumulated only 16, the joint-third fewest of any team in Premier League history at the time.
Only time will tell if this is an emerging trend rather than an extreme coincidence, but all signs currently point to a widening chasm between English football’s top two tiers.
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Is the Chasm Between the Premier League and Championship Widening? Opta Analyst.
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