Ipswich’s imminent relegation raises an urgent Premier League question | OneFootball

To walk around Ipswich Town’s Playford Road training ground, you wouldn’t think it is a club on the brink of relegation. The atmosphere is positive. Kieran McKenna is still committed to a sophisticated coaching approach that is admired by top clubs, and the players are largely content.

An obvious point is that they’ve had a lot of time to get used to their position, cut adrift in the bottom three, but the mood isn’t really a sense of resignation. The feeling has long been that they over-performed in earning back-to-back promotions from League One, and gave their attempt to stay in the Premier League an admirable go.

That is impossible to dispute, but it does raise some questions with more uncertain answers, which are becoming genuine philosophical issues for English football.

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Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich are set to be relegated - but there is still a sense that they have over-performed (Getty Images)

How much would have ever been enough for a club like Ipswich to give? When would a good time to come up even be?

This would be a particularly difficult moment for almost any promoted club. This weekend is already virtually certain to mark the earliest moment in a Premier League season that all of the relegation places will have been confirmed, but this season is absolutely certain to set another record. It will mark the second successive campaign that the three promoted clubs have gone straight back down. A clean sweep, again. Worse, it’s with so many whitewashes for Ipswich, Leicester City and Southampton. There have been many games when they've barely been competitive.

With a collective return of 0.5 points per game, as it stands, that is also set to be the worst haul for the three promoted clubs, as well as the three who end up relegated.

This isn’t to be critical of the condemned three, since they are only part of a trend. The grim challenge of whether a club can “beat” Derby County’s 2007-08 record of 11 points, as Southampton threatened this year, is likely to become more common. It follows Sheffield United’s 16 points last season.

The trio are part of the 10 promoted clubs who have endured single doomed seasons in the Premier League since 2020, which is the worst spell over any five-year period. Between 2010 and 2015, by contrast, only five went straight back down.

These half-decades are not arbitrary cut-off periods, either.

Aside from how these timespans coincide with wider developments in football – the reduction to 20 teams and the increase of TV money – 2020 was a clear season of change in the game. It was when Covid disrupted football, and when its long-term effects started to distort the wider sport. The break cracked open a wider split.

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Clubs like Brentford and Bournemouth have managed to stay up and build, but the Premier League is becoming more of a closed shop (Getty Images)

The Premier League used its immense broadcasting money, which was never more important when stadiums lay empty, to definitively distance itself from the rest of the sport. That applied to European rivals as well as the EFL. It is no coincidence that the discussion about the Premier League “rescue package” for the English pyramid is still going on, feeding into the debate about the need for an independent football regulator.

What the split did was essentially create a “Premier League 2”, across two increasingly stratified divisions. The manner in which Fulham and Norwich City traded places in the league for four consecutive seasons between 2018 and 2022 – one going up, one going down – feels like it has evolved into something wider. The rate of return is accelerating.

Six other clubs since the 2020 relegations have already gone down and gone up again, with three – Burnley, Leeds United and Sheffield United – set to have done so at least twice. Chris Wilder’s side may end up going for a third time in six years if they make it through this season’s play-offs.

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Burnley are coming straight back up after winning promotion from the Championship (Getty Images)

There’s an obvious reason for this, directly connected to the debates from 2020, but really going back even further.

That is the financial gap between the EFL and the Premier League, which has risen from £11m in 1992 to £3.3bn today. The gradient is so steep. Premier League broadcasting money and parachute payments are worsening this problem every year, from both ends.

In the Premier League, even two to three years of broadcasting money makes a huge difference. It may have made a lasting difference for certain clubs that have been in the competition since 2013. That was when the game-changing international broadcasting contract came into force, trebling revenue from outside the UK to £5.5bn.

The effect has been most obvious at clubs like Crystal Palace and West Ham United. They had previously been vintage “yo-yo” clubs, who needed the obvious value in promotion. These days, they are entrenched in the top flight. The old worries about potentially going down that used to shape their campaigns now feel less pertinent, because outfits of much lower relative resources are coming up.

Or, more relevantly, coming up and then going down, without being able to get a consistent run in the same way. At the bottom, for one, Southampton have found it much more difficult than after previous promotions, but without really being able to fully explain why. If you manage to “fluke it”, like Luton Town did, there’s almost no hope.

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Southampton appeared to be doomed from the start after winning the play-off final (Getty Images)

In the Championship, then, there is a similar effect on the other side. The clubs constantly going up and down are benefiting from parachute payments, in turn making the second tier, long heralded as one of the most competitive divisions in the world, more predictable.

The chief executive of one Championship outfit laughed when the FA recently released clubs’ payments to agents, since Leeds United’s, at just under £19m, were almost double the lower club’s wage bill.

It is because of all this that the Premier League’s support plan for the pyramid has naturally been central to discussions about the independent football regulator, as has the future of parachute payments.

The EFL wants the controversial measure abolished, with the financial gradient also smoothed. The Premier League argues that parachute payments are essential to stimulate competition, especially in a world where up to 11 clubs can potentially qualify for Europe in a given season. The effects of that can feasibly be seen this season, with a healthy middle-class pushing for Champions League places.

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Forest survived last season and could qualify for the Champions League this campaign (Getty Images)

And yet there may be another direction that this debate heads. Competition law has recently been a major football theme, with the game’s authorities losing a series of cases. A legal argument can now be made that parachutes restrict competition by preventing clubs from accessing the market for Premier League television rights.

The Premier League’s position about parachutes being necessary to stimulate competition may be even more important there, since it can be argued another way. If you want clubs to be more competitive, money should be given after promotion rather than relegation. But it’s highly unlikely that established Premier League clubs will vote for that.

Many in the division would instead maintain that, as severe as the bottom looks, it’s still too early to talk of trends. For the Premier League’s part, too, there is the example of Brentford establishing themselves in 2021-22 and Fulham, Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest all staying up in 2022-23.

There are individual explanations for those performances, ranging from Brentford and Bournemouth’s intelligence in the market to Nottingham Forest being extremely active in it.

It’s hard not to feel that the factors for a trend are there, though. The mood may not stay so positive for long, even with those such as Ipswich returning to the Championship with few regrets. This is a debate that looks set to keep going up, rather than going down.