Norwich City have taken fewer points from their last 53 matches in the Premier League than their last 13 in the Championship. They have one Premier League away win in five-and-a-half years, incorporating 27 attempts. In their last three completed seasons (Championship, Premier League, Championship), Norwich have taken 94, 21 and then 97 points. Their positions: 1st, 20th, 1st and now 20th again.
We are used to the concept of yo-yo clubs, but Norwich have supercharged it. They have been promoted five times to the Premier League since the turn of the century and been relegated from it five times. This season more than any other, they appear as a club simply too strong for one division and too weak for the other.
As Norwich conceded their fifth, sixth and seventh goals at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, thoughts immediately turned to those supporters who have made so many of these journeys through desperate hope rather than optimism or expectation.
They surely still do get down after defeats and celebrate the triumphs during promotion campaigns, but repetition must cause a degree of desensitisation. Football in any form loses its edge when the method and the result become predictable.
What was more interesting in the reaction to Saturday’s latest thumping was that neutrals seemed to turn on Norwich. There is an accusation that Daniel Farke’s side are somehow wasting a place in the Premier League, clogging up a position that someone who might flourish could occupy.
Firstly, that’s all a little totalitarian. Norwich finished 10 points ahead of the playoff spots in the Championship last season – if anyone has a right to be here, they do. Believing otherwise, even if we’re only talking in kneejerk opinions, is an attempt to manufacture the Premier League according to our preconceptions. That’s precisely what we kicked the European Super League clubs for doing earlier this year.
More importantly, Norwich did try to bridge the gap this summer. They lost their chief creator in Emi Buendia, presumably on a promise that he could leave having stayed at the club for their Championship promotion season. They subsequently spent £65m on seven new permanent players and recruited for more on loan, including Billy Gilmour, Ozan Kabak and Brandon Williams, all of whom had big-club Premier League experience. If Norwich can be accused of anything, it’s signing too many players not signing too few.
Instead, Norwich’s struggles in the Premier League are reflective of a broken game. Their last annual revenue was £119m – seven clubs in the Premier League have revenues higher than £200m. They regularly face teams whose financial strength dwarfs anything that Norwich could ever hope to aspire to as a provincial club in a comparatively unfashionable (in football terms at least) area of the country. They have seen salary demands for potential signings increase rapidly as the Premier League got richer and are not prepared to risk the financial future of the club. It is only 12 years since Norwich were close to calling in the administrators.
But that only offers a part-explanation for Norwich’s situation. Just as unsavoury was their domination of the Championship last season after taking 21 points in the Premier League the year before. We can accept a team being relegated without trace; focus simply shifts to more competitive battles in the Premier League table. What grated was the ease in which they were able to return. Again, this is hardly Norwich’s fault.
In 2019/20, when Norwich finished bottom of the Premier League, they were given £94.5m in revenue for their participation (split between equal share, facility fees, merit payments for league position, domestic and overseas broadcasting revenues). Last season in the Championship, it is reported that they received £7.1m. That makes for a very obvious conclusion: You’re in a much better position in your first season back in the Championship if you haven’t squandered that money in trying to stay up (which, in 2019/20, Norwich emphatically did not do).
In addition to that, relegated Premier League clubs receive parachute payments that aim to act as a financial buffer to account for the substantial drop in broadcasting revenue. Those payments equate to 55 per cent of the equally shared element of the Premier League’s broadcasting revenue in season one post-relegation, dropping to 45 and 20 per cent in seasons two and three. In 2019/20, the figure for newly-relegated clubs was £42.6m in their first season.
There are good reasons for those payments, but all surround Premier League incentivisation. Essentially, without them a club would be heavily guarded against spending after promotion because instant relegation would leave them with a high commitment of expenditure without the guaranteed income. The Premier League would therefore fear the same three clubs coming down every season except in the case of severe mismanagement from an existing Premier League club.
But it does warp competition in the Championship. In 2019/20, two of the three promoted clubs received parachute payments. Last season, the same. This season, the current top three of Bournemouth, Fulham and West Brom are. Fulham accounted for 20 percent of all spending on transfer fees this summer with the signing of Harry Wilson alone. Those three clubs retained many of their star Premier League assets: Callum Robinson, Grady Diangana, Dominic Solanke, Philip Billing, Aleksandar Mitrovic and appointed high-profile new managers. The rest of the league is left to try and smash through a manufactured glass ceiling.
But little of this is Norwich City’s fault. They lie in a vague, unedifying purgatory, unable to compete with the Premier League’s riches but able to use a similar financial inequality to their advantage in the second tier. Perhaps you could accuse Norwich of playing the system. But, if so, it is the system that is broken and not them.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2XJgBjD
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