The promoted club bounce used to be a thing, as the residual glow of promotion lingered into August and beyond.
On the opening weekend last season, Bournemouth beat Aston Villa. The year before, Brentford and Watford both won their first games. In each of the two previous seasons, we had to wait until the second weekend: Leeds United, Norwich City and Sheffield United all won.
Winter? That would be long and hard. But winter could wait.
In 2023-24, only via a win at Newcastle United, West Ham or Everton can a promoted club record victory before October. Any would be considered as a significant shock – it is 16 winless games and counting. The other 17 clubs may dismiss such a notion to deflect any perceived arrogance, but their supporters would quickly give away the truth: they’ve all circled the home games against Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton Town as must-not-lose.
Burnley’s issues are nuanced. They have lost to four bigger, better teams: Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Aston Villa and Manchester United. Their style of football under Vincent Kompany, irrepressible in the Championship, is proving hard to replicate.
The complicating factor: they have half a new team. Nottingham Forest signed 20 players last summer and the world understandably scoffed; Burnley signed 15.
For Sheffield United and Luton Town, this is roughly what we expected. Anything else would have been overperformance. Paul Heckingbottom has a worse squad now than when he got promoted.
Cameron Archer came in, but Iliman Ndiaye left. Gustavo Hamer has started excellently, but they lost James McAtee and Tommy Doyle. Sander Berge was sold.
Sheffield United have lost their top goalscorer, top two assist providers and second and third highest chance creators from last season. They signed one defender on a permanent deal and he’s played four league minutes so far.
Luton – and this isn’t intended to sound disparaging at all – spent the summer building a mighty effective Championship promotion squad. The majority of their signings came from EFL clubs – Stoke City, Barnsley, Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers, Rotherham United. Their total spend on transfer fees – £18m – is roughly the same as what Manchester United will pay Jadon Sancho in wages to play, or otherwise, this season.
The temptation here is to snipe and sneer a little, wondering what the point was of these two clubs putting all that effort into getting promoted if they weren’t going to try (by which they mean spend vast sums of money). The alternative isn’t much better: patronising. Well done, you got a point at home. Keep trying like that and you might win a game soon.
But we’re looking at this all wrong. Luton have spent their last decade atoning for the previous one. Their accounts in the Championship in 2019-20 showed a £3m profit. When they signed Croatian goalkeeper Simon Sluga in 2019 it was exceptional because it was the first time in 18 years that they had spent more than £1m on a single transfer fee.
Luton have a clear set of financial principles that stretch from how the team should play to how they should recruit players and how they should organise their budgets: sustainability. They were promoted with the third lowest wage bill in the second tier because they stuck to those principles. They remember only too well what happens when you don’t and they don’t intend to change now.
At Sheffield United, there has been great financial uncertainty ever since the owner, Prince Abdullah, decided to put the club up for sale. In both of these cases, we must logically ask: what is the sensible thing to do here? Is it to overspend in pursuit of 17th place and, potentially, the same problems next season? Or is it to use the Premier League for what it is – a stupendous cash provider thanks to its broadcasting deals – and ensure that the next few years may be easier? If that means relegation, so be it.
Got a problem with that? Direct your questions elsewhere. Such as: is it healthy that the match to decide who gets promoted to the Premier League is almost exclusively headlined in monetary terms?
Is it good that the revenues of one league are nine times higher than the one below? Is securing your long-term future to be criticised when wages have been higher than total revenue in the Championship for the last five years in a row?
Last season tricked us, temporarily shifting our focus away from reality. For only the fourth time in Premier League history, all three promoted teams stayed up. There was a catch: two of them benefited from parachute payments and the other, Forest, had an owner who was intent on significant spending to dissuade relegation as a probability – £160m and Steve Cooper kept Forest up by four points.
It is a lovely idea, that reality is nothing but a persistent illusion created only by perception. It’s also nonsense here. If Luton and Sheffield United really are taking the money and running, they are well within their rights.
If this season becomes painful for both, they exist this season in a habitat that was not created for them to live well for long. English football’s finances are broken. Luton would only be paying the price for ignoring the glam and the glitter if they agreed to live by its lurid expectations.
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