Mission Impossible

For Danny Murphy on Match of the Day, Ipswich "should be better, for me, considering the money spent". For journalist Daniel Storey, “Ipswich Town are quietly getting away with an appalling season”. Elsewhere, the entire promoted trio of Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich are collectively "a disgrace” and partially responsible for “the worst Premier League season ever”. As the likely outcome of the 2025 relegation fight becomes ever clearer, disappointment at the lack of any real contest morphs into judgement and condemnation.

Football has this strange capacity to silence context. Even watching a cup tie between a non-league team and a Premier League team you have to endure a summariser telling you what the minnows are doing wrong, offering sober critique as to what strategy might conceivably enable Tamworth to overcome Tottenham. Once the game is underway it's easy to get sucked into examining passages of play and miss the bigger picture.

It is almost as easy to do so when looking at seasons as a whole. Last year I was certainly guilty of it when watching the promoted teams fail to make an impact. As Burnley struggled, I nodded along as the pundits, safe in their studios, tore into Vincent Kompany's naivety. They simply weren't pragmatic enough to survive. Sheffield United, well, they were just useless, weren't they? Heckingbottom was a nobody manager, the Blades had recruited poorly and were a defensive disaster. As for Luton? With their paltry spending and rudimentary tactics, they were barely even trying to stay in a division they were self-evidently too small for.

For much of this season, I have scarcely been more forgiving. I had long considered Russell Martin to have failed upwards from MK Dons and Swansea. His football looked like the worst kind of "sterile domination", where you keep the ball until the opposition inevitably turns it over and kills you with it. I giggled at Leicester as they made an untenable managerial appointment in the Summer and then compounded it with an even worse one in the Autumn. These silly clubs and their terrible decisions had them doomed from the start.

Not my Ipswich though. We made sensible investments, took calculated risks, had skilled, analytical people running the club and had a brilliant manager (who we would back come what may). Historically, it has been teams like Ipswich – with a good sized fanbase, good financial backing and out-performing their budget in the division below - who have tended to avoid relegation. It would be tough to compete but, I backed us to do it. Obviously, a lot of this was motivated reasoning. I wanted to find reasons for hope, reasons to believe it would be different for us. In the end it is clear I was delusional.

In re-visiting my delusions, I also found myself re-evaluating my prejudices. Were the people running Burnley, Sheffield United, Luton, Leicester and Southampton so incompetent? By the end of this season, it is likely that each of the last six promoted teams will have been relegated, all having failed to breach 30 points, accumulating at least 10 fewer points than the next-placed team, winning fewer than one in twelve games against the other 17 teams in the league. Is it all just a coincidence that the last six promoted teams got everything wrong?

Maybe it's a little dishonest to turn round and complain something must be impossible just because you have failed to do it. Yet, as this becomes an ever more consistent pattern, at a certain point it surely becomes futile to ask what they are all doing wrong. Eventually you have to flip the question round. What could any of them actually have done to stay up?

Across the six teams you can find a pretty good variety of strategies. Some recruited domestically, from Premier League academies, from relegated clubs and from the EFL. Some tapped overseas leagues, using scouting networks to try and uncover new talents. Some tried to bring in players with Premier League experience, taking risks on injury records or recent downward career trajectories. Some tried to ride the momentum of promotion, keeping together a group with good chemistry. Some spent big, others spent modestly.

Between them they appointed experienced managers, high-profile former Premier League players, up-and-coming new stars, people who'd previously succeeded in keeping a promoted club up, domestic coaches, foreign coaches and former backroom staff at elite clubs. They adopted a variety of strategies, sometimes within the same season. They were defensive and counter-attacking, they were aggressive and attacking, they used low blocks and concentrated on set-pieces and crosses, they played possession football and tried to play through the thirds, they went direct, they played out from the back, they went long from goal kicks, they maintained a defined style from the league below or tried to adapt. They all failed.

At some point it behoves us to stop laughing at these attempts. To stop being disappointed in their failures and stop having this discussion at the level of the match day and the form book and move it to the level of structure.

In 2024, all 17 teams that retained their Premier League status began the following season with at least three years tenure in the division. For the first time since the introduction of three-year spending limits in 2013-14, every single one had the full cycle of broadcast payments and allowable losses. In their 2022-23 accounts, the smallest recorded annual income amongst them was Bournemouth, with £141m. The median income for the division was £195.5m (the mid-point between Leeds and Brighton). In addition to that income, each club could also access £35m per year of additional investment beyond their operating losses. Scaling up, we can estimate that the average Premier League club could access approximately £691.5m in revenue and permitted losses in meeting their profit and sustainability obligations over the three years. The poorest amongst them could use £528m.

The equivalent revenue figure for Ipswich for 2022-23 was £21.8m. Even assuming a chunky income rise in the second tier, Ipswich’s PSR ceiling for the three years is likely to be somewhere around half the poorest established Premier League team (with the smaller permitted £13m EFL loss limit, our limits are probably something like £35m for 22-23, £50m for 23-34 and £175m for 24/25, total £260m). Luton’s ceiling would have been of a similar order and Sheffield United’s only somewhat more generous, thanks to a couple of years of parachute payments. Even for Leicester, Southampton and Burnley, one year out of things will have left their cycle spending maybe 25 per cent short of their nearest competitor, in addition to having forced cheap sales of expensively developed assets.

These are the kind of massive gulfs we were used to seeing between the Big Six and the rest or between the top flight and the second tier. They now structure the gap between 17^th and 18^th. They mean three years of player recruitment and retention, in addition to three years of more generous wages. They also mean years of investment in global recruitment infrastructure. Promoted teams are less and less likely to be able to copy Brentford in the EFL and uncover talent pools untapped by other Premier League clubs. Even if promoted clubs identify top talent that might make a difference, chances are they’ll be gazumped by a more established competitor. Indeed, if you are really unfortunate they will poach the best players from your promotion season. What chance did Sheffield United have once Sander Berge and Iliman N’Diaye had left? What chance Leicester without Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall?  

You can add to this the increasing monopoly the largest clubs have on elite youth talent. Over the past few years Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea have come to use their enormous academies to boost their bottom line and bring in much needed “pure PSR profit” to fund their incoming transfer business. Inflation in this area of the market means that even filling your team with 11 young players who failed to make the grade elsewhere could still cost you the bones of £150m with no real option to shop elsewhere for similar players. All this whilst the chances of you developing your own talent are hamstrung by the sheer volume of players hoovered up by elite academies.  

You are left with your promotion squad, your expensive new kids, your discarded players, your adapting immigrants, half of them traipsing in Late August with no time to do your pre-season. You cross your fingers and pray enough of the deals work out, that most of them stay fit long enough to develop into a proper team, that you somehow add up to more than the sum of your parts, even though you likely had the biggest player turnover in the league. When you inevitably go on a bad run, you pray that out of nowhere you have developed enough collective spirit to pull yourself out of it, even when your squad likely has the least time and the fewest positive memories together to make that happen.

Combining all that, is it any surprise when, after no wins in 9 games and the season almost entirely slipped away, conceding one becomes conceding three? That coherent, proud performances become chaotic, dejected ones in a matter of minutes? That tired minds from the relentless battering of the league and loose collective bonds turn into mistakes and the collective dropping of heads? It isn’t.   

Perhaps all I’m doing here is making excuses and whoever scrambles out of the Championship this season will confirm it was just a “skill issue” all along. Right now though, it’s hard to think of any strategy that would’ve saved the current promoted trio or will save whoever follows them, the 17 clubs above them having crystallised into something diamond hard and impenetrable. What realistic strategy remains untested?