Never Tell Me the Odds

Back in 2000, Ipswich Town were installed as early favourites for relegation, as is customary for the winner of the Championship play-offs. As a teenager I remember getting irate at various media outlets for this extremely unreasonable prediction, sending at least one intemperate, expletive-ridden letter to the Football 365 mailbox. Turned out I was right, but that was probably less a triumph of my judgement and more of my biases and reality haphazardly aligning. Following our epic fifth place finish, the editors at F365 doubled down, saying they’d probably predict next year’s play-off winners for relegation too.

One thing that will become apparent is that when it comes to surviving at least one season in the Premier League, things aren’t quite as straightforward as imagined. Most promoted teams are instantly installed as relegation favourites and Ipswich are no exception. You can find odds on our relegation as short as 4/6 on, a 60% implied probability. No bookie gives us even a 50/50 chance as it stands. Yet staying up as a “fresher” is a little more likely than the received wisdom would have you believe.

Over the past 10 seasons exactly half of those coming up have beaten the drop. In this note I wanted to look at those last 30 promoted teams, to see what aspects of their journey might shape their destiny and shape ours. Are we delusional to believe we can stay up? What kind of teams stay up? How do they tend to approach things?

Back to Back

Our road to promotion is basically the only thing that we know about Ipswich’s Premier League story so far, so let’s start there. In my estimation there’s three salient features here – we won back-to-back promotions, we finished second and we came up without the benefit of additional broadcast money (parachute payments).

Let’s start with the back-to-back thing. You might assume that a precipitous rise from third tier to first in just two years would leave a team unprepared for the highest level. The combination of lower league players and lower league facilities would prove fatal. What rises quickly should also be prone to a rapid fall.

In the Premier League era four previous teams have done it, Watford (1999), Manchester City (2000), Norwich (2011), Southampton (2012), strangely all in consecutive pairs (maybe Derby, Portsmouth and Oxford should be paying attention). None of this happened within my ten year period, but let’s have a look anyway. Graham Taylor’s Watford won their second promotion via a fifth-place finish and the play-offs, then stank the place out in the 1999-2000 Premier League, finishing rock bottom with 24 points. All Ipswich fans should know that Manchester City followed their double bubble promotion with relegation at Portman Road, sealed with a Martijn Reuser diving header.

Paul Lambert’s Norwich side powered straight through two divisions between 2009 and 2011, then managed successive mid-table finishes, the Canaries only sustained run in the topflight since their early 1990s “heyday” (such as it is). Finally, Southampton, with Rickie Lambert leading the line, gained admission to the 2012-13 Premier League with consecutive second-placed finishes, staying there for more than a decade.  So that’s a 50% survival rate for back-to-backers and a 100% chance of survival if both promotions were automatic.

Second again, alé alé alé

Moving on to our more commonplace achievement - finishing second in the league. Over the last ten years, thirty teams have been promoted. You would imagine that league position was important and that the Champions would prove more durable than the runners up, who themselves would be more successful than the play-off winners. Turns out the first part of that is true and the second part not, with 70% of league title winners staying up, but play-off winners and runners-up both survive (40%) less than half the time.

That might worry us, but we should remember that we won more points than 6 out of the last 10 Championship champions and the team that did finish above us are likely getting a points deduction to go with their other financial headaches. The Runners Up that stayed up averaged 90.75 points in their promotion season, compared to an average of 88.8 for their relegated peers, so that over-performance does seem to matter. The more dominant you were in the second tier, the likelier you are to make a success of yourself in the top tier.  

Parachutes and Trampolines

One question that really interested me was whether “yo-yo teams”, recently relegated teams still in receipt of parachute payments, were more likely to stay up than “fresh meat” clubs, new to the level, like us. My first guess was that the former would stand a better chance, with parachute payments enabling them to maintain stronger squads in the Championship, meaning less work to do to make themselves ready for the Premier League.  Ultimately these clubs have had more money come into them over the course of several seasons, which should translate into a better football team.

In fact, the opposite is true. The last ten seasons have seen 17 freshers and 13 yo-yos, which is probably more competitive than you’d imagine from most discussion of parachute payments. And it was the freshers who really thrived too, 11 out of 17 avoiding relegation in their first season (65%), compared to just 4 of the 13 yo-yos (31%).  There doesn’t seem to be a cycle where teams go up, then go down, then go up and stay up. Typically the yo-yos’ finishing point is back in the Championship.

I have two theories about this. The first is that there are legacy costs to a relegation, you’re left with a bunch of players on Premier League Player money which they objectively don’t merit, some of whom are still going to be occupying your wage bill when you return to the Premier League, leaving you less budget headroom for squad building.

My second (and favourite) theory is that the freshers have had barriers to overcome that the yo-yos didn’t. As an ordinary Championship team you have a big resource disadvantage relative to the parachute clubs and no particular advantage over the rest of the division. For the yo-yos, if everyone turns in a par performance you’ll compete for promotion, but any normal Championship team has to be doing something special to get in that mix.

The off-field structure, the recruitment, the coaching, the manager, some tactical innovation - to build a better team than the richer clubs, someone has to be doing something exceptional. Upon promotion these clubs are used to out-performing their budget and that’s likely to be their edge thereafter or at least until their competitors figure out their strategic innovation. For instance, it seems to have taken most of one whole season for Premier League clubs to come to grips with Chris Wilder’s underlapping wide centre backs.

Sleeping Giants

Club size is one of those things that’s largely pointless to talk about because no one agrees what constitutes “bigness”. Nevertheless, we’re all aware that some football clubs are just bigger operations with a larger footprint, a larger fanbase and therefore more resources. You’d expect clubs like Leeds, Newcastle, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest to find it easier to consolidate in the top division than the likes of Hull, Cardiff and Burnley.

In the absence of any better metric, average attendance in your promotion season seems like a reasonable proxy for bigness.1 Do teams with more supporters and bigger stadiums tend to stay up more often? Well, sort of. Survivors on average had slightly higher attendances than the teams going down, but only by about 5% (23,371 to 22,328), not a very significant margin.

Grouping clubs by size is a bit more revealing though. In this period, six “big” clubs with an average attendance of more than 27,500 were promoted, five of them stayed up (Sheffield United 2023-24 being the exception), giving a survival rate of 83%, far higher than the rest of our sample. It does clearly help a bit to be more “organically” Premier League sized. There are also some outliers at the other end, with two of the “very small” (sub 12,000-attendances) clubs promoted in this period managing to get up and stay up - Bournemouth and Brentford. Is there an advantage to being small and nimble? It’s the middle category where you are basically doomed, clubs posting attendances between 12,000 and 27,500 got relegated immediately in two thirds of cases. Average attendance at Portman Road last season was 28,845.

Hey Big Spender

The last bit I thought worth thinking about was spending, this section is especially for Messrs Mark Ashton and Ed Schwartz. You would assume that the more you spend upon promotion the better the chance you have of staying up. I wanted to focus on the “freshers” here because we’d expect yo-yos clubs to spend differently. They should, in theory, have retained a lot of Premier League quality players who won’t need replacing.  

Is there a discernible difference between the successful and unsuccessful freshers? Or are we going to see some counter-intuitive patterns here? Well, not really. The average Summer transfer spend of the 11 survivors was 105% greater than that of the 6 relegated clubs.2 They added more volume, on average 12.2 new players to their squads, in contrast to just 9.8 at the teams who returned from whence they came. Their transfers were also on average £2m (or 65%) more expensive per player, so not just more but better as well. With the exception of Fulham somehow managing to spend £96m in 2018-19 whilst still going down (ever wonder why Scott Parker isn’t in work?), every single non-parachute team that got relegated did so spending less than Bournemouth’s quite modest 2015 transfer budget (£26m).

What sort of figure, on average, keeps a non-parachute promoted team in the Premier League? Over the last 10 years, these successful teams on average spent £62m across 12.2 players to prepare their squad for the season ahead, with their most expensive single acquisition costing on average £16m. These are eye-watering figures for a club like Ipswich whose £4.5m transfer record was set in 2001. To have a shot at doing anything Ipswich will need to be writing multiple cheques considerably exceeding that number.  

Even those numbers have inflated considerably over the last five years. Since 2019-20 the average bill for survival has risen to a whopping £89m, now spread across fewer players (11.8), costing an average of £7.6m, with the most expensive costing on average £20m. Even if you exclude Nottingham Forest’s manic 2022 Summer window as an outlier, the average total still comes in at £77m.

That said, two teams have managed it on the cheap relatively recently. In 2021-22 Brentford spent just £33m (on 6 players) and Sheffield United in 2019-20 only £40m (on 10 players) and both managed 9th-place finishes.

A Shot

The idea that there’s an unbridgeable chasm between the Premier League and the Championship is a cliché. We have been instantly installed as 2nd-favourites for the drop, only behind Leicester and even then only because of the points deduction. Yet, there’s plenty of comfort to be found in the record of clubs like us in the last 10 seasons. “Fresher” teams don’t tend to go down and “yo-yos” do. We’re likely “big enough” to stay up, although at the lower end of it. Runners-up do tend to get relegated, but points-wise we’ve essentially had the season of a title winner. The real question mark is whether we’re in a position to spend the kind of money that most Premier League survivors have required. Over to you Mr. Ashton.