The Premier League is a unique island that nobody wants to leave. It’s like being at Sandy Lane in Barbados – you want to stay for the rest of your life.
Relegation is sport’s biggest trapdoor and this year’s battle – six points separate the bottom nine – consists of legacy clubs, promoted clubs, former champions and a club that won two European Cups.
They’re all bound by a desperation of clinging on to the Premier League in a maniacal game of snakes and ladders The consequences of relegation are significant. People lose their jobs, income drops and you face the challenge of trying to keep or get rid of players.
You degrade relationships and reputations, you unwind ownership aspirations and ideals while the main perpetrators – the players – often sail off into the bloody sunset.
Going up to the Premier League is like building a house on quicksand – you don’t know what you’re putting your foundations on to. Income drops from £150million to £60m overnight in the event of relegation and no business can pivot on the basis of such a drastic loss. Look at what happened during Covid. Businesses were decimated as their revenues were cut and went bust left, right and centre.
Everton are among the clubs in the bottom nine of the Premier League who could go down
Charlton played like men possessed in the 2005 game on the last day that saw us relegated
To use a music analogy, all you can hear is Good Times by Chic when you’re promoted, but if you are cast back to the Championship it’s like The Specials’ Ghost Town. You’re going to stadiums and clubs that you never wanted to see again.
The fact is, relegation is a cataclysmic fall from grace. And for this lot, they’ll feel like turkeys in mid-December.
Leicester are former champions, West Ham splashed out £160m on transfers last summer, Forest spent a vast amount of cash buying more players than you can shake a stick at, Leeds United’s whole potential ownership hinges on whether they stay in the Premier League, Everton have an owner who spent half a billion quid to get precisely nowhere and is now staring down the barrel with a new stadium on the horizon and then there’s Southampton and Bournemouth with new ownership.
Once you’re in the promised land, you realise everything else is like something from the Will Smith film I Am Legend – a desolate wasteland.
It’s a vastly different place when the lights go out, I can tell you. The Championship is great but there is no place like being in the sun – nobody wants to go back to the darkness.
For owners, there’s a great deal of anxiety and tension. I can remember Palace playing relegation rivals Southampton in our penultimate game and while it wasn’t exactly a meeting of minds between myself and their chairman Rupert Lowe, there was the knowledge that one of us was going to have a very disappointing outcome sooner rather than later.
You’d have two sets of directors sitting on either side of the boardroom trying to be pleasant to one another – or not so much in my case – while thinking about which players you can nick if they go down.
I wasn’t the greatest one for fraternising with the enemy anyway. I was combative and competitive and believed they were my adversaries. I wasn’t interested in drinking chardonnay with them, I wanted to go into their club, metaphorically beat them up, get three points and leave.
There certainly isn’t any camaraderie or sympathy. The only thing that unites people in the Premier League is the pursuit of money. Board meetings were all about how much money can be made and who gets it whereas in the Championship, it was more likely to be about what colour the linesman’s pants were.
Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani (left) is among the desperate owners this term
The relegation down to the Championship cost us in the region of £50-60million
Boardrooms are full of tremendous egos and an awful lot of attitude. Now amplify that three-fold when you’re competing with each other to stay in the division. It’s a unique dynamic.
There is always animosity and differences of opinions between clubs. Getting relegated gives other people joy. No other business is like that.
At Palace, it was ultimately a last day draw at Charlton that sent us down – and cost the club £50-£60m. We’d played them in the League Cup earlier in the season and their announcer referred to us as ‘Palarse’ when he read out the teams. Our chief executive made a complaint and the guy got sacked. Everyone blamed me for it of course.
Roll forward to the last day of the season and the vitriol between the two clubs inspired Charlton to play like men possessed because they had the opportunity to relegate Palace – the team that had given them a home when they were a bunch of nobodies and couldn’t find anywhere to play by the way.
I’m of the mindset that if you show me a good loser, I’ll show you a loser. But there’s a way to lose and the first call I made after we’d been relegated was to congratulate the West Brom chairman Jeremy Peace. It was difficult but through adversity I took strength in my own substance. I felt that was the way to behave but wasn’t expected of me, I was considered a tantrum-throwing enfant terrible.
No one called me to offer their sympathies you’ll be shocked to hear. The only messages I got were from Charlton fans as I was driving out of the ground in my Aston Martin telling me to get lost. I was actually congratulating Jeremy whilst some Charlton fan was gobbing on my car. That’s football for you.
As an owner you know that irrespective of who contributed to the outcome, you’re the one at fault. If relegation comes knocking at your door then, more often than not, it’s you the owner that’s going to take the responsibility economically and literally in the minds of others.
It’s a unique old business but that’s the reality facing multiple owners right now who are staring into the abyss.
Bournemouth are favourites to go down but are among nine teams fighting to stay up
The manager I rejected due to his accent
Oxford United received 130 applicants for their vacant manager’s position following the sacking of Karl Robinson. There’s often a deluge when you’re in the market for a new manager and they range from the qualified to the deluded. I never had as many as Oxford but maybe that was just me.
I do remember Steve Cotterill phoning relentlessly and telling me he’d carried out scouting reports on the team. The problem was, I couldn’t take him seriously because of his west country accent and he ended up irritating me.
Talking of accents, Jacques Santini was in the offing before he made the choice to go to Spurs. I also recall Ralf Rangnick being punted at me – there’s a bullet dodged! Others were a total waste of time.
They’d picked a Fantasy Football team and thought they could manage a real football team. Oxford may have had 130 people wanting the job but only a handful will be of interest, no matter what division you’re in.
I couldn’t take Steve Cotterill seriously because of his west country accent
FA turn into the fun police
The FA really are laughable sometimes. They applauded the introduction of a regulator when they themselves are the bloody de facto regulator! What in God’s name are they doing if they’re not administrating the game?
Well, by ‘investigating’ Arsenal for their celebrations at the end of their comeback win against Bournemouth, it turns out they’re the fun police. They are the football administrator equivalent of a balls, bibs and cones coach.
Arsenal’s celebrations after scoring a winner against Bournemouth are being investigated
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