Buzzin Championship Football

It’s what every premiership club dreads – Relegation to the English Football League.

Many top flight football clubs are faced with the prospect of being earmarked for relegation during the festive period. With the Premiership tables being crammed full of football clubs with wealthy backers, it seems somewhat a dreadful situation for them to know to have spent millions on players and managers only to see results fall flat. Ultimately relegation looms. We can just look at Newcastle United for such a classic example last season. Newcastle was a sad story of mismanagement which actually started off as being quite promising. A rich multi-millionaire in Mike Ashley with a long standing clothing business bought the club in 2006 but where things turned sour was the continuation of the infamous revolving door policy for managers which led to all kinds of instability in the dressing room. Players lost interest and the club’s results slid until they were demoted in 2009 to the Championship via a lack lustre performance against Aston Villa – a match they had needed to win.

A club like Newcastle United, who enjoyed 16 years of the premiership football and they have begun their Championship campaign with gusto, much to the surprise of sports pundits. Some football bookmakers on the online betting circuit had faith in seeing the Toon promoted with odds of 15/8 back in August 09. Not bad considering that Newcastle United had just dumped its talisman, Alan Shearer, in favour of the untested Chris Hughton as manager at the time. However, the last thing a club would want to know is the betting odds; the first priority for any ex-Premiership club was to get rid of the excesses and there usually are plenty of them in player wages.

Players who expressed no desire to play on were quickly shown the door. In the case of Newcastle, those players were Damien Duff (undisclosed), Obafemi Martins (£9m) and Shay Given (£6m). Obviously, the sale of high profile players would help cushion some of the blow of reduced income from TV and sponsorship deals. That coupled with a parachute payment which totalled around £12m for dropping a league down.

Compare this to being in the Premiership, where a club get £38m just for being in that league and that’s discounting other lucrative deals on top. Ticket prices are normally affected as well with 8-10% price reductions to try and entice disgruntled fans back into stadiums as well as keeping those all important season ticket holders. Right now, Newcastle can comfortably fill around 42-49,000 spectators for a home match which is nothing to be sniffed at. Newcastle United has always been credited for having a large hardcore fan-base and this season so far has proved nothing less.

Both West Brom and Newcastle have adapted well to life in the Championship whilst Middlesbrough have been the surprise strugglers despite the help of the newly recruited, Gordon Strachan. Newcastle had to do much more to bolster its chances for promotion at the start. Much to their credit, there work has so far paid dividends, with a club managing to keep a lot of its past season’s players who have so far proved that a class above the rest in this league.

A higher wage bill will probably be the price to pay for returning to the Premiership.  Some may argue that playing in the Championship has done Newcastle more good then if they experienced another hapless season in the Premiership. Just look at them now as they have got rid of some deadwood and now play with certain ambition in them that has led to back-to-back wins – a feat they could not achieve in the past few years in the top flight league.

The Premiership 2009-2010 season is just as tight at this stage with three out a possible 11 teams trying to avoid the drop. Like Newcastle United before them, Portsmouth have been handed the uphill task of trying to regain some kind of form against a dire backdrop of boardroom controversies.

Will they be relegated to the Championship? A betting man will no doubt put money on it.