Just around Portman Road, there is a reminder of what football should be about. Ipswich Town are a good-sized club with a proud history of trophies, enjoying a level of excitement they haven’t felt in two decades. There is a chance, there is hope. If they also draw at home to Huddersfield Town on Saturday afternoon, Ipswich will have secured promotion to the top flight for the first time in 22 years. Some of the classic elements that come with such days make it even more exciting. Karen McKenna’s team can’t afford to think about any of that. “You have to stop it and ignore it,” captain Sam Morrissey told the BBC after this week’s 2-1 win over Coventry City. “It’s not our job to get excited. Our job is to come down, rest and recover.
A lot of other people may feel that’s what they need by Saturday evening, and that’s just the people who watch on television. The Ipswich game is one of seven with something on the line, making up more than half the fixtures on the final day of the Championship season. Two of those fixtures see teams go at it while aiming for completely contrasting goals, with relegation-threatened Plymouth Argyle and Birmingham City chasing Hull City and Norwich City respectively in the play-offs. Face to face. They in turn form 10 teams with something to play with during the day. It is, as is almost always the case, much more lively than the Premier League.
Some in the ranks have even lamented that Arsenal’s title race against Bournemouth is underway at the same time. The Premier League feels dependent on this match to keep the excitement going in the title race. Many in the competition will be exempt this Saturday as well, and will be absorbed into the Championship.
It’s almost impossible if you’ve been watching any of this in the last few months or, indeed, the last few years. The chaotic nature of the division means there’s always plenty to play for up and down the table, with good teams pitted against each other for matches that lead to mayhem. The promotion race alone has seen eight matches with at least four goals since the start of April. In five of those, both sides have scored at least twice, perhaps the pick of the games being Leeds United’s 4-3 win over Middlesbrough.
During one of those games, a Championship executive who has worked on the continent enthuses that “this is what English football really is”. Everyone can beat everyone, most of these teams are from elite clubs that are not of global size to be cut off from passionate communities. There are some really strong sustainable organizations such as Millwall and Rotherham. It goes even further, as many of these clubs are among the last remaining social centers in their towns. There is also no VAR. Many fans now openly express the view that they would rather be second, because it is more fun to watch.
This type of connection may go beyond England, or there is a simple argument on how “pure” it is. One argument is that the Championship could now be the fifth biggest league in Europe, perhaps overtaking Ligue 1. This is not an unusual theory. It just comes down to numbers and economics.
Millions of people will be watching on Saturday as Sky Sports pays the EFL a total of at least £935m over the next five seasons. The French league has struggled to compete after abandoning an auction for domestic rights this campaign. It cannot currently attract Championship viewers.
While Ligue 1 pays more in wages overall, and has an average attendance figure of around 4,000, such a figure has been exceeded by four clubs. Olympique Marseille, Monaco and Lille all pay good prices, with Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain again skewing the whole division. Beyond that, though, a significant proportion of Championship clubs pay more than the average Ligue 1 team. Most players’ representatives would place them in England’s second tier, if not one of the clubs’ top tiers, than France’s top tier.
This is certainly true of managers. A third of the Championship’s coaches are from overseas, which is unusual for the second tier. It has given football an international dimension, making the Championship more tactically different from many continental competitions beyond France. European coaching circles are abuzz about what Danny Ruhl is doing with Sheffield Wednesday.
A lot of this is about proximity to the Premier League rather than separation from the Premier League. Virtually all of Europe’s brightest coaches now see the Championship as a stepping stone to the glamorous league they all want to join. These are big names. Of course, Leicester City’s title win this season brought back memories of 2015-16.
This points to how this closeness to the Premier League has led to a number of problems. Leicester could start next season with points deducted for PSR breaches, having first been promoted from the Championship in 2013-14 after paying a £3.1m settlement to the EFL over an FFP dispute.
This touches on why distribution cannot be described as “pure”. It has the same problems as the Premier League, from ownership to disparity, if on a lesser scale. It’s part of the same pyramid, after all. The Premier League’s hyper-inflationary upward draft has had more of an impact on the Championship than any other league. This can be seen in all the discussions about the “new deal” and the redistribution of money in the lower leagues. In trying to keep up, let alone go up, many Championship clubs have massive losses and “crazy” wage-to-income ratios. According to Deloitte, the latter hit a staggering 108 percent for the 2021-22 season. This is why Premier League clubs are resisting the new deal, because they think lower league clubs will go out and spend it on wages. Much has inevitably been made of Nottingham Forest’s heavy spending this season.
Such spending has fostered a growing problem with competitive balance, despite many sports being appreciated. Two of the three teams promoted in each of the last six seasons were clubs that received a parachute payment from relegation from the Premier League. The same could happen this season, if Leeds United or Southampton take on Leicester City. There was a chance for a long time that it could have been worse. At one point, it looked like the three relegated clubs had directly replaced the three promoted clubs for the first time. It is still very unlikely to happen.
This is why a common description of the top eight or so clubs within the game is “Premier League 2”. So let’s not forget that much of the logic behind “Project Big Picture” in 2020 was that many clubs are relatively interchangeable in terms of their “Premier League identity”. Coventry City was once an important center of high class and is now Brighton.
Another description of the championship is “a fantastic division with crazy economics and a skewed result”.
Even the Ipswich story has some complications. It is an investment fund in ORG that is behind the majority owners of Game Changer 20 Limited, and they are ultimately looking for a return. A 40% stake in Ipswich was sold to private equity group Brightpath Sports Partners just a few weeks ago. The latter represents an extreme in terms of capitalist interest in football. While such financial intentions may occasionally coincide with purely footballing goals – such as running a team well enough to go up, as we see here – the goals are ultimately non-football. It’s not like there’s even a deep emotional attachment. Businessman Brett Johnson has spoken in the past about how he bought Ipswich because it was a club with a history of trophies and appearances in the Premier League, with a strong local base, potentially But in just a few years it was the most profitable league. The fact that they were in League One only meant that it was at a very cheap price, at £40m. Because ORG administers the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, it has led some in the soccer investment community to question whether pension payments should depend on the results of soccer clubs. .
Should Ipswich go up this weekend, it would certainly represent an incredible investment. It’s also a description that can already be applied to McKenna. Whatever happens on Saturday, he’s had an incredible season. Judging by how this season has gone, however, anything could happen on Saturday.
Credit : www.independent.co.uk
