So Brighton have £400m Debt, but they made a net profit of £113m on transfers this summer, and their remaining squad is conservatively worth approximately £350m - £400m+ They also finished 6th in the league and are in Europe (More income next season to offset the debt alongside a massive load of incoming transfer fees) They have a newer better stadium that holds 10,000 more people. They also have some very key members of staff that have the ability to identify the right players and the right manager on a consistent basis. Pozzo ran up £200m of debt, took us back to the championship and we’re now left with a squad worth about a of 10th of Brighton’s. We have a scattergun approach to recruitment and go through 3 managers a season. Yes Bloom has pumped more in, but he’s got one hell of a lot more out than Pozzo, I really don’t understand how this is even a point of discussion. It’s a good job Pozzo doesn’t have the means to loan us £400m because imagine the utter state we’d be if he had access to that sort of money.
It could have lasted, but we needed to have remained intelligent. We weren’t. If you do the right things, read the warning signs from the previous season and act on it then you can remain in the top league and progress. There are always strugglers, newly promoted sides and the odd lane duck. If you survive the first two seasons you should never go down. Look at Palace. You just have to be smart.
Saying we had the lowest salary budget in the league does you no favours. It’s an outright lie at the time we went down. And we also bought a player for 35m euro as well.
I suspect people didn’t think Sarr was a financial burden at the time though. Plenty on Twitter demanding we get him. Think we might have been ok but for the COVID lockdown because we had some form. However we weren’t prepared to come back and wanted to cancel the season so there was no willing to get ok with it . We probably haven’t got out of that mindset since .
Fans are not to blame. Of course supporters are going to get excited over signing a £30m forward. That’s something I never thought Watford would ever do. You have to trust the custodians know what they’re doing and that the spend was not reckless and was part of the big plan. But it wasn’t, it was all folly. I seem to remember back then we needed to strengthen the defence and it was largely left alone. Dawson came in, but his heart wasn’t in it. We needed more than just him though but went for Sarr and it cost us a place at the big table in the end. Covid may have played a part, but it was just a component not the cause. We were in trouble well before Covid struck and was clinging to the bounce Pearson was giving us. But it was all last chance saloon stuff.
Probably fair but we had some hope particularly with decent home form . Guess we will never know ! Agree on the defence - trouble was we had a back line that were too slow and caught out easily .
Brighton have had both the privilege of greater funding from their owner and invested those funds more wisely over the past few years, which is what has led them to greater success on the pitch and off it. I think it's reasonable to say that had we invested what our owner was willing to put into the club better then we could still be sitting in the Premier League right now. But it's also reasonable to say that we are unlikely to have been able to kick on and achieve the sort of success Brighton have, at least in the same timeframe, unless we had a way of securing much greater investment than Pozzo could provide directly. The fact that the club sought an external loan and have been entertaining outside investment for some time demonstrates that they were stretching beyond theirs and the club's means. I think relegation in COVID conditions exposed just how stretched the club and ownership had become and has since resulted in a more severe correction than would have been necessary had the Pozzos invested more sustainably and less wastefully, even without access to the levels of owner investment the likes of Brighton have access to.
If you survive the first two seasons, then you shouldn’t go down. You should be better equipped than the three promoted clubs and the teams in their second season (if there are any). There should be always at least three more vulnerable clubs than you from there on. To be relegated after 6 seasons it just reckless. Major decisions would have to be wrong for you to go down once you’re established.
Sure in a comparison to Brighton we don’t currently do very well. But we could also compare ourselves with other clubs who scoffed at the top table. stoke, West Brom, Leeds, Blackburn, Sunderland, Bolton, Norwich, Soton, Hull, Huddersfield, Wigan, Cardiff, Swansea, middlesboro, sheff wed, reading, etc. We really are not that unusual to have regressed. GT said words to the effect that it was better to have risen and fallen then to have never have risen at all.
Small clubs always go down after 1-5 seasons. They can’t beat the odds forever esp when newly promoted clubs like AV and NF can throw silly money around to buy survival. It just needs a few poor decisions and the bubble bursts. Silly money spent on Sarr, humiliation in the cup final, the bonus dispute, that’s all it took, though we’d have been ok if Deulofeu hadn’t been injured and covid hadn’t killed our momentum.
But they are probably the only recent case of a 'smaller' club getting promoted to the Premier League and truly 'establishing' themselves without massive backing, and besides, Zaha has gone, Olise has gone, I'm not sure they're completely safe if they make a few bad decisions/have bad luck, look at Stoke...
An established club will always have an advantage over newly promoted. Look at Villa, huge club but only stayed up thanks to EPL shenanigans, by the skin of their teeth. Forest were close too. It doesn’t matter how big a club is, a newly promoted club is always vulnerable. Where a smaller club, once established, fails is down to the natural cycle. An owner has to realise when things are going stale and refreshen it up. This is a skill. But there is no reason why a smaller club can’t remain in the EPL for a long time, providing the board is stable and intelligent.
Strange then that none seem to be able to do this. Presume all owned by poor owners ? Look at all the smaller clubs in the champ that have been in the top flight in the last 15-20 years. Let’s just agree to disagree. Neither of us are going to convince the other.
Another club I feel it's fair to compare ourselves too are Brentford. After all, they were promoted the same season we were. In terms of size or history, they actually have nothing on us. But two years later, just look at the huge gap between us. Looking in from the outside, both they and Brighton appear to be well run and progressive, without a scattergun approach to new signings or managerial appointments. They are both well set Premier League clubs competing for European places, while sadly we look a middling Championship club with an empty number 9 shirt we seem unable to fill. I’m actually enjoying this season so far. Ismael is doing a decent job so far and it’s been nice to see a few players kick on from last year. But there will always be a sense of ‘if only’ about us too that won’t go away. Yet, at least!
Well they have....Palace, Brentford and Brighton are currently over the two season vulnerability threshold. Who knows how long that will last. They all seem to be set to remain. Bournemouth are now in their second season and only dropped out for a couple of seasons after a long stretch. Burnley were in the Prem for a long time and only dropped out for a season. We'll see how they get on this time around. We were also in that bracket, but our owner has blown it. It all depends on the skill of the ownership. If they are inventive and smart at what they do, notice the signs when things are going wrong and continue to innovate, you can stay in the Prem for a long, long time. There is no reason not to.
Brentford will probably be not so great without Toney but on Sunday showed they can cope as they are organised and got good cover up front which is what we didn’t have /bring in. Palace as we know seem to just be very organised and rely on their attacking ability but if they lose Olise along with Zaha will be worse off . Brighton are just excellent in the transfer market it seems . Always helps of you have an organised and tactically good manager. Stoke and Charlton did but got rid of them and paid the price from which they haven’t recovered. Not sure what happened at Southampton- maybe one season too many of selling players and not replacing them well ? Same for Swansea maybe after a good run ? Which might happen to Wolves .
Crystal Palace are among the outliers. Since the Premier League was founded in 1992-93 the only clubs to have stayed up without suffering a subsequent relegation are: Man City – promoted in 2002 (22 seasons) West Ham – 12 seasons Crystal Palace – 11 seasons Newcastle – 7 seasons Brighton – 7 seasons Wolves – 6 seasons Aston Villa – 5 seasons Brentford – 3 seasons Fulham, Bournemouth, Forest – 2 seasons Burnley, Sheff Utd, Luton – first season That means that on 81 occasions a team promoted to the Premier League has eventually gone down. Even longish term surviveors like Charlton and Bolton went down eventually. Leicester even won the Premier League and went down. Surviving a couple of years does increase the chances of staying up for a longer period but we also have to accept that since 2015, the cost of being a Premier League clubs has accelerated beyond our means. Are we really to expect that now Brentford have survived a couple of seasons they should *never* go down? Just not what the evidence of history tells us.
I think this discussion is expanding into something else. I've said once you've been promoted and stayed up for those vulnerable first two seasons, which is the hardest thing to achieve, you should not be relegated, not that you won't be relegated. I've explained several times, it's down to the intelligence of the ownership. You should always have the advantage over the newly promoted and second year clubs. That should provide a buffer for you to avoid relegation. Two years of EPL money already in the bank should take you up the ladder to the mid-table clubs. Once you're in and established you should not get relegated. People can list the entire history of leagues since football began, it makes no difference to this ideology. You'll only be relegated, once you're established, if your ownership screws up. This is the cause for relegation for any established club.
I don’t quite understand your analysis. You list current PL clubs with the length of time since they were promoted, but preface it with “since the Premier League was founded in 1992-93”. Of course several of those in the list have been relegated since then and come back up. Perhaps the list also needs to show clubs who were promoted earlier and remained for a long spell (Stoke, Swansea etc.)?
Of course things have to go wrong to go down but to say you shouldn't go down just because you've been there for two seasons is ridiculous. Look at the money some of the teams can spend like Villa or Fulham. Way beyond what we can do. If we got it wrong then so has every club relegated in the history of The Premier League who have survived more than two years. It happens, we are not big enough to survive for ever in the top division, it's that simple. Palace will go down at some point much like Southampton did last season. Brentford will go at some point as will many others. For us and many of these clubs if you get your transfer business wrong then you'll be in trouble. That's what we did and many others have done before and since. GT was correct to say our aim should be a top 30 club. He never got mot much wrong and he's bang on with that
As has explained Brighton have been artificially funded to their lofty station. Brentford have done very well. Would you bet on them being a prem side in 3 years time ? Maybe…. What about all the smaller clubs in the champ who tasted life in the prem but couldn’t sustain it. We are in good company ! I don’t think we are that far apart. Yes poor decisions were a part of our relegation. My point is just that it’s tougher for the likes of us, QPR, Reading, Bolton, WBA, Swansea to stay in the prem than the likes of West Ham, Everton etc. Yes you can probably look back to mistakes made by those other teams that lead to their relegation but we and they have less financial margin for error than the likes of WHU and Everton who can afford a few £20m duds amongst their acquisitions and still maintain prem status. I guess with perfect decision making every season it would be possible to stay up forever but that’s pretty tough to pull off indefinitely as many champ clubs have found. OK?
The point Hornetboy made was that if you stay up for two seasons you *shouldn't ever* get relegated. Hornetboy's point that if you can cling on for two years the tools for a longer stay are at your disposal is fair enough, but to say you should never get relegated is an over-reach and one not supported by history. My point is that even the likes of Stoke, Swansea and others who remained in the PL for a reasonable amount of time and might have considered themselves secure, went down eventually. The summary of Hornetboy's argument now is: If you continue to run everything well enough to stay up you shouldn't go down, which is a subtly different point to the one originally made.
But the original point was this: "If you survive the first two seasons you should never go down." Going after 7, 8 or even 13 years isn't 'never going down'! That's the point people are contesting!
Good summary, but I disagree with your final comment. It was the point I was making all along, there has been no subtle changes along the way. Maybe I'm not articulate enough to make people understand it, but that was what I was trying to get across from the very first post.
TBF I was just trying to pick holes in @The undeniable truth. It’s what I do. See cricket threads for further examples.
