Championship - 2022/23

Starting the day 4 points clear of relegation. I'm savouring this moment in case the day gets a lot worse. A Luton win would send them 4th and leave us fout points ahead of 22nd placed Cov who will have 3 games in hand.......

 

Having just won three on the bounce

 

1/29

 

So, in case anyone had forgotten, there is still a league table to be fought for! We're back in the mix for play-offs now, I had kind of stopped looking at the table, but wow, it's really opening up now, Sheffield Utd who were miles clear at one point are 5th and a fair bit behind the top 2, Norwich are 7th! One of my students in the school I work at started crowing that L*ton could have gone top had results gone their way this weekend...how did that work out for you?

 

Detention and 1,000 lines "I must stop living in a deluded state of fanciful impossibility."

 

I think this division is better than it was in 2020/21, but there are still no really outstanding teams in it - Burnley will probably be the equivalent of that season's Norwich. Even taking into account this is a weaker team without Hughes, Chalobah and a still on-form Cleverley, I think we're dropping points in games where we would've got more than we deserved two years ago - Coventry and QPR away really should've been like Blackpool, Luton away like Millwall this week (yes they're 6th but I can't see them finishing higher than midtable where they tend to finish).

 

I think it's slightly better, but the main thing that's making it so competitive is that we are considerably worse than 2 years ago, and Norwich are basically the same minus the rather significant loss of Buendía. Burnley are fine, but they've changed a lot, and Sheffield United now look like they're spluttering. God, just when we'd all given up, the Championship reels us back in...

 

Watford have now picked up double the amount of points at home than we managed last season.

We have also matched last seasons overall points tally before the clocks have changed.

And we've just slapped L*ton 4-0.

What is there to not love about the Championship?

 

Woodgate as his assistant

 

You've summed up one problem though, the massive gap between the Championship and Premier League. Add the fact that Sema looks a decent player again with already three assists and as many goals when he looked like he could barely kick a ball last season. And it's not simply due to the recent massive amount of wealth from TV and sponsorship deals, it's been like this ever since I started following football when Shearer was still the record UK transfer and the smaller clubs didn't have to buy multi-million players just to compete at the top level.

Looking at the lower divisions shows it doesn't have to be this way - only a small proportion of sides coming up from League 1 and 2 go straight back down, and to date no team at all has been relegated in their first season (back) in the Football League.

 

Agree with your wider point, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t true about L1 and the championship, there are quite a few that regularly yo-yo between, or have done.

 

At a guess, the bigger clubs either are completely rotten (most infamously Sunderland) and take a while to rebuild, or have bigger name players who don't want to be seen dead in League 1, at a guess, I wouldn't have thought Rotherham would have lost too many players each time they got relegated from the Champo

 

It's "Micheal Carrick's Boro" now

 

I agree with you. The Championship is a millionaires club, Premier League is a billionaires club.

Fans encouraging millionaires to gamble with the big boys is dangerous. Better to have a financially sound club in the Championship than a club bursting at the seams in, or trying to get in, the Premier League.

 

Not that surprising really though as there's no FFP in the National League and the vast majority of team coming up to League 2 end up having one of the highest budgets in their first year. Stockport are reputedly the richest in League 2 this season for example.

 

And even before any sort of FFP was in place, the top of the Conference/National League has always been a bottleneck as there's only been one or two teams going up. There's usually always one or two established League 2 teams that fall into crisis too and make it much easier for everyone else to stay up

 

While the biggest gap in quality is clearly between the PL and champo, there's also a huge chasm between champo and league 1 in terms of appearing in the top flight. Most league 1 teams haven't spent a single season in the PL.

 

The only way to reduce the gap between the PL and the champo without reducing the income, quality and European successes of our top clubs is a 32 club split PL season. With seeded clubs in 2 16 team leagues playing each other once. The top 6 of each league then play off in a 12 team mini league home and away. Relegation is decided amongst the other 20 teams with results from matches in the first half of the season (against the other 19 teams) carried over from the first half of the season. Could easily include Rangers and Celtic in this format too. It's a no brainer really.

 

I like that, and it completely kills Scottish football at the same time.

 

1 interesting stat is that of the 7 teams we've yet to play, 6 are below us. We've only lost to one team currently below us. The problem is that with our inconsistency we could easily fail to benefit from a run of games against teams below us in the table.

 

Do you work for FIFA?

 

That would very much be a problem for us considering we do better against the supposed better teams in this division!

 

With a 32 team split season PL, I'd also have 5 relegation spots so the 2nd half of the season is a real relegation dog fight for the bottom 20 with 25% of them being relegated.

 

23.

 

Burnley leading now I see. I reckon Dean Smith will be shuffling towards the Carrow Road exit soon enough.

 

Trouble brewing at Wigan? Wouldn't be the first time...
https://mobile.twitter.com/MikeKeegan_DM/status/1584946917208772613

 

Good time to play them . Prob lose now

 

Not really sure where to post this but FBRef now has data on the Championship (including historic data). It’s really cool. Joao Pedro, Keinan Davis and Ismaila Sarr profile very well. They also have data for a lot of minor leagues now (here is Matheus Martins’ profile, for instance: https://fbref.com/en/players/73fd2787/Matheus-Martins)

A really great resource (though I see some data people pointing out that the data available for the Big 5 leagues is more limited than it was).