Ian Wright ‘absolutely worried’ as he and Gary Neville nail Derby County’s £100m problem

Ian Wright, Gary Neville and Roy Keane have expressed their concerning about the increasing gulf between the Premier League and the Championship which is making the top flight as good a closed shop to the likes of Derby County and their rivals.

 

For a second season in a row, the teams who won promotion will be relegated. This time Southampton are already down, Leicester City are doomed and Ipswich Town are on the fast track back to having their fate confirmed.

 

The ‘cliff edge’ between the two divisions is now said to be more than £100m and is in danger of becoming unmanageable.

 

Leeds United and Burnley, who have been relegated in the last couple of seasons, are on the verge of going back up while Sheffield United, who went down last year, are in third.

 

Leeds United and Burnley, who have been relegated in the last couple of seasons, are on the verge of going back up while Sheffield United, who went down last year, are in third.

 

He added: “You look at Wolves this season. They have been so bad this season but they have had nothing to worry about.”

 

Neville pointed to the financial disparity between the Premier League and the rest, highlighted this week by the release of the fees each club has paid to agents this season. Chelsea had paid as much as the whole of the Championship combined, with Manchester City not far behind.

 

A Premier League club has a guaranteed income of £100m due to broadcast revenue whereas a team in the Championship can bank on just over £5m. There is a parachute payments system in place but the EFL argue that is making the problem worse, partly because it accentuates the gap between the haves and have nots in the Championship.

 

Neville can see promoted teams panic about how much they can spend in case they go down and face the financial consequences – and an anomaly like Nottingham Forest, who wrote big cheques to beat the system, both still almost got relegated and were then hit by penalties for breaking Premier League profit and sustainability rules.

 

Leicester have also hit a brick wall by trying to bridge the differences between income in the Premier League and Championship at the same time as not breaking rules.

 

In short, a Premier League team is allowed to lose £105m over a rolling three-year period while it is £39m in the Championship, or a bit more with a leeway for increase in cost of living. Relegated clubs receive about £50m in their first year down as a parachute payment, going down to about £35m in the second and £16.5m in the third.

 

Stoke City have been trying to force change and have argued that owners should be able to at least match fund parachute payments by guaranteed investments. Their own frustrations are exacerbated by different rules also in play in League One, where owner investment counts as income from a Financial Fair Play perspective, which it doesn’t in the Championship.

 

It makes the £100m cliff edge just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to navigating football’s financial landscape.

 

Neville said: “There’s a football question (about why teams are going straight back down) but there is also the financial disparity between what’s happening in the Championship and Premier League and we’ve talked about this for years.”

 

He added: “It’s got to the point now where clubs who come up – Nottingham Forest spent a hundred-odd million pounds – you have those wages when you sink back. There are some levels to soften the impact but the risks you have to take to stay in mean that if you go back down with a parachute there is still a risk of going under financially.

 

“You’re frightened then to go for the risk. What you’re seeing now is teams coming up and thinking, ‘There’s no point in going for it that much, we’ll try to outperform it and then at least we’re not going under financially.’

 

“It’s getting to a point where the gap is getting bigger.”

 

On top of all that, Keane argued, pretty fiercely, that managers were not giving themselves the best chance either.

 

He said: “It’s not the fact they’ve gone down with such low points, it’s goals for and goals against and it was the same last year. These teams are down with so many games to go.

 

“The teams who come up have to make a better effort. Of course it’s hard to stay up, I was there with Sunderland and of course it’s going to be hard.

 

“I think a lot of them are overplaying – Southampton certainly at the start of the season were caught out. You can be harder to beat. Be harder to beat!”

 

He added: “We can be critical of managers who stick to their guns. Burnley went down last year with Kompany. Russell Martin… I think Russell Martin is obviously a good manager. First game of the season they go up to Newcastle and lose 1-0. The goalkeeper had given the ball away, they caught on the edge of the box, Newcastle were down to 10 men. They lose the game 1-0, their first game in the Premier League – and after the game Russell Martin gets interviewed and I’m looking at all these promoted teams and he said, ‘Yeah, but there were loads of other times we got out.’

 

“You were going but that was the defining moment of the match! That was the moment that cost you! It doesn’t matter if you got out 99 times. That was what happened to him over the next few months.

 

“Managers and staff must come in on a Monday morning asking why they keep getting beaten every week and saying, ‘We can’t keep doing what we’re doing.’

 

“What do you do when you get promoted? Be hard to beat – or be harder to beat than they have been. The three teams last year were getting hammered. Sheffield United got beat eight or nine-nil at home. Getting hammered. Maybe one-off games can happen like that but you have to give yourself a bit of a chance.”

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