Derby and the History of Prem Relegation

By: Ian Rose | March 30th, 2008

It has finally happened. Derby County’s relegation from the Premier League has moved from merely inevitable to official, and they will be headed back down to the Championship next season. Arguments will continue about whether they are the worst team in Premiership history, but I’ll leave that to the Derby (and Sunderland) bloggers to discuss. I wanted to take a slightly different approach, and look at the process of promotion in the Premier League as a whole, and what makes a team who goes up most likely to go straight back down.

In the history of the modern Premier League format, 44 teams have been promoted to the top flight. There are three ways to have gotten there, either by winning the Championship, coming in second, or by winning the promotion playoff, as Derby did last year. In total, just over half (52%) of teams that are promoted stay in the Premiership at least one season, with the other 48% bouncing right back down. But if you look at the playoff teams versus the ones that got there by winning or coming second, there’s definitely a pattern.

If your team wins the Championship, you have a good chance of staying up. Only six of the fifteen league champions have bounced back down immediately. It’s worth noting that even though Sunderland is pretty much safe from relegation this season, two of those six were Sunderland teams. So, if you win the league, you have a 60% chance of staying up. If you come second, your chances actually aren’t that much worse, about 54%. Playoff teams, however, are the only ones with a less-than-even chance of surviving their first season in the Prem, with only 40% making the cut. If they do survive, they stay up a shorter time, too, an average of less than four seasons, compared to more than five for 1st and 2nd placed teams.

Anyway, enough of the numbers. The point is, by winning promotion through a playoff, rather than by winning or coming runner up in the league, Derby had the cards stacked against them from the start. The Championship and the Premiership are very different places, and the jump from one to the other might be one of the most extreme changes in quality of any promotion system in the world. Those that dominate in the Championship, like Sunderland did in the second half of last season, have a chance with the big boys, but those that just barely get out of the small pond have a very hard time with the sharks.