Surviving in the Premier League

Has now become the thick end of impossible. (Captain Obvious I know.)

I'm not claiming that this is perfectly scientific - of course it isnt - but as a proxy for the quality of each club, I've had a look at what Transfermarkt reckons different squads are worth (just the headline estimate current market of all their squad).

So let's start with the current bottom 10 ignoring the three relegated teams.

West Ham 454
Tottenham 836
Everton 365
Man Utd 694
Wolves 409
Crystal Palace 441
Brentford 417
Bournemouth 435
Brighton 556
Fulham 362
Aston Villa 627
Nottm Forest 447

So if we ask the usual question of a freshly promoted club, i.e. "who are we going to have to finish above?", youre going to have to pick one of these, in addition to whoever else you came up with. That is, you're going to have to find a way to overcome a club with a squad worth somewhere between 400m and 500m (in the main).

So what do Transfermarkt think the current relegated three went into battle with?

Ipswich 279
Leicester 273
Southampton 273

Just taking this at face value, all the three promoted clubs needed something like an additional 50% of "value" in order to (on paper) be competitive with most of the clubs they need to somehow match. And in my opinion, this doesnt tell the whole story - looking at the scums current Transfermarkt values player by player, some are absurdly high. So the gap was and is almost certainly bigger than that.

Looking at the three promoted teams this year:

Leeds 190
Burnley 196
Sheff Utd 135

Pretty clear why the top 2 are the top 2 then. But this also tells us that Leeds will need to upgrade their squad by about x2 in order to compete with the clubs they need to compete with. What's that, circa 200m of net spend? Not counting the wages? (This is basically what Nottm Forest did to stay up, right? Of course there is always the option of genius recruitment where you find gems for cheap, but even if youre net spending 100m, you still need to find another 100m of value for free.) Need to see if Dirty Leeds's owners fancy spunking that kind of wad. Surely Burnley will be entirely incapable of spending anything like that, as will whoever comes up.

And finally, some of the other clubs in and around it in the Champs (oh, and us):

Norwich 95
West Brom 81
Sunderland 142

There you have it. Why couldnt we lay a glove on Leeds really? Why did Burnley have the quality they needed to turn us over? Basically we need to invest/find 100m of talent in order to compete with clubs at the level of Leeds. And we'd probably need to spend 100-150 for 2/3 seasons consistently to even get close to a Prem survival squad.

Of course some clubs will still do it. They will need to "do a Forest" and spend insane sums over a long period. They will probably also need a relatively established club to "implode" through a season or two of persistent mismanagement. But looking at the bottom 10 (ignoring the bottom 3), you can see why the gap is quite so massive between them and the relegated three, and I see no reason to support that's going to be different in future seasons.

Posted By: Under soil heating on April 29th 2025 at 11:03:44

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