Championship top trio enjoy parachute payments but risk crash landings — Guardian 22/2/25

Jonathan Wilson

Leeds, Sheffield United and Burnley are all vying for Premier League returns but fans will ask if it’s really worth it

Tibetan Buddhist monks will spend months working in cold conditions, icing their fingers, enduring significant discomfort, to create gorgeously detailed sculptures out of yak’s butter. And then they will destroy the sculptures, leaving them out in the sun to melt.

For anybody connected with a Championship club, the sentiment will be familiar. At some level, most clubs exist to feed those higher up the pyramid. So why would a fan emotionally invest in a young star, even a local one, knowing he is unlikely to hang around for more than two or three years? And if a team are promoted, at least half the side will probably have to be upgraded to offer even a chance of survival. When the gulf between divisions is so vast, everything is fleeting, team-building an act of permanent evolution. What monks do to convey the understanding that life is transient and that the artefact is far less important than the act of creation, Daniel Farke and Chris Wilder are doing because football’s economics demand it.

You don’t have to spend too much time at a Championship ground to hear the opinion that promotion isn’t worth the hassle, that the euphoria of the moment would soon be replaced by the gloom of habitual defeat. That’s true even at Leeds, who are playing with real verve and confidence at the moment. They haven’t lost in the league since the end of November. They’ve conceded only once in their last seven league games. Last Monday, they came from behind to beat Sunderland with a great pulsating finish, wave after wave of relentless attack eventually leading to a 95th-minute winner. On Monday they go to second-placed Sheffield United: win that and they will be five points clear at the top of the Championship.

After a wobble over Christmas, the Blades are also on a good run. Bolstered by seven January arrivals – the loanees Ben Brereton-Díaz, Hamza Choudhury and Harry Clarke have perhaps been the most consequential – they have won seven of their last eight. A win on Monday would take them top despite a two-point deduction for defaulting on payments to other clubs.

Burnley, who have conceded just nine goals in 34 games this season, are two points further back, having played a game more. There’s a strong top end to the Championship this season. Much of the football has been good. But there must also be a concern. The three most realistic contenders for automatic promotion have all been relegated in the past two seasons. They’re all benefiting from exposure to Premier League money and parachute payments. Their managers – Farke, Wilder and Scott Parker – have all taken sides to promotion before. Last year, two of the three sides to be promoted had been relegated from the Premier League the previous season. It’s not an entirely new phenomenon but the clutch of mezzanine sides, too good for the Championship but not quite good enough for the Premier League, has never been so obviously defined.

Not that it’s always as simple as taking the money and coming back again, older and wiser, the following season. There is always the risk that confidence takes such a hammering that a team keep sinking. It happened to Sunderland in 2017-18 and there’s a serious danger of it happening this season to Luton. But Premier League money is clearly a huge advantage.

Sunderland are the outlier this season, although even they were in the Premier League as recently as 2016-17 – and have financial advantages of their own with 40,000 attendances and a Swiss billionaire owner. They have augmented their gifted teenagers with experience and, under the calm and adaptable Régis Le Bris, appear to be rising again. What will probably cost them automatic promotion is a lack of ruthlessness in front of goal and a habit of conceding late on: since Boxing Day, they have let in four goals in the 90th minute or later; add in the two late penalties they missed at Burnley and that’s eight points frittered in the past two months.

The optimistic view would be that that means processes are good and they are not too far from being a very good side indeed. This could be like 1997-98, when Peter Reid’s Sunderland lost in the playoff final but came back the following season far more equipped for promotion. This summer, though, there could be a raft of departures. Chris Rigg, Jobe Bellingham, Anthony Patterson and Tommy Watson all have Premier League admirers, Dan Neil and Dennis Cirkin have yet to extend contracts that expire in 2026, and Enzo Le Fée’s loan from Roma is unlikely to be extended if Sunderland remain a Championship club.

But if they are promoted, the prognosis is also troubling. This looks like being the second successive season in which all three promoted sides are relegated. In the past 25 years, the five-year rolling average points total of the three promoted sides has fallen from 41.66 to 34.02. Barring something remarkable in the final third of this season, it will go down even further. What sort of prize is the right to be hammered every week?

The idea that a club could go up and win the league the next season, as Ipswich did in 1961-62 and Nottingham Forest did in 1977-78, seems ridiculous now. So remote are Premier League finances from those of the Championship, even becoming established in the way that Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford have feels almost miraculous. Forest, promoted three seasons ago, may be defying the trend, but they had to breach profitability and sustainability regulations to do so.

Perhaps it will be different this time. Leeds and Sheffield United both have impressively deep squads. Just as it was looking as though Sunderland might have weathered the storm on Monday, Leeds could bring on Largie Ramazani and Willy Gnonto. Burnley’s response to being too open at the back last season to stay up has been to lurch to the opposite extreme; after a period of idealists insisting on playing philosophy-driven progressive football, the reversion to solidity might work.

But every side going up know they face a season of struggle. The fact that promotion is regarded as such a mixed blessing should have sounded alarm bells long ago. The pyramid, the greatest glory of English football, is broken and nobody at the top seems much concerned about rectifying the situation.