You're right, this league is ace when we're ace. But it's a one season scenario. Next season if we don't go up our superstars will vanish like a fart in the wind, and we magically turn into QPR.
Totally. Our squad will be torn apart. Then we can all enjoy watching fight for our lives down the bottom of the Championship. Not fun.
Hopefully, I think it’s unclear though. Lots of talk of some sort of extension, I’m not sure anyone knows for sure?
Seems our best case scenario is for us (the fans) to vote for a European super league with the top 6 or so Prem sides leaving us to compete in a newly vamped top league which we could compete in and maybe win something! Doubt it would happen in my lifetime though.
The choice for a club like us is either a season like this every other year, but an absolute write off season inbetween, or spend every penny of the premier league money to maintain mediocrity for as many seasons as possible.
I would love to see a complete revamp of the whole league system, I’m not against changing the premier league to 18 teams and scrapping the parachute payments, but then spreading revenue more evenly down the leagues. Make finishing top of the championship worth something like £60m, and make the increments similar to the premier league. Make promotion less about the money and relegation much less of a disaster. It will never happen, but I think the difference of around £100m for finishing bottom of the PL and only £5m (the championship TV deal for each championship club) for finishing effectively one place lower is utterly bonkers.
But why? It’s not prize money, it’s tv revenue that causes that disparity. The EFL product simply doesn’t attract viewers, advertisers, international interest etc in the same way the PL does.
By prize money I obviously mean TV revenue, it’s the same thing, but anyway it could, and it does. It’s something like the third most watched league in the world. The EFL are just completely useless at monetising it properly. By definition if the tv revenue was more evenly distributed then the championship or whatever it would become would become a higher quality product which people would want to watch even more. If you scrap parachute payments and cut the premier league to 18 teams then that’s £500m immediately that could be distributed down to the EFL to close the gap. It’s all moot anyway as it will never happen, but I’m just saying it could be done if the will was there. To further add, the EFL rejected a bit of £375m for a 20% stake which values it at nearly £2bn, even now when it’s on its knees. There is clearly money to be made which currently isn’t being made: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/efl-rejected-375m-offer-from-american-firm-fwzqm2pm2
As many have said who understand the financial side of things better than I, it's imperative that we get promoted this season. Even bounce around between the two as Norwich have. I'd prefer us to stay up and progress, hopefully we will and that the club has learnt it's very harsh lessons of the seasons before. Recruitment of players that are ambitious and want to play for our great club is paramount for us to reach our goals.
The Championship has around the third or fourth highest total annual attendances out of all football leagues: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/42704713 However, I can't find any exact numbers on initial searching, but the Championship's TV viewing figures will be much, much lower. Even though the Champ has marginally higher gates in total than Serie A and Ligue 1, the TV interest in those leagues globally will be much higher owing to their status as top divisions in their country (side-note, Serie A and Ligue 1 games tend to have slightly higher average attendances than the Championship, but the Champ generally has a higher total attendance due to more teams and matches). Meanwhile, the Premier League is the most viewed league in the world on TV for any league in any sport. TV is where most of the money is, and it's a huge reason why there's such a big disparity in revenue between the Prem and the Champ. The Championship still does have the 6th highest revenue for a football league in Europe (behind the PL, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1, but ahead of the likes of the Eredivisie and Russian League), so it's not all doom and gloom. The quality of the league and its players is generally reflective of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue
The way I see it if someone valued it at nearly £2bn at what what is probably the most distressed time of its existence, then there must be a much greater potential to monetise it than we are currently seeing. Of course it’s nowhere near as popular as the Premier league, that isn’t to say it couldn’t generate more cash than it currently does. Rick Parry only turned it down because he’d got in to bed with the big premier league clubs and wanted to push project big picture. But as I said, it’s all moot, it’s what I’d like to see not what will happen. If you take away the completely self serving elements then PBP was actually along the right lines, so it’s not completely impossible, unfortunately and obviously I’d would only happen if the big clubs got their way with the self serving elements, so therefore that’s why it will never happen. I just think if we could smooth out the cliff edge between the PL and the championship, it would make for a more enjoyable experience for everyone. Promotion wouldn’t be about a £100m ‘milestone’ it would be more about sporting merit of actually getting promoted, relegation wouldn’t be the end of the world of it happened. Well run clubs could still prosper, pre Covid big clubs in the championship always have a financial advantage as they have bigger fan bases, but it didn’t correlate they did well if they weren’t well run. I’d say a club like us would prosper even more in that sort of environment.
You're not the only who feels like this I'm sure but being favourites for every game, other fans being complimentary only lasts a short time. Remember the early nineties when we struggled. It was worse watching that than last year by a long stretch. We've had plenty of years in the Championship when we struggled and it was far from enjoyable. Extra games and no VAR is lovely but if we don't want to go up then what is the point in football? Best days out have been at games like Brighton when we got promoted. Take days like that out then there is no point. I despise the scum but if we lose one game out of the next seven and get promoted I would take that despite being properly miserable on the particular weekend
Perhaps, but the fact that it has the 6th highest revenues out of all the football leagues in Europe suggests that it's already earning close enough to what it should be (and in fact doing pretty well) - surely you wouldn't expect that the Championship should be earning more than say Serie A?! That simply isn't going to happen, because there is a cliff edge in viewing figures.
No, but then Serie A is slightly different, more money is concentrated with the bigger clubs, with the lowest club getting something like €40m, so way less then the PL equivalent, but still way more then the 21st club in England. TV deals obviously enable the TV company to make a lot of money themselves, who knows what they had planned but they could have planned to cut TV networks out of the equation all together and set up their own streaming service for the EFL.
Would you say the viewing figures for West Brom Vs Burnley would be 20 times higher than a championship match between two half decent teams?
Which isn't unexpected given that the 20th club in Serie A will be playing in a more popular league... I don't see how Serie A's overall revenue being less evenly distributed than the PL's has anything to do with the total revenue for the Champ either. Ermmm... iFollow says "hello".
Why are you asking me? You could try and find the figure yourself if they exist. I'd guess they'd still be many multiples more though, sure. But anyway, the revenue occurs over the course of the season - and I could imagine the viewing figures for West Brom when they play say Liverpool or Man Utd probably would be around 20 times higher globally than for what they would be if West Brom were in the Champ playing say Stoke.
Not to mention the fact that being in the Premier league means we attract better players and so increase the chances of us winning the first meaningful trophy in our history. We aren't going to do that with a mid table chumpionship squad.
If you order that revenue table by revenue per club, then Bundesliga 2 clubs earn more money than Championship clubs. But with fans in grounds the Championship is miles ahead of a lot of other leagues granted.
Well I found this and it actually massively surprised me, my question was a genuine one as I wasn’t entirely sure, and if it was 20x I wouldn’t have been surprised: https://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-football-myth-sky-sports-14m-viewers BT Sport’s coverage of Everton v Brighton got 669,000 – 842,000 and Chelsea v Crystal Palace 577,000 to 921,000. These look a bit higher than might normally be expected. Newcastle United v Burnley only saw a poor 358,000 to 479,000 watching its broadcast on Sky’s Main Event. Sky also saw their coverage of Norwich City v Derby County get 311,000 – 480,000. So a crap premier league game got the same viewing figures as good championship game. So the cliff edge in actual viewing figures between the bottom of the PL and the top of the Championship in fact doesn’t exist at all.
How many people in China, Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, etc. watched Norwich v Derby? How many would be interested in watching Norwich v Derby?
Getting back to the point in hand, i.e. the Middlesbrough match. I had a glance at the oneboro forum and the upshot is: They think their season is over, some want to roll over and lose if only to pi$$ off Swansea; and the Hartlepool United badge has a better hart on it than our badge does (can't disagree). The other thing is that Diego Fabbrini played for them! I didn't know that.
Probably much less than you’d imagine based on those domestic figures. But how many watch it overseas is irrelevant. Overseas rights sales for the entire world make up half the PL revenue, it doesn’t matter how many are watching it’s how much they’re paying for it. So even if there is zero demand for championship games overseas, then that still leaves 50% domestic revenues, from which the crap premier league clubs earn a minimum 20x more than good championship clubs pulling in the exact same domestic viewing figure..... which make up 50% of the Rev. Anyway, I think what those figures actually show is that outside the very best teams, a premier league game has little to no extra draw compared to a higher level championship game. Just being a premier league game gets no extra viewers, the 300/400k watching either game are likely just to be either fans of the club or football fans in general who will watch football regardless. Probably more than half the clubs in the PL are there to make up the numbers, and give the bigger teams games to play in to generate the bulk of the viewing figures and revenue. They’re getting paid to be in the competition, they aren’t a draw in their own right.
That is only for Sky in the UK - PL viewing figures are large globally, the Champ's aren't. For Sky in the UK lots of people have a subscription, actively watch a PL game, then just leave it on in the background when it changes to a Champ one. There are also only the occasional Champ game that gets the luxury of being shown on Sky, while loads of PL games get shown on UK TV.
See my post above, it’s irrelevant how many watch it overseas, if a billion people watch it in China but pay next to nothing for it what difference does it make how many people watch it? What’s important is how much the 1/50/100,000,0000 people watching it overseas are paying for it, which is approximately 50% of the total revenue.. so the domestic viewing figures contribute the other 50%. The bold but is also not true is it? We alone are televised pretty much twice a week.
Not quite as much as that - but this is only due to the agreement put in place due to covid. In a regular Championship season we'd be on Sky how many times per season? Four? In the PL you'd get at least about 14 games on either Sky or BT.
