Relegation is what every Premier League team is desperately trying to avoid. But without prejudice, three teams are relegated from the Premier League every single season, but what happens when they are demoted from the Premier League?
What happens when a Premier League team gets relegated? They are sent down to the second tier of English football, known as The Championship. In the Championship they will have to fight for promotion to get back into the Premier League. They are given a ‘parachute’ payment to help them stay financially stable as they fight to get back to the Premier League.
When a Premier League team is relegated it means that in the following season, they will play in The Championship which is the second tier of domestic football in England. The three teams that are relegated to the Championship will be replacing the three teams that get promoted to the Premier League from The Championship.
In The Championship these teams do have the ability to get promoted back to the Premier League. They can either finish in the top two which secures automatic promotion or they finish 3rd-6th and win the Championship Playoffs which is how the final team goes up to the Premier League.
While playing in the Championship is something every relegated team sees happen there are also a few other things that are caused by going down a division. Quite often a relegated team will be unable to hold onto its star players. Going down to The Championship massively reduces the amount of money the team will earn from things like broadcasting revenue.
This means they often cannot afford to pay star players and they will often secure deals either back into the Premier League or elsewhere. We saw this happen in the 2022 transfer window, with Burnley losing starters like Nick Pope, James Tarkowski, Dwight McNeil and Ben Mee who all returned to Premier League clubs.
This huge change in the squads means that teams who are relegated do not always come straight back up to the Premier League. In fact, we have seen countless examples of teams getting relegated and not coming back up to the Premier League for a long time. The Championship can be a very difficult league to get out of.
Birmingham City are the longest serving Championship team. Having remained there since relegation from the Premier League in 2011.
How much do clubs get when relegated from the Premier League?
The Premier League is a gold mine for teams in English football and losing the money from the Premier League when you are relegated is very difficult. Especially if you had made big signings in order to try and sustain your place in the Premier League. That is why the Premier League has introduced parachute payments to help clubs who are relegated in the future.
Each team that is relegated from the Premier League will receive 55% of the amount a Premier League team would collect in the share of broadcast revenue in the team’s first season out of the Premier League. In the second season, they earn 45% of the normal revenue share, with that figure dropping to 20% in the third year.
At the current rate, this is worth around £40m in the first year, £35m in the second year and £15m in the third year. These parachute payments do not continue if a team is promoted back to the Premier League. These parachute payments have seen a lot of teams that are relegated return to the Premier League in the first couple of seasons outside of the top flight.
This is because the relegated teams tend to have a much bigger budget than the teams who do not get these parachute payments. The payments are in place to try to lighten the burden for relegated teams of missing out on the huge amount of broadcasting money that the teams get when they join the Premier League.
This is why we have seen a lot of yo-yo teams over the last few years. This budget increase means that teams like Fulham and Norwich have been able to get relegated and almost immediately be promoted back to the Premier League.
Has a relegated team ever won the Premier League?
Blackburn Rovers are the only team to have won the Premier League and been relegated in the years following. Blackburn were one of the best teams in the early years of the Premier League. They finished second in the 1993-94 season and were one of the favourites for the next season.
But they were faced with trying to better Manchester United and it turned into a brilliant title fight between the two teams. Blackburn had some brilliant spells throughout the season and they were spurred on by Alan Shearer who finished the season with 37 goals from 42 games.
Despite losing three of their final five games, Blackburn did enough in the season to secure the Premier League title, the team’s first and only Premier League title. In the years following, Shearer left the team and Blackburn dropped out of the fight for the title. In the year following their title, Blackburn dropped to seventh in the table.
A fight back up to sixth in 1997-98 was followed by a terrible season, with Blackburn finishing 19th and becoming the first and only former Premier League Champions to be relegated. Since then they have had an eleven-year stretch in the Premier League before another relegation to the Championship in 2012.
They have not been back in the Premier League since that relegation, even dropping down to League One in 2017-18 and failing to even reach the Championship Playoffs. Blackburn are the only team to have been relegated from the Premier League after winning the title.
Manchester City and Leicester City are the two teams who had been relegated from the Premier League before their first title.
Leicester are the most likely team to join Blackburn with that infamous title of relegated Champions. Their 2016 Premier League title came out of nowhere and they have done brilliantly to hang on near the top of the Premier League since. However, their current 2022-23 campaign is faltering and relegation looms.
How does relegation work in the Premier League?
The rules behind relegation are pretty simple. When a Premier League season finishes, the three teams with the fewest points will be relegated to the Championship. If there are two teams on equal points then the team with the worst goal difference will be relegated to the Championship.
These teams are relegated to make room for the three teams that are promoted from the Championship to the Premier League.