Q - Is it harder to stay up in the Premier League than win Promotion from the Championship?

As we canter towards an almost certain relegation at a fair old pace i keep hearing people saying a mixture of the following:

1. We have no chance of coming straight back up as loads of Championship teams are better than us.

2. We will drop down another level to League one as the Championship is too strong for us especially if we downgrade again Lerner style due to less money incoming down there.

3. With a few Championship style additions we will come straight back up and it will help to "sort us out".

4. It's exactly what we need and will do the club and us fans the World of good to have a good clear out & get that winning mentality back so a chance to start again.

5. We will hover around the middle and languish there for years.

This appears to indicate that many feel the top of the Championship is basically as good as if not tougher than the lower end of the Premier League....so my question is this

IS IT HARDER TO STAY UP IN A RELEGATION BATTLE THAN IT IS TO WIN A PROMOTION FROM THE CHAMPIONSHIP?

Staying up in my opinion is harder than the championship. I base my opinion of this on cup games and the evident gulf in class combined with the record of promoted teams going straight back down. Although admittedly that gulf is getting smaller and this year we may see all 3 promoted teams stay up this is a bit of a freak season. So evidence number one for me is our game with blues in the cup this season, we are quite frankly the most garbage side in the premier league and not once In that game did I fear we were going to lose. We made hard work of it but quality (or lack of) showed through in the end.

And if course the answer to all this is we don't know but we are about to find out. Everything depends on what happens at the club over the summer.

FWIW my view is that if we keep the same administration/governance then we will struggle next season in the Championship to the point that we will be again looking over our shoulder rather than looking up.

What gives me some hope is that our only win this season is against the Championship champions from last season Bournemouth, despite how poor we are we should never have lost to Leicester from 2-0 up and the Watford game was close but i think our lack of confidence cost us in that game.

As for the cup game that Jae mentions above against Sha, that worried me actually as Sha dealt with us quite comfortably and they are basically a mid table Championship team as is now being shown so that kind of indicates that may be this teams level.

Thing is there will be a lot of comings and goings between now & then and Garde will presumably have a full summer to instill his methodology and work on battered confidence.

Wigan were able to survive in the PL for a few seasons before they dropped and then they dropped again to League one after a second season in the Championship.

I think we'll find it hard to get promoted. Simply because we need to sign about 7-8 players that has a pair of bollocks to stand a chance.

If we were lucky to come straight back up I think we would struggle, the amount of money coming into the prem next year every team still in there will have moved on soooo much. This is not the time to be relegated!!!!!!!

Championship is a difficult league make no mistake, and clubs are much closer to each other quality wise IMO which makes it so competitive. No one down there has any real money, and the fact our clubs operating at a loss already despite the swathes of cuts to budgets for several seasons now does not bode well

Quick addition: let's not forget the parachute payments are now only going to be paid over 3 years with each years smaller than the previous, if you don't bounce back quick it becomes a much more difficult task.

Saunders82 wrote:If we were lucky to come straight back up I think we would struggle, the amount of money coming into the prem next year every team still in there will have moved on soooo much. This is not the time to be relegated!!!!!!!

Personally, I'm not convinced that this new mega-ultra-massive money TV deal will be the holy grail it's being portrayed as by the media. Firstly, the money won't be equally distributed. It'll be dished out based on how many games Sky/BT choose to show for each team, which means that they'll give the top 5 more air time than anybody else (as always), and, relatively speaking, the other 15 teams in the PL will be left to pick up the crumbs, as per usual (a good example is West Brom, who aren't scheduled to have ANY of their remaining PL games this season shown by Sky OR BT). Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man City, Liverpool & Tottenham will be the teams who will be shown the most on TV, no doubt.

Secondly, agents will continue to suck the life and money out of the game like leeches, all the extra TV money means in this respect is that agents' and players' fees will increase to keep pace with the increase in TV money.

Thirdly, it's impossible to predict how effectively the owners of each club will invest the extra money. Mike Ashley is often accused by Newcastle fans of pocketing a lot of the money himself instead of re-investing it properly.

So, y'see, all is not lost from losing out on the new TV deal!

They've been saying tv deal this and not the year to be relegated that for about 15 years now. Teams have still gone down and come back up. It's just relegation.

I'd love to see us pack Villa Park when someone like Brentford come to town though. That should be funny.

That's absolutely a spot on attitude that we, myself included, need more of Joppe

I will apologise in advance for this long post but i awoke a different animal today!

I actually believe we will do better than a lot expect. I understand the negativity and i too hear the negative chirping from "The Birds" as a very great man once called them...i.e the voices in the crowd who just love to neg us all out and constantly chirp negative comments in our ears, "If you go down you'll do a Leeds" " You'll be there for years" "You'll drop down to League 1" "You'll struggle in the Championship" Etc etc etc i've heard them all from many who are seemingly enjoying trying to put us down and make what is a difficult time seem like the Worlds going to end for AVFC, they know we are in a pretty indefensible position at this point in time, an easy target etc.. well that says more about them than it does AV in my opinion and we have to rise above it and show them what this club is all about next season!

I personally am actually at a point now where my passion and Claret & Blue blood is awakening and i am at last rekindling emotions which i thought had left me forever. It's been truly painful the last 5 years but i now look forward to the challenge, BRING IT ON!!

I stood on the Holte end when it was fun and raucous before all seating came in it was full of passion, i watched us come up from division 3 under Saunders and win the League, indeed i was a home and away ST holder that year and i stood on the terraces at Highbury as news filtered through that we were Champions & the steps of Rotterdam to watch Dennis lift the European cup with Claret & Blue ribbons on it.

I also watched our demise and felt the torture of the never years under Ellis & was a ST holder the last time we went down.

We actually had great fun invading towns en mass from Plymouth to Reading and loads of others, we were the top dogs in the division everyone wanted to beat us but they just couldn't, well not very often anyhow. We lost some players for sure though kept others and bought a few i was very unsure of at the time. One guy was great though, a certain Alan McInally and in the end after a stuttering first few games when we seemed to keep drawing 1-1- we went straight back up.

Like us all i have felt the false hope during the fake rise and then shameful fall under Lerner. Seen every bad record broken whilst he twiddled his thumbs way out of his depth.

I was downtrodden, beaten into submission and pretty much ready to withdraw my support...but something has changed this week.

I have realised that i have fully accepted that we will very likely (though not yet absolutely) go down this season and i do not care if we do. I have seen it before and experienced it. I do not see ANY team down there we need be afraid of and that's even with our current squad. Derby County have Bent, Weimann and Warnock in their team and they are pushing for promotion, well you and i should know that gives us a good chance!!

I do actually believe that Garde, who today pinned his colours to the mast as did Tom Fox both saying he stays, will hugely improve this team for next season though and we will be a totally different animal. But we have to play our part too!

It will be a huge battle and us fans need to get our passion back up and help this club become great again. I do not believe all this hogwash about finances, of course they are a massive help but look at Leicester this season! They are on the brink of doing what we did in 1980 and all the "Brains" said that was impossible now. Money can do a lot of things but it cannot buy History nor inbuilt PASSSION in the fans that is built over generations! At the end of the day there are only so many "Best players" in the World and hardly any of them are playing in the Premier League right now despite it being the richest league in the World. ...So BRING IT ON!

Thanks guys i feel better now needed to just say it

Fantastic post... I share your optimism for next season and really hope Garde can build a team with a united determined spirit at the core that takes the Championship by storm next season. I just hope us Villans abroad can watch it unfold on AVTV while you boys in Brum watch from the Holte End.

A superb post Utterer. I go back a bit like you. My Dad started taking me to VP when we were in the third division. I was at Highbury, Rotterdam and all the highs and lows we've experienced since back in the 70s. The pains we've experienced and are experiencing don't seem to get any easier as I get older, but the joys no matter how small lift me like I'm still a little boy (The wife has given up on me ever growing up!).

I pity the glory hunters. All those plastic Mancs crying because they're only about 6th or what ever it is. Those poncy Chelsea fans going to the "footy" in designer suits and celebrating in Champagne bars. If you've never had a rainy day, you don't appreciate how warm the sun feels.

This situation we find ourselves in will eventually turn around, I don't know when but it will. We're The Villa, it's never boring. Even last season we managed an FA Cup Final, and we're still in the FA Cup now! Even when we lose, you wake up in the morning and you're still Villa. It may be painful, but it's real.

"Success is not final, defeat is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." Sir Winston Churchill.

Villa 'til I die.