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I would say that it would be the English Premier League (EPL), for two main factors.Firstly, the EPL is arguably the most marketable league worldwide, and has the highest revenue of any football league in the world. Following this, clubs playing in the EPL stand to earn a lot of money just by merely taking part in it. For example, in the 2016–17 season, each club received £35,301,989 as a basic participation fee. After this, taking into account revenue from TV broadcasting rights, sponsorships, as well as merit payments (based on their placing in the table), a club could possibly earn around £80,000,000 just in one season in the EPL.But if they are relegated, that is a lot of money that they are losing out on. Even the parachute payments that come after relegation can only last for so long, and after that another source of income has to be found in order to continue funding the club. Without the money from TV rights, clubs tend to spend beyond their means trying to earn a quick return to the top-flight, resulting in financial difficulties and (in the worst case scenario) administration.Secondly, relegation from the EPL leads to the Football League Championship. Compared to the EPL with 20 teams, the Championship has 24 teams instead. This means that there are more matches to be played, which takes its toll on teams since they have to travel more and play more often. The Championship is also a lot more competitive since there are 4 possible slots for the play-offs (and 2 slots for a confirmed promotion).This means that clubs which get relegated often struggle to be promoted at the first time of asking. This usually leads to either one of two things: the club’s owners decide to pump in a lot more money to overhaul the team, hoping that they can earn their money back through promotion the following season. If this fails, the club (and its owners) fall further into a financial quagmire. An example would be Leeds United in the mid-2000s.The second possibility is that the club is unable to get promoted and thus joins the numerous fallen giants surviving as mid-table clubs in the Championship, living off the parachute payments for as long as they can, and settling into their current level. Examples would be Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers.So to sum up, the most devastating relegation would be from the Premier League to the Championship, due to the loss of revenue and the level of competition in the Championship.

I’ve heard there are problems behind the scenes. No-one in the hierarchy seems so supportive of the manager and they are not likely to give him the money he needs in the transfer market.But of course, that is a bad scene for a selling club like Southampton who need to do a lot of succession planning as their model is based on generated transfer fees - such as the £78m just received for Virgil van Dijk. It is just the inevitable cycle of a selling club model - a model that contains the seeds of its own downfall as I have written about here at www.howtowatchfootball.co.uk:Stockpiles, Wombles, and crumbs from the richBy Greg GordonOn 2017-06-28I’ve been thinking about the future of so-called ‘selling clubs’ a lot recently. And specifically so after reading the new book by the great Michael Calvin No Hunger In Paradise: The Players. The Journey. The Dream. It is a book that tangentially, at least, addresses the issue of the biggest clubs stockpiling the greatest talent at younger and younger ages against a background of global scouting.When a club like Chelsea can unashamedly boast 38 players sent out on loan as they did in 2016, then you have to wonder how a small, or even a medium-sized club can every hope to consistently compete for live prospects to develop.And indeed what does it say about the assumed duty of care clubs exhibit towards youngsters they sign? That is, the selling of false hope to young players that have little or no chance of ever donning the first team shirt of their parent club.Dominic Solanke © Liverpool FC - HomepageSo, in one way, it is good to see Chelsea at last selling off the fat from their roster – stars who regularly win the national youth awards only to falter on the stony ground of a restricted path to first team games.According to World Soccer’s Brian Glanville, Chelsea were not best pleased when one of their brightest youngsters, Dominic Solanke, having materially helped the England U20s victory in South Korea, elected to jump ship and join Liverpool.He says: “Now Chelsea have decided to sell Bertrand Traore to Lyon for a whopping £16million, with a clause which guarantees them 15 per cent of any profit if the French club sells him. While similar clauses will be inserted into the deal when Nathan Ake, the accomplished young defender, joins Bournemouth for £20million, having done so well while on loan to them last season.”Nathan Ake © Sky SportsBut that still leaves a bunch of gifted youngsters who remain at Stamford Bridge and it is a situation that enforces Brian Glanville’s conclusion:“All credit to Chelsea for their scouting expertise and for the excellent training they give their youngsters when they have signed them, but for the most part these youngsters would be much better off at other clubs where first-team football awaited them.”Faced with the stockpiling of schoolboy and youth talent on what is an industrial scale so-called lesser clubs are resigned to the role of football’s Wombles, poring over the cast-offs, sifting through the big teams’ damaged goods and nurturing the occasional savvy star-turn whose parents understand the good sense of their child playing in an environment with a recognised pathway to the first team.The key question is: ‘Does the tightening net of football’s recruitment intelligence effectively spell the end for the classic selling club model of early talent identification, player development and selling on with a massive upside?’My hunch is that it does.I don’t know what the answer is here – a quota on the volume of players that elite academies can sign each year and per age group? Strategic formal partnerships with lower league feeder clubs?Certainly, Gianni Infantino, the president of football’s governing body Fifa, is in favour of outlawing it by capping squad sizes.He is on record as saying: “I believe it is not right but it is permitted. It doesn’t feel right, for a club to just hoard the best young players and then to park them left and right. It’s not good for the development of the player, it’s not good for the club itself. We have to work on squad size limits.”Football fans of reasonable age can all name clubs that have boxed above their weight for long periods, if not decades on the back of selling on home-developed stars.In 1966, the year that England won the World Cup, Scottish players comprised 20 per cent of the players then plying their trade in the old First Division.In more recent times the likes of West Ham, Ajax, Auxerre, Celtic, Sevilla, Liverpool, Genoa, Southampton, Porto, Benfica, Sporting, Spurs and Newcastle have all had spells as clubs that have been able to identify and burnish young stars before moving them on at great profit.Ajax’s Class of 1995 © The official website for European football – UEFA.comHowever, in the post-Bosman, Champions League era the idea that clubs outwith the gilded cage life of the Big Five European leagues might sustain themselves through regularly moving players on season after season seems as distant as ever.You can see how it plays out in The Football Obervatory Report and its tables below:The CIES Football Observatory say: “While clubs having invested the most in transfer fees are logically among the richest, the majority of teams having received the most money are also part of the closed circle of financially dominant clubs. For example, Real Madrid is 7th for transfer expenditure and 9th for transfer incomes.Like Real Madrid, most teams in the top twenty of the rankings of clubs who earned the most income from the transfer of players to big-5 league teams are also in the top twenty of clubs that spent the most. For teams of countries hosting the five major European championships, Sevilla, Udinese, Southampton and Genoa constitute the only exceptions.”As The Football observatory report confirms: “There are only two clu bs situated outside the big-5 league countries in the top twenty places of teams having most benefited from big-5 club spending: Benfica (4th) and Porto (5th). The exceptional capacity of these Portuguese clubs to generate incomes on the transfer market is linked to their prestige and competitiveness, but also to strategic alliances woven with key intermediaries and investors both in Europe and South America.”Football Observatory Elite Transfer Spending“Generally speaking, our analysis shows that to be able to generate considerable profits on the transfer market, it is necessary to have sufficient economic clout and prestige to attract the best talents either young or adult. In the current state of play, clubs without the necessary economic muscle have little chance of earning considerable incomes. A good access to dominant transfer networks is also of crucial importance.”At the elite level, Jean-Michel Aulas, the owner and chairman of Olympic Lyon single-handedly turned OL into a French powerhouse, based on a now classic football business model: buying promising players, giving them a shop window, and selling them to the biggest clubs in Europe.The sales of star players such as Karim Benzema, Florent Malouda, Michael Essien and Lassana Diarra are said to have generated a net surplus value of approximately 95M€. There are others like Edmilson and Tiago, Bayern-incomer Corentin Tolisso and the Arsenal target Alexandre Lacazette that are significant, alternative big names from the Lyon system.At various points, the virtuous circle for Lyon seemed unbreakable as their players became flavour of the month for a while but of course there is always a football cost to pay when prime assets are spirited away – even for a fantastic financial return on investment – and it hits clubs’ bottom line sooner or later.It is a cycle best illustrated by the rise and fall of super scout Graham Carr at Newcastle.Graham Carr made his name identifying underexposed players in the French market for a business model that would introduce them to Premier League football at St James Park, tie them in on long contracts, and then look to move them at a high fee profit. The scouting parameters appeared to be a French nationality, an age profile under 26 and a fee ideally less than £10m with the promise of a major upside on resale.As a business strategy it is self-evidently attractive. But as a football strategy it is destined to fail. The reason being is that while the financial ROI from polishing and rebranding unloved bargain buys can be high, even fantastic, the downside is always central to the piece.This is because inevitably ‘buying cheap to sell on dear as a strategy’ is a numbers game. It is bound to throw up more hits than misses. Misses you have to tolerate, to absorb, to do something with.Newcastle’s Wijnaldum and Sissoko © NUFC The Mag | HomeIn order for the Mike Ashley/Graham Carr model to work it had to dovetail perfectly, at all times, with football and team-building objectives so that players signed were the right players, for the right roles at the right time. And that is where both Carr and Newcastle appear to have failed as a football project.The ongoing success of a selling club model assumes three things:1) That the stream of under-exploited talent you can source is ongoing.2) That said new recruits can be seamlessly integrated into your first team season after season.3) That there are no structural or ‘fashion’ changes in the recruitment landscape that are lying in wait to fatally assail you.And none of these are even slightly guaranteed in the medium to long term.In Newcastle’s case, they couldn’t possibly have predicted either the free-for-all causing structural fall-out from the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson at Man United. Nor could they have anticipated the Sky TV rights-funded gold rush that would turn every Premier League club into a continental transfer market predator virtually overnight. But equally, there is no denying the fragility of the classic selling club model where teams either fail unlitaterally at the recruitment level or become victims of their own success – and unwittingly create a blueprint for wealthier rivals to follow.Certainly, as it stands, the also rans are forced to cut their cloth accordingly as poor relations, hoping, rather than budgeting for infrequent windfalls when they come along.Certainly you look at the CIES Observatory’s report and tables, and the story of Graham Carr’s travails at Newcastle, and you have to consider that player development as a form of club-sustaining speculation is now a closed shop game. That is, a game played out almost exclusively between existing Champions League level clubs.

Strap yourself in, because this is a torrid tale of mismanagement, complacency, mismanagement and bad luck… but mainly mismanagement.——When American Billionaire Ellis Short took control of Sunderland in 2009, the club had been back in the Premier League for two years. Despite quickly falling out with manager Roy Keane, under Short they had started to establish themselves in the league; Darren Bent's goals and Steve Bruce's guidance helped them to 13th and 10th positions in the 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons respectively. Though Darren Bent's acrimonious exist in January 2011 was a portent of the storm to come.In July 2011, Short made Margaret Byrne the CEO of the club, and things took a dramatic downward turn from here.By November 2011, the club sat 16th in the League, and Byrne made the first of an astonishing sequence of managerial decisions, sacking Steve Bruce - much to his disgust (he later fell out with the fans and claimed he was sacked because of his Newcastle roots).Former player and internationally respected Martin O'Neill came in and steadied the ship (finishing 13th), though 15 months after taking over, O'Neill lost his job, and the untested, hot-headed, Mussolini-supporting Paolo Di Canio came in and performed Miracle #1, keeping the club up against the odds (he actually only won 2 games, though his first was a 3–0 victory at Newcastle). Despite the “miracle”, and his passion, Di Canio's appointment angered many because of his unorthodox politics.Di Canio came with Roberto Di Fanti, a so-called Director of Football, and between them they spent a huge amount of money (over £30m) in the summer of 2013, bringing in a squad of (in hindsight) barely average players. This included Jozy Altidore, a player who's ineptitude has gone down in Sunderland folklore.Di Canio lasted 2 months of the 2013/14 season before he was acrimoniously shown the door, Sunderland sitting bottom of the table with only a single point. If rumours are to be believed, Bynre made her decision after the players organised a dressing-room revolt against the manager. Di Fanti followed soon after, Sunderland's brief flirtation with the DoF an unmitigated disaster.Former Brighton manager Gus Poyet replaced Di Canio, took the club up the table temporarily (his first win a victory over Newcastle), but they slumped back down again before Poyet performed Miracle #2 and saving them with a series of stunning wins at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge and a draw at the Ethiad as the season closed. A trip to Wembley in the League Cup final also added an extra layer of gloss over the cracks that were beginning to show.Sunderland's squad was rank average, bolstered with too many loan players each year, and a wage budget that was disproportionately high considering the position the club was in. The managerial merry-go-round had started to make the club a laughing stock to neutrals, and it started to be recognised as a place for foreign mercenaries and over-priced off-casts from other Premier League sides; the appalling Danny Graham being a case in point. Squad harmony, community links and connections to the fans all began to fall apart. Sunderland players were regularly finding themselves in the news for a variety of misdemeanours - usually alcohol related.Debts began to mount, though Ellis short still threw good money after bad, bringing in Lee Congerton as Head of Recruitment, who spent an estimated £10m on Jack Rodwell.Poyet found himself falling into the same pattern as his predecessors, and sure enough, like clockwork he was sacked just in time for the next manager (Dick Advocaat) to perform Miracle #3 in 2015, with yet another victory over Newcastle getting him off to the right start (You see a pattern forming here?)Advocaat should have known better and walked away at the end of the season as originally planned, but somehow got talked into staying. Advocaat was backed with huge money; spending over £25m on a handful of players including Borini and Jeremain Lens. He lasted 3 months into the season. Before Sam Allardyce took over.In 2016, Margaret Byrne's tumultuous reign as CEO came to a bitter end, when it was revealed she was aware that midfielder Adam Johnson has been arrested for charges of child grooming, and allowed him to continue playing while on bail. The Johnson saga knocked the morale out of the club, amgered the fans and turned many neutrals against Sunderland. Byrne was replaced by Martin Bain.Ironically, as the Johnson news broke, things actually began to click on the pitch. Allardyce showed fans a rare period of solid January recruitment and got a team playing well. Allardyce genuinely seemed like a good fit for Sunderland (a team he had actually played for). He performed Miracle #4 (relegated Newcastle in the process) and things were really looking up. Sunderland fans dared to dream a corner had been turned.Then two things happened:Allardyce was tapped up by England, (although he lasted only one game). Ask a Sunderland fan to imagine a “What If?” Scenario and most will reply with “What if Big Sam had stayed?”The money truly ran outShort had invested more than any other Chairman in the club's history (hundreds of millions), but, through Margaret Byrne, Di Fanti, Congerton, and a revolving door of managers, it had been truly squandered on sub-standard players being paid over priced wages. Agent's fees, and bizzare contracts added to the confusion, with Sunderland paying £10m for Ricardo Alvarez, despite never actually owning him. It was typical of the administrative shambles that club had started to become famous for.Short brought in David Moyes, gave him one last throw of the dice in terms of spending (which he blew spectacularly, spending £22m on the inept Djilibodji and the underwhelming N'Dong) and then snapped the chest shut.Moyes was an utterly miserable failure; he sucked out the morale and momentum that had been built under Allardyce. He played the role of the Boatman on the River Styx, guiding the club to their inevitable doom with minimum fuss, projecting a dour presence and showing thinly-veiled contempt in interviews and press conferences.There was to be no Miracle #5; Typically, Moyes blamed absolutely everyone except himself - in a later interview with a newspaper, he claimed he had no idea how bad the club were structurally, and he would never have taken the job had he known (He glosses over his abysmal recruitment funnily enough).With relegation confirmed (and Moyes bailing like the first man off the Titanic ), Sunderland were left saddled with £140m of debts - a legacy of several years of appalling mismanagement. The fact that £70k per week Jack Rodwell did not have a relegation wage-reduction clause was yet another astonishing oversight for a club that had been perpetually flirting with the drop.When Simon Grayson took over in the summer of 2017, it was made clear to him there was no money to be had. On the contrary; there was a fire-sale, and the fees recouped from the likes of Jordan Pickford were all spent on servicing the vast debt. Despite this, Grayson actually picked up some free (and low cost) bargains; Aidan McGeady and Callum McManaman two players with Premier League experience.On paper, the team should have been mid-table in the Championship. Why weren't they?They were club that had forgotten how to win (statistically the worst team in England in the last 10 years)The Stadium of Light became happy hunting ground for opposing teams (two home wins in 14 months)Crippling instability (if you include caretaker managers, Lee Catermole and Jon O'Shea, both signed under Steve Bruce, have played under 1/4 of all the managers in the club's 140 year history)The morale had been completely kicked out of the club's fans after several years of struggle, which led to half empty stadiums and a weak atmospherePlaying staff had a completely rotten core (Kone making a point of playing at 10% of his ability, Rodwell refusing to play at all, Gibson sacked after crashing his car drunk, Lewis Grabban leaving after 6 months, etc)Pickford and Mannone sold and replaced with three of the worst goalkeepers the club has ever seen, between them costing the club several points throughout the season.Neither Grayson nor Coleman could scrape away the rot at the heart of the squad, and with no money available to replace them, were left with no options but to forge on. The Academy, underfunded and largely forgotten for 10 years (Henderson and Pickford being the only standouts), could not produce the quality required to bolster a weak squad.And so here we are… Heading into League 1, still saddled with vast debts, an uninterested owner who can't even give the club away, an overpaid squad of institutional losers (one of whom earns 5 times more in one week than the entire Accrington Stanley squad), and a fanbase for whom success is an alien concept. We can only hope we've reached the bottom.It's not beyond the realm of possibility that Sunderland succumb to Administration, take a big points deduction, and find themselves staring down the barrel of an unprecedented Triple-Relegation. Unlikely maybe… but don't write Sunderland off when it comes to breaking the wrong kind of records.