How Relegation Trends Have Evolved in 50 Years

Yo-yos, pyramids, and a financial divide may not be words that you immediately associate with English football as you tuck into your half-time pie or pasty. These are not terms that describe the action you see on the pitch or the decisions being made in the dugouts, yet they do influence everything that you see at every game, week in, week out.

Whilst most fans focus on the events that take place during the 90 minutes of each match, the action (or inaction) in the clubs’ offices and boardrooms can have just as much impact on a club’s success, especially in England’s top few football leagues.

The result is that clubs today are 9.6 times more likely to yo-yo between leagues year after year than they were back in 1970.

Financial pressure, league structures, and the business of football are all playing a bigger and bigger role in whether clubs get promoted, relegated, or cement themselves a near-permanent position in the Premier League. This is a relatively recent trend, created by modern developments in football and sport more generally.

Understanding the English Football Structure

Football is as English as Big Ben, fish and chips, or a good cup of tea on a rainy afternoon. So it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the sport developed around old English traditions of gentlemanly behaviour.

In the early days of the codified sport, players were trusted to be able to settle disputes between themselves, as a fine fellow playing football would never deliberately commit a foul.

It was in this spirit that the modern football pyramid began to form. Clubs of differing levels of talent would play each other in leagues of their peers, with the most successful teams in a season earning a promotion to the tier above, replacing the worst-performing clubs who slid down a level.

The principle was that sporting success should be rewarded. It’s a concept that lives on today – the basic idea is that the best teams belong in the Premier League, the second best in the Championship, and so on.

It’s a romanticised idea. Every lower league club dreams of a rags-to-riches climb where their club earns back-to-back promotions as they launch their way up the pyramid in pursuit of a prestigious Premier League place.

However, this is a dream that fewer and fewer clubs are getting to turn into a reality.

Historical Relegation Patterns

In the modern era of English football, these fairy-tale climbs have remained exactly that – fairy tales.

Back in the 1970s, 20% of clubs in the Third Division (today’s League One) achieved back-to-back promotions, but that has trended downwards to just 5% between 2020 and 2024.

In the second tier of English football that we now know as the Championship, this has dropped to between 0% and 7% since 2015, down from the highs of 18% in the early 1990s.

Although it remains more prominent in League Two (the fourth tier), where it was 10% between 2020 and 2024, the number of back-to-back promotions fell uniformly across every level of the pyramid.

The Wild 90s and the Birth of the Premier League

This is illustrated perfectly by this graph. We can see that the 1990s were a crossover point for these four tiers of English football. It was during this ten-year period that fourth-tier clubs began enjoying more back-to-back promotions, whilst every other level saw declines.

It’s no coincidence that this change occurred at the exact same time that the clubs in the former First Division broke away from the English Football League to create the Premier League.

It was a volatile period for English football. During the latter half of the decade, we saw a huge spike in promotion and relegation churn that resulted in 57% of Premier League newcomers being relegated within a season.

There were also spikes in lower league instability during this period as the shockwave of disruption caused by the creation of the Premier League permeated England’s beautiful game.

No club better personifies this disruption and instability than Blackburn Rovers. Founded in the late 19th century, the club spent most of its history in the first tier of the pyramid, though it suffered a decline in performance in the 1960s and worked its way back up into the top flight by the late 1980s.

It joined the Premier League in 1992-93 as a founding club, finishing fourth in the inaugural season, and then climbing to second place the following season. In 1994-95, Rovers topped the league, reaching a high point in the club’s history. However, in less than five years, Blackburn were sent packing with a relegation to the now Championship.

Finances and Why Newly Promoted Teams Struggle

A big reason for this decline is that climbing into a new league brings new challenges, not just on the pitch, but in the boardroom, back offices, and bank accounts.

Although English football was founded and structured around gentlemanly players striving for sporting success on the pitch, inflows of cash from wealthy investors, television broadcasters, and a revolving door of sponsors have made football a business.

Landing in the dizzying heights of the Premier League may sound like a dream come true to most fans, but for a club that has spent decades scrapping in the Championship, it doesn’t have the facilities and funds to compete with the big boys at the top of the table.

When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to see why. In Deloitte’s Football Money League 2025, Manchester City ranked as the highest earning English club, raking in €837.8m, followed closely behind by their northern neighbours Manchester United and Liverpool, who netted €770.6m and €714.7m respectively.

Compare that to Burnley, who were freshly promoted to the top flight for 2025-26, and their annual turnover of around £123m (€141.6m) looks like pennies.

With such a disparity between the money clubs have to spend on signing and paying the wages of top players, it should be no surprise that these new clubs often find themselves bouncing between leagues.

The Financial Divide in English Football

Promotion and relegation are supposed to reward talented clubs and punish those who lack quality players and tactics; however, a club’s finances now play much more of a role.

Back in the late 1970s, only 7% of teams that earned a spot in the First Division were immediately sent back down to the second tier. The turbulent times of the late 90s, saw this jump to 57%, but rather than settle back down, they have remained high and jumped higher again to 67% between 2020 and 2024.

This unfortunate act of bouncing between leagues has been referred to as ‘yo-yoing’.

You may think that this yo-yo effect is the result of a club that’s of a skill level that straddles the top flight and second tier, making them slightly too good for the Championship and not quite good enough for the Premier League.

However, if that were the case, we’d see this yo-yoing go back through time, whereas it is very much a modern phenomenon.

A gulf in the size of club finances is behind much of this. Teams that enjoy promotion into the Premier League can expect to earn between five and ten times as much as they received from being in the Championship.

In the 2024/25 season, the lowest-earning club was Southampton, which received a total of £109.2 million in fees from the Premier League. In comparison, teams in the Championship receive an estimated £9.5-12.5 million.

For clubs being relegated to the Championship, that drop in income would be enough to bankrupt them, so a system called ‘parachute payments’, which is unique to English football, is used to cushion the blow.

These pay clubs a share of the Premier League revenue for three years after relegation, designed to give them time to adjust to their new circumstances. However, this means that these clubs have significantly more money to spend on a ‘Hail Mary’ push to get back into the top flight.

Stability at the Top and Bottom

This financial structure means that the English football pyramid is stable at the top and the bottom.

The big-name clubs like Liverpool, Manchester United, and Chelsea have cemented themselves in place at the top of the league, bringing in massive sums that they can spend on increasing their success even further.

Meanwhile, the teams in League Two also find themselves in a more stable position. Free of the burden of parachute payments and the inequality it creates, back-to-back relegations for clubs in the fourth tier are much less likely.

Between 1995 and 2019, the percentage of clubs at this rung in the pyramid being relegated in sequential seasons never went above 10%. However, it spiked to 17% between 2020 and 2024, which may be simply a blip, or it may be an early warning of a new problem on the horizon for smaller clubs in English football.