The World's Game

January 18, 2012

onefootinthegrave asked: can you guys explain a little bit of how promotion/relegation works? Like I know Blackpool got relegated last year, but are they doing well in the lower league this year because they have better facilities/a larger payroll from being in the top league previously?

Promotion and relegation is pretty simple at the base, X amount of teams move down a league, while X number of teams move up. In England, the top two teams in the championship move up and then the 3rd-6th place teams play in a playoff to determine the 3rd team that moves up. Other countries have different ways of doing promotion and relegation, but they pretty much follow the basic pattern. It is theoretically possible for an English team to move up or down a total of 24 different leagues. This is not very likely over a short period of time as there is hardly any money at all beyond the Conference National.

As far as Blackpool’s situation specifically, they are currently in 9th place in the Championship, but just 3 points outside of the promotion playoffs with a lot of matches still to play.

They actually don’t have much better facilities than most teams in the Championship. Bloomfield Road is actually the 4th smallest stadium in the league this season. I couldn’t find anything saying how many seats a premier league club needed, but I did find this, which has some info on stadium rules.

Since Blackpool was an unlikely candidate for promotion two years ago (they’ve been a mid level championship club for a while), and was seen as highly likely to get relegated (as they did) they were rather cautious with regards to going out and spending a lot of money last season. So their payroll really isn’t too high this season. (They also sold Charlie Adam which put some cash in their pockets).

Typically when small teams like Blackpool get promoted and then relegated they’ll stick around the mid level of the Championship for a few years, build their squad back up after their team has had all it’s good players/coaches stolen by better teams and then hopefully jump back up for a year or two.

Got a question for us? No matter how silly you think it is, we’ll be happy to answer it for you and hopefully teach you more about our favorite sport.