And so, another season in the Championship nears a close: 552 games of frantic wrestling, slogging and scrapping will soon be done for another year, with just the five play-off games – the football equivalent of waiting for some medical test results – remaining.
Bournemouth and Watford fans will jig in the May sunshine, while the four teams below them nervously fiddle with the lid of a Valium bottle, and the remaining 18 will quietly sink into their summer reverie, initially glad it’s all over but knowing the innocent hope of August is in the post, that shimmering time when we all think: “Actually, you know I reckon we could do it this year.” Perhaps the ultra-competitiveness of the division is the worst thing about being a fan of a club in the Championship, because there’s real hope: two-thirds of the teams in the division have a genuine chance of promotion, and the other third think they do. At least in the Premier League about three-quarters of the teams don’t for a minute imagine they can win the thing, allowing them to abandon any real delusions of grandeur and, like Forrest Gump and his money invested in Apple, have one less thing to worry about.
The life of a Championship fan these days is a curious one because of what success represents. The second tier is desirable because it offers supporters of “small” clubs some chance of doing well, of winning some games, or at least not getting a thorough shoeing most weeks by bigger and richer boys. The problem is that winning lots of games will get you promoted into the Premier League, a place where you are likely to get a thorough shoeing most weeks by bigger and richer boys.
It’s a strange cycle, in that success is “rewarded” with the one thing you want to avoid. With the days of Nottingham Forest or Derby winning the title the year after promotion gone, the best someone coming up from the Championship can realistically hope for, assuming your club has a plan and is thoughtfully run by people who know what they’re doing, is to be Swansea or Stoke or Southampton (perhaps the name of your club has to start with S to guarantee stability in the top flight – Sheffield Wednesday fans rejoice). Those teams are fine examples of how to do things, but if the best-case scenario is pleasantly dwelling in mid-table, possibly getting a sniff of the Europa League and a run in the League Cup, then you can’t really blame people for turning their nose up at “glory” like that and preferring life in the “lesser” league.
Still, “lesser” depends on how you define things. The Championship is unquestionably a more competitive division, and by and large it’s much more fun too. It’s unpredictable and chaotic, meaning there are usually no processions to glory and even the surest thing for promotion can slip and slide away at the shortest notice. Derby, for example, after being mugged at Wembley by QPR last May continued to be the best team in the division for the first six months of this season, but in February embarked on a curious collective bottle job and go into the final day sweating over a play-off spot. As well as Steve McClaren’s men, at various points this season Ipswich, Nottingham Forest, Middlesbrough and Norwich all looked like they would dance away with automatic promotion, only to be knocked off course in assorted degrees of calamity.
Even if many accept its entertainment value, the frequent strike against the Championship is that the quality of football is poor, but even that doesn’t necessarily hold up these days. Of course, in general, the Premier League is better, but there genuinely isn’t a big difference between Watford and someone like Aston Villa, while Bournemouth are not only more aesthetically pleasing than the likes of Sunderland or Newcastle, but would probably beat them more often than not too.
If nothing else, this season has surely dismissed the notion that you have to play functional football in the Championship. The best two teams in the division play attractive attacking football, as do many of the chasing pack, but that’s well-known; what isn’t so widely acknowledged is that most teams are largely built around a creator, a ball-player of some description. Derby have Will Hughes, Watford have Almen Abdi (to name but one), Middlesbrough have Lee Tomlin, Bournemouth have Matt Ritchie – even what we’ll call “moderate” teams like Leeds and Forest have youngsters like Alex Mowatt and Ben Osborn, respectively.
“The Championship is not the same as it was five or six years ago,” Brentford’s own playmaker Jota told the Times this week. “It is strong, it is tough, but it has changed. It is a beautiful league to play in. There are more teams trying to play more football. Our team has tried to do that from the start. That was the idea of the coach [Mark Warburton] and the club, to win by playing well, not by force or fighting spirit.”
Perhaps the nature of the division has facilitated this more widespread approach to attractive football. Of course, there’s pressure to get into the Premier League and the riches therein, but not nearly as much as the pressure on those clubs already there to stay up and retain said riches. If you don’t get promoted then never mind, not the end of the world, there’s always next season, and therefore there’s more freedom. The chaos of the division also means there’s no set formula for success, no prescribed method of playing, so attacking and pleasing football is just as likely to pay off as the alternative.
The Championship has many problems, but it is the division that teams are obliged to want to leave, lest they be accused of lacking ambition, but do so with a heavy heart, knowing that they won’t have that much fun in the “better” league. Promotion in football is like promotion in the workplace; from teacher to head of department, from writer to editor – the money’s good and you think you should probably better yourself, but sooner or later you’ll yearn for the old days.
Farewell for another season then, the Championship. You’re maddening, you’re chaotic, but you’re wonderful.
