Tough times ahead for Bluey, mascot of relegated Ipswich Town FC
Ipswich’s relegation was not dramatic but it is noteworthy nonetheless
All that was left was to dot the I and cross the T. Officially, Ipswich Town’s brief stay in the Premier League drew to a close after they failed to beat Newcastle United on Saturday afternoon. In reality, the club’s fate had been sealed long ago. They had won just four games all season. Relegation had been effectively certain for months.
Ipswich’s demotion might not have been dramatic but it is noteworthy nonetheless. The season still has a month or so to run; never before has the battle to avoid relegation from the richest domestic league in football been concluded so early. (Leicester City and Southampton both mustered even less resistance to the inevitable.)
It is also the second time in successive seasons that the three teams to have been relegated are the same three teams that had been most recently promoted. That had never happened before, either, and it represents a problem that should not be underestimated.
English football prides itself on its social mobility: the ability of its teams to rise and fall through the banks of its pyramid, a mechanism that grants every club – and fans of every club – the right to dream. Increasingly, that process appears to have stalled, at least at those altitudes where the air is thinnest.
That it has been allowed to happen is often presented as an immutable consequence of raw economics. In short: the Premier League generates for its clubs an almost impossible amount of money.
That revenue means that those teams who are promoted from the English Football League Championship, where cash is rather more scarce, start every season at a colossal disadvantage.
But it is also a choice. The cliff edge that sits between the Premier League and the Championship, between the first and second tiers of the pyramid, perhaps could not be flattened entirely but it could certainly be eroded. That it has not been is because the current arrangement works perfectly well for the only people with the power to enact change: those clubs who, by virtue of wealth or accident of history, find themselves effectively ensconced permanently in the cosseted ranks of the Premier League itself.
Time and again, the league has proven that it can act only in its own interests
The job of solving that intractable problem will fall, it would appear, to David Kogan, a 67-year-old media executive and historian of the Labour party, and now the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s preferred candidate to head the country’s first independent football regulator.
Kogan makes as much sense as a candidate as anyone else. He spent much of his career working in the sale of media rights – making broadcasters pay eye-watering sums to show sports – and has counted both the Premier League and theEFL, the body responsible for the three tiers below the top flight, among his clients.
His nomination has not been universally popular: executives at some EFL teams have suggested, privately, that he may prove to be a Premier League patsy; others have queried whether his background is relevant to the post. That should not be a bar, though. Universal popularity is not an achievable status in football, an industry staffed almost exclusively by the sort of people who would both maintain and appear in the Mean Girls Burn Book.
A far greater problem, though, will likely be that the Premier League – like many of its clubs – is implacably opposed to the very notion of a regulator.
Some of the objections are legitimate. The precise scope of the regulator’s powers remains somewhat uncertain. Its existence will be an added cost, a complication, an unwelcome insertion of politics. There are fears, too, over mission creep, that one of England’s few remaining boom industries will now be hidebound by unnecessary bureaucracy.
The fate of Ipswich, as well as that of Leicester and Southampton, offers a perfect encapsulation of the counter-argument. As English football has grown, so too has the complexity of the issues it faces: not just how to spread its colossal wealth but how to protect its unrivalled depth and breadth, to protect the social institutions, the clubs that lie at its heart, from predation and decay.
Currently, all of those issues fall under the aegis of the Premier League. It controls the flow of money, and, as a result, it controls how English football works. Time and again, though, the league has proven that it can act only in its own interests, rather than those of the game as a whole. The Premier League might not want a regulator, whether it is Kogan or not. It has shown, though, precious little ability to regulate itself.
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.