Southampton are going down but will they come back up from the Championship?

Southampton have been relegated from the Premier League averaging two-thirds of a point per game. It is as bad as it sounds. What went wrong, and how might they get on next season in the Championship?

I will start with the future and work back to the past.

Everyone expects teams relegated from the Premier League to do well in the Championship. They achieve more than teams who were already there or promoted from League One. But they might not succeed as often as is commonly supposed.

I studied teams relegated from the Premier League then playing in the Championship across 27 pairs of seasons – starting with 1995-96 and 1996-97, ending with 2021-22 and 2022-23.

Fourteen per cent of teams relegated from the Premier League won the Championship, nine per cent were promoted as runners-up, another six per cent went up through the playoffs. So 29 per cent got back one way or another.

The promotion-rate was only 11 per cent for teams who had spent the previous season in the Championship and five per cent for teams who had come up from League One.

Nearly half of teams relegated from the Premier League finished in the top six of the Championship – the automatic promotion and playoff places. But that means just over half finished lower.

The mean finishing position in the Championship of teams relegated from the Premier League was eighth. They had averaged 31 points in the Premier League and would average 71 points in the Championship.

The worse a team did in the Premier League the worse they were likely to do in the Championship. Generally speaking, though, differences became smaller. A lot can change between leaving the Premier League and joining the Championship, players and managers come and go.

Southampton have accrued 24 points with two games to play and will almost certainly finish bottom of the Premier League. Teams relegated in last place averaged 26 points in the Premier League and 68 points the following season in the Championship. Typically they finished ninth in the Championship.

Projecting only from Southampton’s results in the Premier League, a reasonable prediction for next season in the Championship would be somewhere in the region of 68 points and ninth place. Other things that happen between now and then could move those numbers up or down.

That is what might transpire in the future. What went wrong in the past?

Southampton bought players who improved then sold them for more to richer Premier League clubs: Sadio Mane, Virgil van Dijk, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Victor Wanyama, Morgan Schneiderlin. They also got big fees for some former trainees: Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Calum Chambers. In recent seasons, though, the replacements have not turned out so well.

Does every transfer work? Of course not. Therefore recruitment must be a percentage game. If a recruitment team have a certain success-rate over time there will be periods when they do better and periods when they do worse. It might be true to say these signings did not turn out as well as those. It is not necessarily true to say the recruiters have gone from good to bad. It can be true but usually it is not.

I read Southampton’s accounts for the ten seasons since they returned to the Premier League in 2012-13 until 2021-22. Accounts for this season will not be published until it is over. Southampton’s wage bills across ten seasons were exactly what I would have anticipated from their results across ten seasons. Overall, they got what they were paying for.

In some seasons, though, results were better than in others. One season Southampton gained as many as 63 points. This season so far they have only 24 points.

A question occurred to me. If a club signed players who were worth what they were paid, and they always performed at the level they were capable of, how much might results fluctuate purely because of good or bad luck? I decided to find out.

Over 11 Premier League seasons Southampton will have averaged 45 or 46 points, depending on what happens in their last two games. I simulated 10,000 seasons for a club who will average 46 points.

In each game in every season there was a definable chance of winning, drawing and losing. Those chances varied with the venue and quality of opposition. In an average season the team gained 46 points – if they did not, there would have been something wrong with the simulations. But there could be huge differences between seasons. Once they gained 77 points, another time they gathered as few as 19 points.

In ten per cent of my simulated seasons the team like Southampton were relegated. In one season out of every ten they would have gone down – not because they had worse players or performed below reasonable expectations but because too often they got an unkind roll of the ball. In short, because they had too much bad luck.

After 11 real seasons the team who are Southampton have been relegated. I am not saying their demotion can be explained entirely by horrible deflections. To repeat, some current players are not as good as some former players, although it might not be the recruitment department’s fault. 

What I am saying is that there can be a lot of natural variation in results even before we factor in changes in the quality of players – a lot more than most of us probably realise.

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