Promoted clubs that spend big to survive are playing smarter than the know-your-place crowd admits
Every summer a newly promoted club spends real money and a certain kind of fan clutches their pearls about it being reckless, or about the club not knowing its place. It is the opposite of reckless. The gap between staying up and going down is astronomical, we are talking a full extra year of top-flight television money plus parachute payments, so spending aggressively to protect that is one of the most rational bets in the whole sport. Forest and Leeds both understand the maths even when it looks chaotic from the outside. Yes, some clubs overreach and blow up, but the ones who sit back and stay humble are usually the ones who go straight back down having banked nothing. The financial cliff is genuinely that steep, [BBC Sport](https://www.bbc.com/sport) has covered just how big the drop-off is. Survival is worth gambling for.