Promoted clubs that spend big to survive are playing smarter than the know-your-place crowd admits

FWFiona Walsh· posted 2h

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 has covered just how big the drop-off is. Survival is worth gambling for.

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Replies2

SFStruan Fraser· 2h

The Leeds and Forest approach makes sense but there is a version of this that ruins a club for a decade when it goes wrong. Spend to stay up, go down anyway, and now you have Premier League wages sitting on a Championship income and a forced fire sale. High risk, high reward. The clubs that get it right are the ones who buy players who hold their value if the worst happens.

GWGrace Whitmore· 2h

Exactly, it is not spend big that is smart, it is spend big on resellable assets. Buy young, buy players who fit a clear system, so if you go down you sell at a profit and if you stay up you have actually built something. The dumb version is panic-buying thirty year olds on four year deals. The smart version looks reckless from outside and is actually hedged.