IT'S a popular but incorrect belief that modern football has crushed the opportunity for clubs to journey from lower in the English football pyramid to the top-flight. Swindon, Barnsley, Wigan, Reading and Bournemouth have all played their only seasons in the top division within the Premier League era, while the modern period has also seen long awaited returns for the likes of Bradford, Cardiff and Huddersfield.

The latter club famously won three titles in a row in the 1920s and it’s telling that the only former champions of England never to play in the Premier League are Preston North End, whose most recent league title came in 1890. Sheffield United, the only other team who entire haul of top-flight wins (in their case just one) came in the 19th century are currently battling to get into the 2020-21 Champions League. English football is certainly not a meritocracy but it is still fluid.

You can’t have fluidity without relegation, though, and of the teams listed above, all of them, except Bournemouth [who, trivia fans may like to note, are the only team to ever play in the English top-flight and never be relegated from it] have gone down, most of them after just a season or two trying to mix it up with the big boys. Of the six ever-present Premier League sides, Manchester United and Arsenal have never come close to going down, Liverpool and Chelsea flirted with it vaguely at points in the 1990s while Tottenham have done so periodically and Everton semi-regularly, most dramatically in 1994 and 1998.

That leaves the rest of the cast to chop and change, rise and fall and wax and wane. Newcastle are experts in dipping into the Championship every six or seven years to refresh themselves but some teams fall out and find it a herculean task to return. Your Nottingham Forests, your Sheffield Wednesdays, your current leaders of the second tier: Leeds United.

That brings us to 2019-20, a season in which the relegation battle feels more than ever like a group of people trying to run through custard towards a mocking finish line that is slowly edging away from them. Norwich will be relegated, if not this weekend then soon, and will become the first team to ever drop out of the Premier League on five occasions. Since Delia Smith emerged on to the Carrow Road pitch at half-time in their game against Manchester City in 2005 the club have won only 48 of 197 top-flight games. In you invoke the gods of banter and their meme priests then they will demand recompense, and so they have.

The remaining two places will be filled by two of Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Watford and West Ham. The old, mythical 40-point margin of safety has never looked so over-cautious. Since English football switched to three points for a win in the early 1980s no club has ever stayed up with 31 points or fewer. As it stands, Watford and West Ham could fail to collect another point this season and survive on 31.

Yes, that’s unlikely but somehow seems much more likely than one of the bottom five actually hitting some sort of form in the four remaining rounds of games. Since the restart last month, the quintet of gloom have won two out of a combined 26 games and scored 15 goals between them. The lowest combined points total by a bottom five in the 20-team Premier League era is 150 10 years ago in 2009-10 (as it stands the 2019-20 bottom five have 138 between them), but that was skewed by the nine-point penalty Portsmouth were given for going into administration.
 

Aston Villa have just climbed up a place without playing. Could be something to look at for the rest of the season?

— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) July 1, 2020

So that leaves last season’s 151, which passes the sense-test, given that Manchester City and Liverpool ended the campaign with 98 and 97 points respectively. If you stretch the division that much, it’s going to get saggier towards the bottom. Even so, 16th place Southampton still got to 39 points, a threshold it’s extremely unlikely we’ll see repeated later this month.

A video of people predicting relegation for Sheffield United last summer has been circulating on social media this week and while it’s enjoyable to wallow in other people’s hubris it’s a brave person who claims that they spent August 2019 confidently touting a possible top six finish for Chris Wilder’s side. Aston Villa had the chequebook, champions Norwich had the system, but look where that’s left both of them.

Sheffield United’s deserved success has at least prevented a situation we’ve only ever seen once before in the Premier League era, where all three promoted teams are promptly demoted a year later. 1997-98 remains the only time that has happened, comprising of a Palace team who didn’t win a home game until late April, a Barnsley side who battled but weren’t quite good enough and Bolton who were unlucky on a couple of fronts.

Firstly, they actually reached the holy 40-point target, to no avail, and secondly they went down on goal difference from Everton, a team they had played in the first ever league match at the shiny new Reebok Stadium. The game ended 0-0 but Bolton’s Gerry Taggart had a header from a corner that clearly went across the line but wasn’t given. On such moments a season can turn. Strangely we’ve come very close to that scenario in 2019-20, in the first game after the restart when Aston Villa benefited from a glitch in the goal line technology which gave them an Everton-style 0-0 vs Sheffield United.

If that point helps them survive in the next couple of weeks then there will be strong echoes of 1998. Back then it was human error, this time it was freak occlusion. The technology may change but the anxiety at the foot of the table is timeless.