BEING promoted into the English top-flight and disrupting the status quo of the top sides has long been a thing of the past – Nottingham Forest were the last team to join the top division and then immediately win it, back in 1977-78 under Brian Clough. Since the Premier League became a 20-team league in 1995, the only side to even crash the top-five was Ipswich Town in 2000-01 – and they were then relegated the following season.

But in more recent times, even troubling the top half of the league has become almost an impossibility. Across the last 18 seasons, only seven sides have managed it, with 7^th the highest position achieved by Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2018-19. Since 2020-21, 10 out of 15 promoted clubs have come immediately back down. Between them, 2022-23 and 2023-24 Championship champions Burnley and Leicester won 198 points in those title-winning campaigns – in the Premier League after promotion, they picked up just 49 points collectively.

Both Leeds and Burnley won 100 points in the Championship in 2024-25 – the first time ever two sides in the same Football League have achieved that in the same season – and yet both sides are projected by the Opta Predictor to go straight back down, undoubtedly not helped by all three promoted clubs going down in 2023-24 and 2024-25, which had only happened once before (in 1997-98).

The top-flight records of their managers may not help either.

Farke & Parker

There’s perhaps no greater sign of the gap between the Championship and the Premier League than the records of current Leeds and Burnley head coaches Daniel Farke and Scott Parker.

Farke is the only manager to win the second tier of English football on three occasions, leading Norwich to the title in 2018-19 and 2020-21 and Leeds last season. With a minimum of 100 league games in the Championship since 2004-05, Farke has the best win ratio (55.2%), best goal difference (+167) and best goals per game ratio (1.71). After losing three in a row in November 2017 with the Canaries, Farke has never since lost three Championship games consecutively across 214 matches. He’s led his teams on seven different runs of five or more consecutive league wins. Then there’s the two 7-0 wins he’s overseen, in April 2021 (Norwich 7-0 Huddersfield) and February 2025 (Leeds 7-0 Cardiff). He is a Championship expert.

Now, compare and contrast with his Premier League record. It started quite well with Norwich, with two wins in his first five games in 2019, including a 3-2 win over reigning champions Man City (one of two times Guardiola has lost versus a promoted club – the other was against Leeds) but with just six wins in 49 games overall, Farke’s is the lowest points per game ratio in the competition’s history (minimum of 40 or more games) at just 0.53. He lost the final 10 games of 2019-20 and then the first six of 2021-22 to give him a 16-match losing streak in the Premier League, the worst run of any manager. Norwich managed just three goals on that 16 game losing run and – from the best goals per game of any Championship manager – Farke sits at the bottom of the Premier League list (0.63).

With Parker, it’s a similar story. He is an expert in getting teams promoted out of the Championship, managing in three seasons at that level and lifting teams into the Premier League on all three occasions – Fulham via the play-offs in 2019-20 and Bournemouth and Burnley as runners-up in 2021-22 and 2024-25 respectively. Although his win rate is marginally below Farke’s (55.1%), he does enjoy a better points per game total in the Championship than the German, at 1.95 the best in Championship history despite never lifting the trophy himself. Defensively, there is no one better than Parker at that level since 2004 – his teams have conceded just 103 goals in his 138 games, a goals against per game rate of just 0.75, and then there’s the small matter of 30 clean sheets for the Clarets last season, equalling a Football League record in a season in its entire history.

Burnley in 2024-25 conceded just 16 league goals all season – in Parker’s final three Premier League games as a manager, with Bournemouth in August 2022, he conceded as many times as in that entire Championship campaign, losing 4-0 to Man City, 3-0 to Arsenal and then 9-0 to Liverpool in a bruising trio of matches that saw him sacked as Cherries boss.

For a minimum of 50 Premier League games managed (Farke is on 49, just missing this cut off), Parker has the second lowest win ratio (17.3%), lowest points per game (0.77), second lowest goals per game average (0.71) and second highest defeat percentage (57.7%). He has just one win in his last 14 matches at Premier League level, losing 11 of them; his previous 11 Championship league defeats stretch back over a period of 100 matches.

The contrast between divisions could not be greater for two of the Championship’s finest.

The omens – on a club level – are a little more positive for Leeds United supporters. On seven previous occasions, Leeds have been promoted into the top-flight and not once have they been immediately relegated back to the second tier, a joint record with Chelsea and Newcastle. Their last three seasons as a newly promoted club have seen them come 2^nd (albeit way back in 1964-65), 4^th (1990-91, winning the league the season after) and 9^th (2020-21 under Marcelo Bielsa).

Burnley, though, will have to buck their recent trend of joining the Premier League and then leaving it with a sharp exit – they’ve gone straight back down in three of their four promoted seasons (2009-10, 2014-15, 2022-23).

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