The Championship season is now just around the corner, with the first game due to be played on August 9th.

We’re back with more pre-season stuff. This time we’re looking at how relegated Premier League teams perform in their first Championship season, asking whether they typically bounce back at the first time of asking.

Do relegated teams usually bounce back?

The question is do relegated teams usually bounce back? Let’s first answer what bouncing back means.

Bouncing back could mean many things, and I’m certainly not saying that teams who take a couple of years to get back to the Premier League fail to bounce back.

It’s just that here I’m interested in seeing how often teams relegated from the Premier League make it back to the height of English football at the first time of asking. In other words, how many teams get promoted straight after being relegated?

Off the top of my head, I had a rough idea, but who can remember every relegation and promotion to and from the Championship since the start of the previous decade? Well, there’s probably lots of people who can do that, but I’m not one of them.

Therefore, I dug a little bit. What did I find? I found that it’s far from rare for a team to bounce straight back after relegation.

Interestingly, in each of the last five Championship seasons, at least one of the teams relegated from the Premier League at the end of the previous season won promotion.

In two of those five Championship seasons, two of the relegated teams won promotion at the first time of asking.

In fact, looking at things since the first season that began in the 2010’s, more often than not, at least one of the teams relegated from the Premier League came back up without needing a second attempt. More on this below.

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How teams performed in their first season after relegation

Let’s look at how those relegated from the Premier League in each of the last 14 seasons performed in their first season back in the Championship?

Why the last 14 seasons? Well, 2010 seemed a good place to start. Is 14 a strange number? Perhaps, but there you go. Am I a strange person? Perhaps, though that’s a topic for a very different article.

Back to the table. The table below shows how those relegated from the Premier League performed, detailing where they finished, whether they got promoted, how many games they won and their total points.

Season	Newly promoted teams	Final positions(s)	Promoted?	Games won	Total points
2023/24	Leicester, Leeds, Southampton	1st, 3rd, 4th	Yes, no, yes	31, 27, 26	97, 90, 87
2022/23	Burnley, Watford, Norwich	1st, 11th, 13th	Yes, no, no	29, 16, 17	101, 63, 62
2021/22	Fulham, Sheffield Utd, West Brom	1st, 5th, 10th	Yes, no, no	27, 21, 18	90, 75, 67
2020/21	Norwich, Watford, Bournemouth	1st, 2nd, 6th	Yes, yes, no	29, 27, 22	97, 91, 77
2019/20	Fulham, Cardiff, Huddersfield	4th, 5th, 18th	Yes, no, no	23, 19, 13	81, 73, 51
2018/19	West Brom, Swansea, Stoke	4th, 10th, 16th	No, no, no	23, 18, 11	80, 65, 55
2017/18	Middlesbrough, Hull, Sunderland	5th, 18th, 24th	No, no, no	22, 11, 7	76, 49, 37
2016/17	Newcastle, Norwich, Aston Villa	1st, 8th, 13th	Yes, no, no	29, 20, 16	94, 70, 62
2015/16	Burnley, Hull, QPR	1st, 4th, 12th	Yes, yes, no	26, 24, 14	93, 83, 60
2014/15	Norwich, Cardiff, Fulham	3rd, 11th, 17th	Yes, no, no	25, 16, 14	86, 62, 52
2013/14	QPR, Wigan, Reading	4th, 5th, 7th	Yes, no, no	23, 21, 19	80, 73, 71
2012/13	Bolton, Blackburn, Wolves	7th, 17th, 23rd	No, no, no	18, 14, 14	68, 58, 51
2011/12	West Ham, Birmingham, Blackpool	3rd, 4th, 5th	Yes, no, no	24, 20, 20	86, 76, 75
2010/11	Burnley, Hull, Portsmouth	8th, 11th, 16th	No, no, no	18, 16, 15	68, 65, 58

As we can see from the table above, plenty of teams do make a rapid return to what is often dubbed as the “best league in the world”, but can we say that this typically happens?

The answer must be no. From the 2010/2011 campaign, up until last season, 42 relegated teams have had the chance to return to the Premier League without needing any more than a single season.

Of those 42 teams, 13 have got the job done. That’s 30.95%. Therefore, we cannot say that teams typically bounce back.

What we can say is that, more often than not, at least one relegated comes straight back up, which is something that has happened in 10 of the last 14 seasons. In only three of those 14 seasons did more than one relegated team return to the top flight at the first opportunity.

Here’s an interesting stat: in each of the last four seasons, the Championship winner has come from the trio of teams to be relegated from the Premier League at the end of the previous campaign.

Is there a betting angle?

Is there a betting angle here? There may just be. For my money, I think the 9/4 that is currently available of Burnley making a swift return to the Premier League seems ever so slightly generous.

The Clarets were relegated after an unsuccessful season under Vincent Kompany last time around, but they’ve got a squad containing lots of quality, while new manager Scott Parker is man with promotion on his CV.

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Parker has orchestrated not one but two promotions to the Premier League in recent times, leading Fulham to the top division in 2020, before repeating the trick with Bournemouth in 2021.

If we also consider that a near 30.95% of relegated teams bounce right back, then could we have a slight edge? Odds of 9/4 carry an implied probability of 30.8%, while they also translate to decimal odds of 3.25.

30.95% translates to odds of 3.23. Such odds imply a probability of 30.80%, so by taking odds of 9/4 (3.25), we may just have the smallest of edges at 0.15%. It’s awfully slight, sure, but it’s the best I can do here.