Nothing to do with our position, happy the club is in the top tier and I want us to stay there. BUT, I was watching Forest vs Leeds earlier and got to thinking.

Positives of the Championship:
- More of a level playing field
- More varied results (i.e. more upsets)
- 6 'new' teams each season (3 promoted, 3 relegated)
- Better fanbase (less glory hunters and plastics)
- Good quality, probably on a par with or better than the top tiers of some European nations

Negatives of the PL
- Fairly predictable outside the top 6
- Big games often fail to live up to expectations
- David vs Goliath encounters (e.g. ourselves or Huddersfield against the likes of Man City) turn into attack vs defence training routines
- So much at stake that many teams favour a more conservative style
- Football tourism, the 'brand', ludicrous figures involved in transfers, wages etc.
- Daft schedules (Saturday 3pm kickoffs increasingly rare)

Positives of the EPL:
- Playing at the highest level
- Fantastic exposure for our " little " town
- £100m+ of income, over and above the Championship
- Rovers aren't in it ...
- World class football on our doorstep

Positives of the Championship:
- All of the OP's points but they don't outweigh being in the EPL !

being in the prem is like dating a beautiful woman. Eventually you get used to it and take it for granted and its only when she is gone that you wish you had her back.

The Championship is fantastic but a serious lack of money.

Premier League football is undeniably more crucial to the town than the club as our past has shown

HieronymousBoschHobs wrote:Nothing to do with our position, happy the club is in the top tier and I want us to stay there. BUT, I was watching Forest vs Leeds earlier and got to thinking.

Positives of the Championship:
- More of a level playing field
- More varied results (i.e. more upsets)
- 6 'new' teams each season (3 promoted, 3 relegated)
- Better fanbase (less glory hunters and plastics)
- Good quality, probably on a par with or better than the top tiers of some European nations

Negatives of the PL
- Fairly predictable outside the top 6
- Big games often fail to live up to expectations
- David vs Goliath encounters (e.g. ourselves or Huddersfield against the likes of Man City) turn into attack vs defence training routines
- So much at stake that many teams favour a more conservative style
- Football tourism, the 'brand', ludicrous figures involved in transfers, wages etc.
- Daft schedules (Saturday 3pm kickoffs increasingly rare)

Totally agree.

In an ideal world, the PL would be more like the championship. Maybe if the big six breakaway I'll get my wish.

Without the PL money, we don't compete.

Without the PL money, we don't qualify for Europe

Without the PL money, we don't do a right lot

There are no negatives being in the Premier League.
It's the place to be.

claretnproud wrote:being in the prem is like dating a beautiful woman. Eventually you get used to it and take it for granted and its only when she is gone that you wish you had her back.

I had thought of something similar when composing my humble contribution ! Mine was more about the people you see interviewed saying " Of course, money isn't everything, and you don't need money to be happy " , as they sit in their Millionaire's row home, with the Jaguar in the drive and their kids at private school !!

I wonder if Bolton's fans think life is better outside the Premier League,i doubt it.

Everytime we've come up from the Championship to the PL the first thing I notice is the level of football and the intensity is just way higher.

A win in the PL for me feels so much better than a win in the Championship

Positives of League Two:

Can stand.
Can turn up five minutes before kick-off
Play mostly on Saturday
No need to book a ticket (I think)
More homely, less 'razamataz'
Not only 6 new teams each year but they include possibly 2 non-leaguers
More cup games
Big fish in small pond

HieronymousBoschHobs wrote:In an ideal world, the PL would be more like the championship. Maybe if the big six breakaway I'll get my wish.

If the six breakaway the money goes with it.

Regardless of what people think, regular games between Liverpool & Man U. will still attract global audiences far bigger than any Championship game ever could, even if they were played on a weekly basis.

In the PL we are on the tele a lot more, which is great for us exiles. Plus we get all that lovely lolly!!

claretnproud wrote:being in the prem is like dating a beautiful woman. Eventually you get used to it and take it for granted and its only when she is gone that you wish you had her back.

Superb analogy from Swiss Tony.

claretnproud wrote:being in the prem is like dating a beautiful woman. Eventually you get used to it and take it for granted and its only when she is gone that you wish you had her back.

On that basis I've never been in the Premier League unfortunately. Only non-league!

tiger76 wrote:I wonder if Bolton's fans think life is better outside the Premier League,i doubt it.

15000 Blackburn Woe-vers Fans don't miss it ( They all sit in "The Etihad" every other week )

Hipper wrote:On that basis I've never been in the Premier League unfortunately. Only non-league!

As many have said over my near 30 years of marriage, I'm punching above my weight with Mrs Clarets4me ! "

Captain Kirk, iluvmywife, timnoone and claretfern would, I'm sure, agree !!

HieronymousBoschHobs wrote:Nothing to do with our position, happy the club is in the top tier and I want us to stay there. BUT, I was watching Forest vs Leeds earlier and got to thinking.

Positives of the Championship:
- More of a level playing field
- More varied results (i.e. more upsets)
- 6 'new' teams each season (3 promoted, 3 relegated)
- Better fanbase (less glory hunters and plastics)
- Good quality, probably on a par with or better than the top tiers of some European nations

Negatives of the PL
- Fairly predictable outside the top 6
- Big games often fail to live up to expectations
- David vs Goliath encounters (e.g. ourselves or Huddersfield against the likes of Man City) turn into attack vs defence training routines
- So much at stake that many teams favour a more conservative style
- Football tourism, the 'brand', ludicrous figures involved in transfers, wages etc.
- Daft schedules (Saturday 3pm kickoffs increasingly rare)

You're right. I said this before - even last season when we were doing well. However, if you think the Championship is going to stay that way, forget it - it'll succumb to the money just as quick. The only chance would be when the big 6 leave English football (which will happen) if someone with foresight and 86 visionary clubs come up with some way of distributing the money that doesn't lock in success but also doesn't mean Macclesfield have as much chance as Everton of winning the league in three years (but gives Macclesfield the chance to build to that point).

Do I think that will happen? No - not ever. We're now (because it's our turn to be in good shape) just like Phil Gartside was when he was protecting Bolton's interests and we were on the outside looking in. Us and Everton and Leeds and Leicester and the rest will pull up new drawbridges, trying to protect what we have while simultaneously wondering how we could get a slice of the action the big 6 are getting...

This house doesn’t.

In Australia every EPL game is live ... but at least I’d get more sleep in the Championship!

SpringHillClaret wrote:This house doesn’t.

In Australia every EPL game is live ... but at least I’d get more sleep in the Championship!

Burnley in the Championship requires a $15 per month subscription to Bein Sports. My Optus plan gives me EPL for free, definitely prefer not having the additional subscription!

Clarets4me wrote:As many have said over my near 30 years of marriage, I'm punching above my weight with Mrs Clarets4me ! "

Captain Kirk, iluvmywife, timnoone and claretfern would, I'm sure, agree !!

Well, perhaps I need some 'overseas investment' - Russian or from the Philippines perhaps.

Hipper wrote:Well, perhaps I need some 'overseas investment' - Russian or from the Philippines perhaps.

I wouldn't be so sure, " Hipper ", I went as far as Rosegrove for mine !!

CHEWBACCA wrote:The Championship is fantastic but a serious lack of money.

I think it's the lack of money that makes it good. It doesn't need more money, that's what is killing the game, or will. It's the PL that has too much of it.

Lancasterclaret wrote:Without the PL money, we don't compete.

Without the PL money, we don't qualify for Europe

Without the PL money, we don't do a right lot

Without the PL money it would be a far more level playing field.
Without the PL money in general we would probably have MORE chance of qualifying for Europe because of the more level playing fiald.
Without the PL money we have done a hell of a lot in the past.

A negative for the PL is UTC posters reactions to defeats against the top clubs. In the PL you have to accept losing and if you get a run of difficult games it is going to happen. Reduce the expectation levels and look at it realistically, never going to happen whilst we have the experts who call for the manager after we've lost to Spurs , Arsenal and Everton.

Last night (yesterday in fact) was another example of the gulf between the top 6 and the bottom 6. Wonder if Up the Bluebirds message board posters are calling for Warnock or accepting Spurs are simply a lot better?

houseboy wrote:Without the PL money it would be a far more level playing field.
Without the PL money in general we would probably have MORE chance of qualifying for Europe because of the more level playing fiald.
Without the PL money we have done a hell of a lot in the past.

Without PL money, we would be nowhere near the Top Flight. We have very little Match Day Income and do not have a Benefactor. We’d be about where PNE are now.

gawthorpe_view wrote:There are no negatives being in the Premier League.
It's the place to be.

If you believe that all you have to look forward to at the start of every season is battling to survive as not a negative then I wouldn't like to live in your head. And that is what around 60% or more of clubs live with. Football is suposed to be about at least attempting to win things, even if that is doomed to failure, it is not about just surviving every year so that the club can earn more money to pay ever increasing fees and wages to players who will then hopefully get you survival but who then need to be replaced by even more expensive players. It's all very well having 200 million in the bank but it is all pointless if it doesn't buy you fck all.

The main negative in the PL (and it is a massive negative) is the money.

Bop wrote:Superb analogy from Swiss Tony.

CoolClaret wrote:Everytime we've come up from the Championship to the PL the first thing I notice is the level of football and the intensity is just way higher.

A win in the PL for me feels so much better than a win in the Championship

That's because it's very rare.

Lord Beamish wrote:Without PL money, we would be nowhere near the Top Flight. We have very little Match Day Income and do not have a Benefactor. We’d be about where PNE are now.

But the point is we would all be in the same boat so yes we may well be very much in the top flight. We managed it for 24 consecutive years prior to the PL and could do so again without the PL money if no-one else was getting it. Yes, there will always be the big guns but they too would have to survive on income. Part of the reason they have so much money now is because they keep finishing in the top 6 and playing in the Champions league every season, thus continuously adding to that wealth. If there were not that financial reward (other than the extra big games etc) they would also have a lot less money. Even the rich owners may be far fewer because there would be no PL wealth to attract them.
Given all this there would be a great deal less inflation in football, which outstrips anything in the real world (if the PL were a country it would be on it's knees with inflation) and so more clubs would be able to attract the better players, adding to the more level playing field.
Doesn't the fact that Burnley or Ipswich or Notts Forest or Derby or even Rovers will never again be Champions of England not bother you? I know it does me.

houseboy wrote:But the point is we would all be in the same boat so yes we may well be very much in the top flight. We managed it for 24 consecutive years prior to the PL and could do so again without the PL money if no-one else was getting it. Yes, there will always be the big guns but they too would have to survive on income. Part of the reason they have so much money now is because they keep finishing in the top 6 and playing in the Champions league every season, thus continuously adding to that wealth. If there were not that financial reward (other than the extra big games etc) they would also have a lot less money. Even the rich owners may be far fewer because there would be no PL wealth to attract them.
Given all this there would be a great deal less inflation in football, which outstrips anything in the real world (if the PL were a country it would be on it's knees with inflation) and so more clubs would be able to attract the better players, adding to the more level playing field.
Doesn't the fact that Burnley or Ipswich or Notts Forest or Derby or even Rovers will never again be Champions of England not bother you? I know it does me.

The writing was on the wall for us(and teams of our ilk) with the abolition of the Maximum Wage. Yes, we maintained 24 years of Top Flight Football, but once the spell was broken, we managed only 3 in 26 years after that.
Without the PL money, even if we were to fluke a promotion to the Big Time(like we did in ‘09) we’d have been goosed by the fact that we had no comparable Match Day Income to practically any of our peers, and no Benefactor to make up the shortfall. Without the PL money, we’d have had even less money to pay the meagre wages we were offering that season.
The continued inflow of PL cash has allowed us to steadily increase our wage bill over the last five years(but only in a sustainable way). Without it we’d be paying the lowest wages in the Prem(like now), but after Relegation we should have real financial difficulties in trying to compete in the division below. We’d likely sink like a stone;ink unlike the last time, when our PL money inflated our spending power for both wages and transfers for at least a couple of years. What a good job we didn’t need those couple of years to get back to the feeding trough.
As for your last point, I couldn’t give a stuff. It’s far beyond my power to change, so I really don’t worry about it.

houseboy wrote:The main negative in the PL (and it is a massive negative) is the money.

And where would we get the money to pay for our new disabled facilities, for example?

They won't come cheap!

Shock of being relegated back to the championship really hurts when you take your seat and the ground is half full.
The Championship is only exciting when you have a side good enough to challenge for promotion, its crap otherwise,with an empty turf.
Burnley fans soon walk when the results don't go their way

Does that mean if you were in the Championship you'd only want us to do 'okay' because you wouldn't want promotion?
Perhaps you'd wish for league 1 because there even less money...

I do not understand people like you. I hope we never leave the top division.

Unfortunately, we are well and truly on the Premier League Merry-go-round of Madness.

Relegation would mean that we would lose many of our best players (if not all of them), money would dry up and we'd end up like Horwich and even our nearest and dearest from down the M65.

The excitement of Championship football is better, probably because we are competing like-for-like but, I'd rather be watching Chelski and Spurs at t'Turf than Rotherham and Millwall.

P.S. Happy New Year

Lord Beamish wrote:The writing was on the wall for us(and teams of our ilk) with the abolition of the Maximum Wage. Yes, we maintained 24 years of Top Flight Football, but once the spell was broken, we managed only 3 in 26 years after that.
Without the PL money, even if we were to fluke a promotion to the Big Time(like we did in ‘09) we’d have been goosed by the fact that we had no comparable Match Day Income to practically any of our peers, and no Benefactor to make up the shortfall. Without the PL money, we’d have had even less money to pay the meagre wages we were offering that season.
The continued inflow of PL cash has allowed us to steadily increase our wage bill over the last five years(but only in a sustainable way). Without it we’d be paying the lowest wages in the Prem(like now), but after Relegation we should have real financial difficulties in trying to compete in the division below. We’d likely sink like a stone;ink unlike the last time, when our PL money inflated our spending power for both wages and transfers for at least a couple of years. What a good job we didn’t need those couple of years to get back to the feeding trough.
As for your last point, I couldn’t give a stuff. It’s far beyond my power to change, so I really don’t worry about it.

I think the max wage is a bit of a dead end because that happened quite a while before our relegation and subsequent temporary demise. The fact remains that without the stupid money on offer in the PL even the 'big' clubs would be forced to curb their spending leading to more affordable players and the inability of even the big clubs to have a squad whose reserves could probably finish in the top ten. Part of the problem is that the big six can buy players simply to stop other clubs having them and then do a bit of a squad rotate to keep said 'fringe' players happy. The only reason the wages and fees are at such stupidly unacceptable levels is because of the spending power of the top 6 clubs, if they were curbed by the loss of PL money the rest of us would benefit, it's an economic fact. Put in context the PL is bleeding football globally like a cancer in the sense that there are massive clubs, globally famous clubs, in South America for instance who cannot keep hold of players simply because a PL club can come and wave money at players and they are gone.
The sooner the European league is formed the better, I for one will not miss the likes of Arsenals divers, Chelseas glove wearing prima donnas, Uniteds preening arrogant fans and the like, they have zero interest for me. I like Burnley being in the top flight, that is good but I don't like the PL as a 'product' and I really don't care too much who wins it if it's not us.

Spijed wrote:And where would we get the money to pay for our new disabled facilities, for example?

They won't come cheap!

It would not take a fortune to adapt part of an existing stand. To build two new stands is fine but not entirely necessary if we didn't have the money. The fact is I have often wondered just how many disabled fans (and I mean physically disabled for that is what we are talking about) we have to justify building not one but two new stands. Disability comes in many forms (technically as a partially deaf person I am one) but not all disabled people require special treatment, some in fact despise it. As far as is humanly possible the idea is 'normalisation', not segregation.
What we are doing is admirable, I agree, but if we couldn't then there would be other far cheaper ways to include disabled people.

If we were to be eternally in the Championship we would end up bitter and twisted like Preston fans

Why would we want to be somewhere between 21st and 44th in the order of league merit?

I was at the city ground yesterday and it was a great game.Both teams would struggle in the prem with the players on the pitch yesterday.
Best part of the game was when the forest fans started singing Leeds are falling apart again to to the tune of love will tear you apart again.
Forest fans were far from happy when Leeds supporters started singing Brian Clough is a W**ker

houseboy wrote:I think the max wage is a bit of a dead end because that happened quite a while before our relegation and subsequent temporary demise. The fact remains that without the stupid money on offer in the PL even the 'big' clubs would be forced to curb their spending leading to more affordable players and the inability of even the big clubs to have a squad whose reserves could probably finish in the top ten. Part of the problem is that the big six can buy players simply to stop other clubs having them and then do a bit of a squad rotate to keep said 'fringe' players happy. The only reason the wages and fees are at such stupidly unacceptable levels is because of the spending power of the top 6 clubs, if they were curbed by the loss of PL money the rest of us would benefit, it's an economic fact. Put in context the PL is bleeding football globally like a cancer in the sense that there are massive clubs, globally famous clubs, in South America for instance who cannot keep hold of players simply because a PL club can come and wave money at players and they are gone.
The sooner the European league is formed the better, I for one will not miss the likes of Arsenals divers, Chelseas glove wearing prima donnas, Uniteds preening arrogant fans and the like, they have zero interest for me. I like Burnley being in the top flight, that is good but I don't like the PL as a 'product' and I really don't care too much who wins it if it's not us.

It wasn't just the maximum wage though. In those years clubs shared the gate money. Then it was changed so the home club kept it all. You can imagine that the difference in our income compared to Man Utd would have increased considerably.

Television money at the time was also shared around (including the lower divisions) but as the potential of that increased rapidly, the five 'big' clubs (at the time) wanted a bigger cut, and they got it with the formation of the Premier League. The Premier League is not about clubs like us. It is about the top six now and we are just fillers of little consequence. Our job is to extract as much of these riches whilst we can to improve all the club, including its facilities. The training ground has been done. I imagine the next step would be the two old stands.

As in life it seems, the rich get richer.

Hipper wrote:It wasn't just the maximum wage though. In those years clubs shared the gate money. Then it was changed so the home club kept it all. You can imagine that the difference in our income compared to Man Utd would have increased considerably.

Television money at the time was also shared around (including the lower divisions) but as the potential of that increased rapidly, the five 'big' clubs (at the time) wanted a bigger cut, and they got it with the formation of the Premier League. The Premier League is not about clubs like us. It is about the top six now and we are just fillers of little consequence. Our job is to extract as much of these riches whilst we can to improve all the club, including its facilities. The training ground has been done. I imagine the next step would be the two old stands.

As in life it seems, the rich get richer.

Pretty spot on mate.

The standard of football in the Championship seems lower this season. Granted that Derby enjoy an annual bottle-fest but the fact they are still relatively comfortably a top six side despite indifferent form recently suggests a mediocre, at best, league to me.