If they get relegated, I think there's a very good chance their time as a top 6 club is over.
They aren't just going to bounce back in a year and be back to normal. They'll lose out on £150m TV money even including the parachute payments, matchday revenue will probably half, that's another £40m, The press is already full of stories of the sponsors leaving and they've got £280m net transfer debt.
Newcastle bounced back in 2009 because Ashley injected aobut 60% of their revenue from the previous year into the club to keep them operating as a PL club in the championship. For ENIC to do that would require about £400m, and it would break PSR.
I don't think anyone sees ENIC funding that, so they'd be looking at selling off 75% of the squad IMO between selling the valuable assets to cover their losses and offloading the highest earners.
Then they'll be replacing those players with bottom end of the PL players at best.
I still think they'd probably come back up straight away, but the £200m/year revenue gap between them at the bottom of the big 6 and Newcastle/Villa trying to catch up would be wiped out and they'd be saddled with a squad of midtable players it'd take years to replace with ones as good as they have today.
They aren't just going to bounce back in a year and be back to normal. They'll lose out on £150m TV money even including the parachute payments, matchday revenue will probably half, that's another £40m, The press is already full of stories of the sponsors leaving and they've got £280m net transfer debt.
Newcastle bounced back in 2009 because Ashley injected aobut 60% of their revenue from the previous year into the club to keep them operating as a PL club in the championship. For ENIC to do that would require about £400m, and it would break PSR.
I don't think anyone sees ENIC funding that, so they'd be looking at selling off 75% of the squad IMO between selling the valuable assets to cover their losses and offloading the highest earners.
Then they'll be replacing those players with bottom end of the PL players at best.
I still think they'd probably come back up straight away, but the £200m/year revenue gap between them at the bottom of the big 6 and Newcastle/Villa trying to catch up would be wiped out and they'd be saddled with a squad of midtable players it'd take years to replace with ones as good as they have today.