A blueprint to stave off the fear of relegation
Written by Elizabeth Barnard on 30th September 2024
The Premier League has not always been a happy hunting ground for Fulham – even in recent times, we can recall the days of nine home goals (2020/21 – lockdown was rough anyway, but having to watch Fulham every week really made it worse) and losing a game 2-1 without the victors having a shot on target (2018/19, specifically away at Burnley).
Being promoted in 2022 under Marco Silva, things felt different – after all, we’d won the Championship at a canter, under a manager that the fans adored. Even now, after two successful seasons in the top flight, there is still the threat of us doing something, well, Fulhamish, and tumbling back down to the second tier.
The question becomes: What can I, a powerless fan, do to stave this off? Enjoy watching my team and avoid worrying about an unlikely drop? Not really my style, so I created a survival checklist: every league fixture we play is included, and labelled with win/loss/draw. Match those results, and we make it to a respectable, if underwhelming, 37 points, which would have been enough to stay up in the last eight seasons.
This chart follows the idea that, to stay up, a team can have a 50:25:25 split in their results of loss:draw:win. All the wins can come at home, against bottom half teams. Draws can come against those better teams at home – those challenging for Europe like Brighton or Newcastle – and the worst teams away from home. Then we can afford to lose the rest, with no worries about getting turned over at the Etihad, or falling to our traditional loss at St James’s Park.
There are significant flaws with this system, of course. I have to predict the finishing position of every team in the league before the first ball is kicked, which can lead to some skewed results (who could have predicted Newcastle’s considerable rise in 2022/23, or Brentford’s dramatic drop in 2023/24?). Home advantage factors into the chart, but maybe too much. Does a 0-2 home loss against a catastrophically bad Burnley side in December really derail our entire season? Perhaps not. This kind of nuance is lost.
At the end of September, it’s clear that we’ve had a good start to the season, but with a comfortable fixture list. How far have we outperformed expectations? Well…
It’s a relief to know we’re outperforming relegation form, and can set our sights slightly further up the table. For the rest of October, following this chart, we’ve got difficult enough fixtures that we don’t need to get a single point – but I think we’ll all be feeling a bit wobbly if that’s the case.
