Member

The kind of progress that has been seen and which is widely recognised, with the Premier League being the most successful league in Europe and the Championship being the sixth most successful, is never completely linear. There are spurts of success and there are setbacks, inevitably. Without occasional failures, there are no big successes. We all know that organisations learn more from the things that are tried but do not work than from those that are tried and do work. Of course, there have been setbacks; of course, there have been clubs that have gone into administration. Overwhelmingly, those clubs have come out of administration. Only three clubs have gone into liquidation, but all of them have been resurrected and are back in the football leagues and doing well. A number of the clubs that went into administration—which is generally, one hopes, only a temporary thing—have then risen from that rebirth into the Premier League, the top level of the pyramid.