Explore the seasons ↘︎
Football / The numbers department 2006/07 — 2025/26

THE PROMOTION TRAP20 Years of Premier League Survival

Promotion is the beginning.
Survival is another story.

Twenty seasons. Sixty promoted teams. Follow their climb—and fall—through the Premier League table, then see what happened a year later.

Analysis by Fine Margins Sources & methodology ↗︎
28/60

Went straight back down.

46.7% were relegated in their first Premier League season after promotion.

7/30

The second year caught them.

23.3% of survivors with a completed second season were relegated a year later.

2years

All three came straight back.

Every promoted club was relegated in both 2023/24 and 2024/25.

01 / Follow a season

Three teams. Thirty-eight games.

Higher on the chart means higher in the league.

Relegation places: 18–20Position after each team’s game · How this is calculated
Hover, tap, or use the slider.

Source match results for this season (.csv) ↗︎

Points are end-of-day positions after each club’s own game; the three dates may differ. Game 38 shows the final table. Dashed lines ended in relegation. Equal points, goal difference and goals scored share a rank.

Read the selected season as a table
02 / The stories inside the numbers

Staying up isn’t the whole story.

The second-season trap

Eighth. Then eighteenth.

Reading finished eighth with 55 points in 2006/07. The next season they went down in 18th. Birmingham and Sheffield United also followed top-half finishes with second-year relegation.

The other extreme

Survivors. Then champions.

Leicester finished 14th with 41 points in 2014/15. A year later they were champions with 81. Their first Premier League season back was an escape; their second was a title.

The lowest return

Eleven points. One win.

Derby’s 2007/08 campaign produced one win, eight draws and 29 defeats. Their 11 points are the lowest total among all 60 promoted campaigns in this study.

The highest finish

Seventh, twice.

Wolves in 2018/19 and Sunderland in 2025/26 share the best finishing position in this window. Leeds earned the most points: 59 in 2020/21, but finished ninth.

03 / The year after

A place in the league. For how long?

Each row is one promotion group. Each cell is a club, coloured by what happened across its first two Premier League seasons.

Down in year oneDown in year twoSurvived bothYear two incomplete

Leeds and Sunderland’s second season is 2026/27 and remains incomplete. Clubs relegated in year one are not included in the second-year relegation rate. Repeated promotions count as separate campaigns.

The seven second-season relegations
04 / The complete picture

Every promotion. Every path.

The same 1–20 scale in every chart. The shaded strip is the bottom three. Select a season to explore its individual games above.

05 / Behind the charts

What was counted. How it was counted.

The sample

The 20 completed seasons from 2006/07 to 2025/26: 60 promotion campaigns across 32 distinct clubs. A promoted club is present in that season’s Premier League results but absent from the preceding season. The 2005/06 season supplies that baseline.

Rebuilding the table

The table is reconstructed from 7,600 match results, awarding three points for a win and one for a draw. All matches on the same date are processed together. Positions use points, goal difference, then goals scored. Exact ties share a rank; alphabetical order does not break sporting ties.

The x-axis is each club’s own games played, not official matchweek. Rival clubs may have games in hand. Intermediate points show the end-of-date table after that club’s match; the 38th point is the completed season table, including any delayed final fixtures. Lines connect these snapshots; they do not show every intervening table change.

Deductions and follow-up

Portsmouth’s nine-point deduction is applied from 17 March 2010. In 2023/24, Everton’s deduction is ten points from 17 November, six from 26 February, and eight from 8 April; Nottingham Forest’s four-point deduction applies from 18 March. These affect promoted clubs’ relative positions.

“Down in year two” means a club survived its promotion season, then finished 18th–20th in the immediately following season. Outcomes stop at 2025/26. The two surviving clubs from the 2025/26 cohort are excluded from the second-year denominator.

Sources

Take the data

60-team summary (.csv) ↓︎2,280 position snapshots (.csv) ↓︎Complete analysis (.json) ↓︎

The charts and findings are calculated by Fine Margins from the linked results, rather than quoted from a published analysis. This is a descriptive study, not a forecast.