What are the risks and trade-offs of going for it after a promotion like Sunderland and Paris FC?

Gaining promotion to the Premier League in England or Ligue 1 in France is one of the great achievements available to a football club. Beyond the thrill of competing at the highest level the game offers, it transforms the club’s economics — on both sides of the ledger. Earning potential steps up immediately; so do the expense commitments required to compete.

Competition for survival is cutthroat. Fielding a squad fit for Tier 1 in the first season after promotion is both expensive and difficult, and most newly promoted clubs — whatever their effort — fall right back down to Tier 2 after one season. Hasty spending in search of better fortunes often is not enough to change a club’s fate, and only adds to the pain when the drop comes anyway. At the same time, one number predicts a club’s fate better than any other: its squad wages. The model puts figures on exactly that relationship.

The gradient is steep. At relegation-level wages the first season back is worse than a coin flip — three drops in every five; at top-half wages the odds fall to one in twenty.

From the 2025-26 season’s major storylines across the Big 5 leagues, we see two clubs in exactly this position who chose to spend up. Sunderland answered promotion with the largest ever gross transfer spend made by a newly promoted Premier League club. Paris FC matched this ambition, spending the 5th most in the entire Ligue 1 table in the transfer market, and with the top net outlay, in their first promoted season. But the transfer fees are the one-time part of the investment. What does the model tell us about the increased annual squad wages in going from relegation-level wages to top-half wages?

This is the recurring commitment underneath the transfer headlines — roughly €80M a year in England and €24M in France, carried every season the club intends to hold its position.

And all of that investment is made to avoid one outcome: relegation. The model can quantify how much of a financial hit that would be, should it occur — running scenarios across the two seasons that follow, through every combination of tiers the club could occupy in each — staying up throughout, dropping and returning, returning and dropping again, or spending both years in Tier 2. Every parachute and solidarity mechanism that comes into play is included automatically, when and where each country’s rules stipulate them.

Read on its own, the table says something counterintuitive: across Years 2 and 3, the more time the club spends in Tier 2, the better its pre-transfer net — €123.5M at the top of the England column, against a €17.9M loss for staying up throughout. That is the cost of competing showing up honestly. A top-half squad in Tier 1 is the most expensive thing on this page, while a season in Tier 2 arrives with a collapsed wage bill and parachute payments still flowing.

It is also why two years of P&L is the wrong lens to judge the decision on. Clubs do not spend to win a cash comparison over two seasons; they spend to stay in Tier 1, because Tier 1 is what sets both the club’s annual earning potential and what the club is worth. The damage of relegation is not the two years that follow it — it is not coming back.

If it works, the club enjoys yet another season of the prestige and revenues of competing at the top level. And as we saw in the 2024-25 season, if it goes really well, the club can even begin to push for the European Cups — an outcome that would solidify the club’s tenure in Tier 1 further still, and bring new revenues with it. The model prices each rung of that ladder.

A Europa League season alone returns €45.7M in the Sunderland scenario and €18.7M in Paris FC’s — revenue that starts paying back the very wage step that made survival likely in the first place.

Of the 13 clubs promoted into the Big 5 leagues for the 2025-26 season, five were relegated right back down. Seven, including Paris FC, stayed up in mid-table. And one — Sunderland — stayed up and qualified for the Europa League. That distribution shows the uncertainty involved with choosing any path. But in this case, the on-field execution validated the investment commitments of both Sunderland and Paris FC.