Premiership-Football League gulf

Since its split with the Football League, many established clubs in the Premier League have managed to distance themselves from their counterparts in lower leagues. Owing in large part to the disparity in revenue from television rights between the leagues,[40] many newly promoted teams have found it difficult to avoid relegation in their first season in the Premier League. In every season except 2001–02 at least one Premier League newcomer has been relegated back to the Football League. In 1997–98 all three promoted clubs were relegated at the end of the season.

The Premier League distributes a small portion of its television revenue to clubs that are relegated from the league in the form of "parachute payments". Starting with the 2006–07 season, these payments are in the amount of £6.5 million over the club's first two seasons in lower leagues.[40] Though designed to help teams adjust to the loss of television revenues (the average Premier League team receives £28 million while the average Football League Championship club receives £1 million[40]), critics maintain that the payments actually widen the gap between teams that have reached the Premiership and those that have not,[41] leading to the common occurrence of teams "bouncing back" soon after their relegation. If a team has "bounced back", they are generally said to have bouncebackability, a term commonly used by football fans and coined by the then Crystal Palace manager Iain Dowie. The word achieved high coverage due to shows like SoccerAM and subsequently made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. The term is also used in the circumstance where a team may lose one or two games and then demonstrate 'bouncebackability' by winning subsequently. Some teams get promoted and relegated so often they are referred to as "yo-yo" teams.