Some dictionaries define a league as "an association of sporting clubs that organises matches between member teams of a similar standard". If this is the case then the Premier League offends the Trades Descriptions Act on an annual basis. Certainly the patient, long-suffering supporters of Derby County would have taken some persuading last season that they were watching an even contest.
Had Derby been a horse they would have been put down before Christmas. Apparently the laws of humanity do not apply to rams. As it was their fans must have felt like aficionados turning up on a regular basis to support the bull, and last season the poor beast won only once and then against the tinpot toreadors of Newcastle United.
Derby were relegated with a record low number of Premier League points, 11, four fewer than Sunderland managed when they went down two seasons earlier. At this rate the team finishing bottom will soon fail to reach double figures and the fate of Stoke City and Hull City during the coming season may attract morbid interest. Neither would appear to have as much chance of staying up as a more accomplished West Bromwich Albion side.
Since the Premier League broke away from the Football League in 1992 there has been only one season when all three of the promoted teams survived: Fulham, Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers in 2001-02. But if life for the promoted clubs has been tough for 16 years the signs are that the task has become so demanding that the sort of weary fatalism that overtook Derby before last season was half over will become the norm as more teams find they are completely out of their depth in the higher division.
At least this season's trio can console themselves with the thought that they will have to plumb extraordinary depths to match Derby's descent. Derby, remember, did not score an away goal until the first week in December and that, incongruously, was at Manchester United. Derby changed their manager and new owners took over at Pride Park promising to build the club into "a powerful worldwide brand". Well they are Americans after all.
Derby flopped primarily because they could not defend against even the most mundane Premier League attacks. From the start they leaked goals while Kenny Miller, their lone striker, peered vainly back towards his own penalty area hoping that something positive would find its way out of the shambles.
Neither Billy Davies, who had brought Derby up through the play-offs, nor Paul Jewell, who took over the team mid-season, could pull the side out of its dive. So Stoke's Tony Pulis and Hull's Phil Brown will harbour few illusions about the sort of season that awaits them. Yet it is in the Premier League's interest that they, along with Tony Mowbray at West Bromwich, make a decent fist of it.
Too often the promoted teams are merely providing cannon fodder for the leading sides and easy points for other teams seeking only safety. There was a time when it was possible to argue that the top half of the old Second Division could hold its own in the old First. Since the second world war Tottenham Hotspur, Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest have all won the league the season after winning promotion.
More recently, two years after winning the promotion play-offs, Blackburn finished runners-up in the Premier League and won it the following season. True they were backed by Jack Walker's millions although nowhere near the amounts now swirling about at the top of the table.
Much then is against a club coming into the Premier League for the first time. West Bromwich have been there twice since the turn of the century and would seem to be better equipped to hang around for a while than they were previously. Stoke, on the other hand, last experienced life at the top between 1979 and 1985. And Hull have never before played at this level.
Long gone are the days when Tony Waddington, not so much a manager as an impresario, could build a good-looking Stoke team with such chips off distinguished blocks as Jimmy McIlroy, Dennis Viollet and Peter Dobing. The wages demanded by the modern equivalents put such talents beyond Stoke's reach.
The Hull team of Ken Houghton, Chris Chilton and Ken Wagstaff, which pressed for promotion in the Sixties, would have held their own in the First Division more easily than Brown's side will survive in the Premier League. Hull, moreover, have shared the disadvantage of those who come up via the play-offs because their entry into the summer transfer market is of necessity delayed by nearly a month so they do not get first pickings. At least an old Derby man, Craig Fagan, should be able to tell them where they are going wrong.
Winning promotion to the Premier League guarantees a club a minimum of £60m over three years even if they do go straight back down: £35m from TV and sponsorships plus two years' parachute payments of £12m. The wise club will budget accordingly and not mortgage its future on a hopeless cause.
Yet the Premier League, already depressingly predictable at the top, urgently needs a team to pick up the baton of originality from Reading and before them Ipswich. West Bromwich may be the side this time. Just so long as Stoke or Hull do not become punchbags in the manner of poor, desperate Derby.
