What would be worse than the Premier League? Two Premier Leagues.

That’s a joke by the way. But with a fresh wave of talk about a Premier League 2 hitting the airwaves, news columns and socials as I write this, it’s worth thinking about.

After Leicester’s latest defeat without scoring, added to Southampton’s speediest-ever relegation being confirmed at the weekend and with Ipswich almost certain to join them, it has re-opened the debate (as if it ever went away) about the chasm between the top two leagues.

BBC’s Sport department, true to form as they seem to write anything these days provided it has some link – however tenuous – to football, weighed in with the usual articles that somehow always found a way of telling us how many clubs have been relegated the season after winning promotion from the EFL (it’s 50% in the last ten years, 42% in the last fifteen, if you’re interested).

But that, and they, are completely missing the point. It’s not really that important how often it has happened. Preston North End once went a whole season unbeaten. Bury won the FA Cup. Manchester United used to qualify for the Champions League. It's not impossible, but it's not likely any will happen again. What is important is how often it will happen in future. And the way it’s going, in five to ten years from now the number will be 100%, or as near as damn it.

But that tiny percentage (if there is one), the exception that proves the rule, is also the problem. Because while clubs think it’s possible to survive, they will try to make it there regardless – literally in some cases – and when they find it’s really not, then the damage might have already been done and a bigger decline set in. For every club that does make it, many more go the other way, and it doesn’t always end back in the Championship. For some, the decline takes them into the lower leagues (although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing) first.

But we’re still looking back to predict the future. Still showcasing the handful of clubs that break the mould, or at least did. It’s questionable whether they would do so if they were coming up this season, or next. Although I’m sure Leeds, Burnley and Sheffield United will think otherwise.

Brentford have a tremendously sound model, amazing recruitment and a brilliant manager which has helped them to establish themselves. Brighton were doing the same kind of things well before then. Fulham and Bournemouth yo-yo’d a little but also got themselves some unbelievably good managers at just the right time to kick-on. This is in no way to belittle any of the achievements of these clubs, but they got their timing absolutely spot on; doing something when it was still just about possible.

And, of course, there is Nottingham Forest. From hanging on by the skin of their teeth last term, they’re now on course for a top five finish and a dabble in the Champions League under Nuno (another fantastic appointment). Next year they could be welcoming Barcelona, Benfica, Bayern Munich and er, Basel, to the City Ground. And that’s incredible, especially when you consider they were pitted against Huddersfield Town in a play-off final in May 2022, and where a reversal of the 1-0 score line might have led to a very different future. For both teams.

It's Forest that clubs will continue to look at though. If they can do it, so can we. And they’re right in a way. A meritocracy system means there is always a possibility. But how much of one?

The reason a second Premier League is even mooted is because the gap is deemed to be too big (it is) and getting bigger every season. But because the financial disparity between the leagues is so massive, all clubs want to get to the top table, even if only for a season. For an owner of a Championship club it’s not a lottery win, it’s Euromillions. After weeks and weeks of rollovers. Who’d say no to that?

And when they get there, they might just be the one. After all, the survival tally – the number of points needed to stay up – is getting  ever smaller. So that increases their chances, right? In theory yes, but in reality, go check the league table. Last season, 26 points and a decent goal-difference would have kept you up. This season, it could be even less (for comparison, Newcastle went down with 37 points ten years ago, and the average is around 33 points since then but that already feels like a different era).

But what if one of the clubs who perpetually occupy the bottom half have a bad year? They might, but even a bad year these days still nets significantly more points than a promoted team can muster.

Or what if we spent hundreds of millions on new players? Many have tried and failed. Forest took a hell of a risk bringing in a whole new squad and got away with it, and even then they had to swerve outside of the financial rules to do so. And when clubs point and say ‘what about Forest?’ as a form of justification for spending similar amounts, notice they never say ‘what about Southampton?’.

Of course, it also fails to address what this does to the EFL, and the Championship in particular, which has long enjoyed a reputation as the second-best league in the world and since VAR came in, the unofficial best one.

If the clubs that are relegated from the PL are the same three that went up, only much richer, won’t this increasingly distort the balance and mean that – eventually – the same clubs will always be the ones vying for the top spots every year, and leaving everyone else to fight for the final play-off spots? We’re actually not far from that now.

Is that what we want? Most importantly, for us anyway; is that what the fans want?

Do they want to enjoy a cracking season of traveling home and away winning lots of games, to then attend less games and lose them all? Judging by the boos and early walkouts at all three promoted clubs this season, maybe not.

I heard someone say – jokingly, I think – that the best solution would be to make promotion to the Premier League optional at the end of the season. ‘Thanks, but I think we’ll skip it this year and stay where we are.’

It’s probably not going to fly though. And fans of the clubs concerned will just have to put up with the boom and bust in the short term.

But we need better options going forward, surely?

A second PL is simply papering over the cracks. What if the gap is still too big? What happens if – when! – it starts to get wider? And does it resolve the jump that’s needed from either the EFL to the PL2, or from PL2 to PL1?

My guess is it won't. It might make a few more fairly rich clubs a lot richer, a few less rich clubs even worse off and not impact the ones at the top very much at all. But fix the issue? Is it even fixable?

The option that surely can’t be left on the table is to stay as we are. As mentioned, if they sleep walk through the next few seasons of widening gaps, and smaller points tallies, it might be too late to reverse the damage.

You hope, maybe expect, that someone has this in hand. As Bruce Willis said of NASA in the film Armageddon, as a planet-killing asteroid headed Earth’s way, ‘there must be a room full of people just sitting there, thinking this stuff up’ and I – maybe naively – think that some clever sod(s) will see the imminent dangers and send up a nuke to stop it before the Best league in the world becomes the Best closed league in the world, or is no longer a good league at all.

Or maybe they, like some clubs, think they might just be the one to beat the odds this time.