Offer Paul Heckingbottom and Sean Dyche a guaranteed 17th-place finish in the Premier League right now and they would immediately snap your hand off. So too the Sheffield United and Everton directors keeping an eye on the accounts.
And who can blame them? To revive former Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon’s infamous remark from 2005, the reality of the Premier League today is that the winner will come from ‘a small group of one’.
Two or three clubs will fight to finish second to Manchester City, and three or four more will dream of finishing fourth.