The play-off final was the best day anyone at Hallowgate could remember. Fourteen hundred through the gate, a coach party that needed three coaches, and a bar that ran out of everything by seven o'clock. The club went up to Step 2 for the first time in its history.
The ground grading letter arrived eleven days later.
This is the part of promotion that nobody puts on a flag. Step 2 requires a higher facility standard than Step 3: more covered accommodation, more seats, floodlights to a higher lux, hard standing on all four sides, a designated media area. Some of it Hallowgate already had. The seats and the floodlights they did not.
The arithmetic of going up
Promotion added, in round numbers, about forty thousand pounds to the club's annual costs before a single ball was kicked.
The away trips are the obvious one. At Step 3 the furthest journey was ninety minutes. At Step 2, in a division that stretches across the north of England and into the midlands, the club now runs four trips a season of four hours or more. That is a coach, a driver, a meal stop and, twice a season, an overnight stay. The travel budget roughly doubled.
Then the squad. A Step 2 squad is not a Step 3 squad with a better haircut. The players who got the club promoted were on Step 3 money, and half of them were offered more elsewhere within a fortnight of the final. The club kept most of them by paying more, which is the correct decision and also an expensive one.
Then the fixed costs that nobody mentions: a physio at every game rather than every other, an extra steward because the ground grade requires it, a higher insurance premium, and a league fee that went up.
Against all of that, the increase in central income was nil. There is no central distribution at Step 2. There is no central distribution at Step 3 either. The only thing that changed on the income side was the gate, which went up by about a hundred and fifty a game, and the bar, which did well.
The good season that made it worse
Hallowgate finished eleventh, which for a promoted club is a fine season. They also had a cup run — three rounds, a plum home tie, a full ground and a payout that covered the floodlight upgrade almost exactly.
The committee will tell you, quietly, that the cup run is the problem. It filled a hole that should not have needed filling, and it will not happen again next year. You cannot budget for a cup run. You cannot write "hopefully a plum tie" in the column where the money is supposed to go. And a club that balances its books on a cup run is a club that is one bad first-round draw from a crisis.
What would have made the difference
A promoted club knows a year in advance that it might go up. What it cannot know is whether it can afford to.
Under our model, a Step 2 club would receive around eighty-two thousand pounds a season, and a Step 3 club around forty-one thousand. The step up in central income would be about forty-one thousand pounds — which is, near enough, what promotion actually costs.
That is not a coincidence in the model; it is the reason the model weights higher steps more heavily. The costs of the pyramid step up as you climb it. At the moment the income does not step up at all until you reach the EFL, at which point it steps up enormously. Everything below that line is a series of cliffs a club climbs at its own expense.
Everyone congratulated us. Then the ground grading letter arrived.
Hallowgate stayed up. The floodlights are excellent.