Fulham and Bournemouth braced for a season scrapping for Premier League survival

“We’re way short of where we need to be,” said Scott Parker, the manager of Bournemouth, three days before beginning a Premier League season as one of the three new clubs in the division. “We can’t be competitive,” echoed Marco Silva, his counterpart at Fulham, last season’s Championship winners.

August gloominess among those fresh to football’s most watched domestic competition is routine. The precedents for promoted sides to be immediately relegated are ominous. Parker and Silva know that only too clearly.

Two of Silva’s previous stints in the division have finished with his employers sitting 18th in the 20-team table. Parker, 41, began his senior managerial career at Fulham, appointed as the third different manager of a troubled season that followed their 2018 promotion.

Fulham went straight back down; Parker guided them straight back up; he then oversaw immediate relegation. Fulham would be the definition of a ‘yo-yo’ club if there weren’t so many other candidates to epitomise the perilous gap between even the most elevated standards in English football’s second tier and the heightened demands of the top flight.

Norwich City have gone up each of the last two times Fulham have gone down, and been relegated in the two Mays Fulham have been promoted. Bournemouth’s four-year record includes just one pause in a hectic zig-zag between divisions. They were relegated from the Premier League in 2020.

A tendency among club executives seeking solutions to all the instability, the strains on financial planning that perpetually switching between divisions with vastly different rewards is to identify specialist managers.

Parker is one: he knows only the zone that covers the lower end of the Premier League and the upper reaches of