Mitrovic, Knockaert, Gayle: 11 Championship stars who struggled in the Premier League

It doesn’t matter how well you perform in the Championship. To many fans who don’t watch the English second tier, those performances mean nothing until they’re replicated in the Premier League.

While that is a pretty narrow minded outlook, there is a hidden truth underneath it. Not every player who rips it up in the Championship is capable of translating those heroic performances to the top flight. It’s an entirely different beast.

The most unassuming are more likely to make the leap from Championship to Premier League with greater success, perhaps because the focus isn’t on them to hit the ground running and deliver.

Be it impressing in the Championship and being poached by a Premier League side, or leading the charge and taking a team up to the top flight, it doesn’t always work out as planned after reaching the summit of English football.

That results in a strange grey area having emerged over time. A grey area that sees a bunch of players fall into the endlessly frustrating gap of ‘too good for the Championship, not good enough for the Premier League’.

Be it a yard of pace, a shot that isn’t quite hard enough, or a step or two of movement for those marginal gains of space on the pitch, it’s these intricacies that can condemn players to a life stuck in the train station of nowhere, between Championship and Premier League, waiting for the trainman to grant them access to top flight stardom.

Right, dodgy analogy from The Matrix done. GIVEMESPORT has compiled a list of 11 unlucky Championship ballers who just couldn’t cut the mustard in the Premier League, despite tearing up the second tier.

Famed for his Mankind-inspired celebration and his exploits as Sheffield United talisman, Sharp is the all-time top scorer in the