Is Premier League relegation really the disaster we all consider it to be?

Ahead of the 2017/18 season, 46 of the 72 teams (64%) to have been relegated from the Premier League have eventually returned to the top flight, with the average club needing three seasons to make their return to the big-time.

There are 21 occasions of teams returning at the first time of asking, most recently in 2015/16 when Newcastle came up as runners-up behind Brighton & Hove Albion.

However, things are not always so rosy, with QPR spending 15 years in the wilderness following their relegation in 1995/96, including a spell in the third tier, before securing promotion to the Premier League at the end of the 2010/11 campaign.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other sides that haven endured long spells outside of the top flight following relegations, including: Sheffield United (12 seasons), Leicester (10), Norwich (nine), Crystal Palace, Watford (both eight), Middlebrough and Southampton (both eight). 

That's not to mention the sides who don't come back, which account for some 26 of the 72 teams to have dropped through the Premier League trapdoor (36%).

- So, what's the best way to bounce back? - 

Whilst it had previously been accepted that using your parachute payments to launch an assault on the upper echelons of the Champions with a squad full of second-division stars was the best way to secure a rapid return, the struggles of the likes of Aston Villa and Middlesbrough in the last couple of years have proven that money spent is no guarantee of success.

Instead, perhaps it is Sean Dyche's Burnley who provide us with the best example. Dyche has never been a man to assemble a team full of stars and prima donnas, that approach helped the 'Clarets' as they only lost Kieran Trippier and Danny Ings following relegation in 2014/15.

Whilst the rest of the Premier League vultures cirlced, Burnley were able to keep their squad together, adding only Matthew Lowton and Andre Gray as direct replacements for significant fees and picking up Joey Barton on a free as they opted for evolution rather than revolution.

James Tarkowski, who has arguably been Burnley's stand-out performer this season, was then brought on board in January to help the club over the line as they defied one of the tightest championship promotion battles of recent years to secure a return to the promised land as champions.

This approach of adding solid, season performers who bring little or no risk has been one that Dyche has stuck to and it worked wonders. However, the club deserve just as much credit for sticking by their man in the first place. These days, it seems almost obligatory for clubs to sack their managers following a relegation, regardless of performances over the course of the season, but Burnley bucked the trend, sticking by their man and giving him the chance to make amends.

There is plenty of logic in that thinking from the club, in Dyche's case, this was a man who had brought his side up just a year earlier with largely the same group of players and who was well-versed in the cut and thrust of second-division football.

However, the Burnley example may well be an isolted case and just as we should not assume that shipping in a load of Portuguese talent (Wolves) is a guarantee of success or that raiding Chelsea for loanees (Hull) is a one-way ticket to failure it is also impossible to say that simply keeping the faith is the holy grail for promotion-seeking sides.

There is no "one size fits all" approach to chasing promotion, with it being very much a case of "horses for courses".