Is the gulf between the Championship and Premier League really as wide as everyone says?

Chris Coleman: Yes, it is big. The money in the Premier League is staggering and only getting bigger. The Championship is getting bigger also but the gap is massive. Unless teams invest a significant amount of money in an intelligent way they’re going to come back down. Normally they do invest, come down a year or two after, then they’re in trouble financially. It is recognised without a shadow of a doubt as the best league in the world, the strongest and most prestigious. So the gap’s getting bigger.

Steve Coppell: By definition it has to be even farther apart. If you looked at the Premiership at the start of this season you could more or less write down where everyone’s going to be at the end with one or two, three or four, variations. That’s based on their respective income levels. That can only be broken by benevolent millionaires putting fortunes into their respective clubs and not wanting a financial return, just a glory return.

Given Premiership income through TV and Championship income through TV, the gap has to get bigger. We just had a number of things work in our favour in our first Premiership season. Increasingly, they’re voting to make the advantage to the bigger teams. The big teams dictate the policies of the Premiership because they have the power of the television audience. They’re not going to vote for equality, they’re going to vote for whatever gives them an advantage. Marginal it may be, but marginal over a number of years gives them a huge advantage, which is what they have at the moment.

Adrian Boothroyd: There’s a big divide. If you can hang in there for two or three years, it can give you the wealth to go and plan for a further three, four or five years - the important thing is to get up and stay up, or else come back down then come straight back up within your parachute payments. If you don’t, you run the risk of having to cut your cloth accordingly, having to sell your players. Yo-yo clubs know that they are always going to have their best players taken if they go down. It’s important to invest that money well in an academy or a recruitment system.

Without massive investment, can a club like yours ever be more than a yo-yo club?

Coleman: Fulham have done it, and stayed in the Premier League being careful what they spent, investing in the right areas. It's possible, if the club is run the right way, to stay in the Premier League. The problem is, when you’re in the Premier League for two or three or four years, sometimes people get a bit carried away and they get unrealistic and they always want a bit more and that’s when it gets dangerous.

A club like Coventry, as long as you’re realistic and the money’s spent wisely, it’s possible to stay in the Premier League. If you're in the top ten you’ve had a fantastic season. If you’re extra-special, sixth – at best. My first year in management at Fulham we finished ninth. A very good friend of mine who’s a psychologist said, "Chris, that’ll be the worst thing you’ve ever done in your career because now anything other than ninth won’t be good enough'" He was right. We finished 13th and it was seen as a disappointment. Year after that we finished 12th, which was seen as a disappointment. When you have a good finish, reality has to set in. But sometimes managing everybody’s emotions and being realistic is seen as pessimistic, and that makes it difficult.

Coppell: No. Only if somebody like Abramovich buys Reading. My chairman has devoted 17, 18 years of his life, and an awful lot of money, but his aim all along was that the club would be self-financing and competitive. He didn’t want it to be a rich man’s plaything, he didn’t want it to die if he lost interest or died. To that extent he’s been successful. Now he would like somebody who’s prepared to put in hundreds of millions. That’s what it takes to compete at the top level now. It’s the only way you can break the circle of the top four clubs, another billionaire who comes in and says I want the world to know my face and to make my football club one of the best in the world.

Boothroyd: The answer is quite simple, no. We looked at our budget when we were up there. We pushed ourselves to the limit and had a budget of £17 million. We were six million behind the next team, Sheffield United. It was very difficult and look at Reading, the great job they did, then you have different problems, expectation levels and also your own players start to think that maybe they should be playing for bigger and better clubs, then you have to work hard to keep them.

Then you push the boat out with wages, and before you know it, if you don’t stay up that gives you a problem because you have expensive players on long-term contracts. Because we’ve been successful, that’s given us problems. Our best players have been taken, players have moved on for big money. It’s great to have the money but that needs to be spent on developing the next level of talent. The Premier League money soon goes if you haven’t got a long-term strategy.

Is the future of the Championship as a home for young British players who can’t get a game in the top-flight?

Coleman: I disagree when people say the younger boys aren’t getting their chance. They will get it, or they have to come down a division and if they’re good enough eventually they’ll get back.

Coppell: I’d like to see the loan rule scrapped. At the moment the Premiership clubs use the Championship as a hothouse, a nursery, to develop younger talent that isn’t good enough for their own first team. I would scrap the loans entirely. A lot of League clubs, Championship clubs, would think that would be disastrous but at the moment Premiership clubs are taking 40, 50, 60 pros, they can’t give them all games, they’re just loaning them out. If the loan wasn’t there, they wouldn’t take 40, 50, 60 players and the Championship clubs would be able to acquire those players naturally.

At the moment the Premiership clubs loan a player for a year then sell them on for two or three million and a 20 or 30 per cent sell on and I think it’s a short-sighted policy. It’s called an emergency loan but that’s just a cover-all excuse. It’s something which is good for the Premiership clubs and Championship clubs think it’s good for them but it’s not in the long-term. If Premiership clubs can’t provide enough games for these players they would just lose them, get rid of them, and the Championship clubs would pick them up for free.

Boothroyd: It could well be. The top of the Championship may be full of those players. Everybody’s looking for that edge, that inch they can get on anybody else, and if they can get a player abroad at half the price then that’s good governance. It doesn’t do very much for the English game but I don’t blame managers for a second for trying to do it. We’ve tried to do it. At our club, the way forward is to improve our academy. We want to produce our own. One, because the man in the street wants to see one of their own running about, it’s that little bit of difference that gives fans that extra connection with the club. And also because it's cost-effective. Chairman and directors do cartwheels when you can get a kid through the system because it means they don't have to spend any money.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Coleman: If you’re a manager, not just in the Championship, it’s the same – you’re trying to produce a winning team, you’re trying to get the players in the team to keep peaking, those out of the team you’re trying to keep fit and happy, you’re trying to juggle finances with the chairman. In every league the dynamics are more or less the same. The pressures may be different. As a manager you want to test your team against the best and that’s what I enjoyed about the Premier League.

Coppell: I don’t know. It’s what I do. Is there one thing I look forward to? A training day on a beautiful crisp spring morning, the camaraderie of a winning dressing room, the unity of a group of men with a common goal, the sheer elation of feeling the adulation of a crowd after you’ve won a match, or something significant. There are so many things, countered by some of the lows. When you do have a low you appreciate even more the high moments. That’s not always winning, winning, winning. It can be getting out to the training field on a lovely morning, you think how blessed you are to be in the job.

Boothroyd: Obviously the winning and getting a group of people to believe in one common theme and to work at it, and to see them successful. Within that, developing your players and staff so that everybody’s on the same page.

And the worst?

Coleman: Sometimes it’s difficult dealing with the press, with unrealistic goals, sometimes with unrealistic chairmen, but there’s definitely more pluses than minuses. I had a conversation last week with my staff – it’s an addiction almost. When you lose, the feeling is so bad, it doesn’t last 24 hours, it lasts until the next win. As a player you think slightly different, you have to look after yourself, predominantly to get your own game right. As a manager you’re looking after everybody. When you win the high is big, when you lose it’s very low. It is definitely an addiction and you’re always chasing the next high unfortunately.

Coppell: Some of the press coverage irritates me because I think we’ve lost the art of journalism. A report now is just quotations from key managers and figures in the game rather than interpretation or a real objective viewpoint of the performance of both sides. Travel now is more and more of a problem – motorway travel on a Friday is a very difficult thing to do. Bad agents. Some are terrific, others are bad at the job and sacrifice the benefit of their client for their own gain. That’s something we’ve got to be looking at more.

Boothroyd: I guess the worst thing . . . I don’t think there really is a worst thing. I’ve never been one to whinge. There are all kinds of positives, even from bad things that happen. For somebody like me, they’re good because they’re going to add to me later on in life. I’m not going to have all good things happen to me in my managerial career, and sometimes a little bit of adversity does you good, provided you don’t have too much of it, obviously.

How can you plan for the long-term in such a pressurised environment?

Coleman: You’ve got a long-term plan – you say, 'Where do I need to be in three years to be where I need to be in five. Where do I need to be in a year to get to three years, where do I need to be in six months to get to one year?' I think you work backwards. What do I need to do today to make a decision that’ll help me get to there. You have to have two things going on at the same time. Maybe you have some good 13 year olds in the academy and perhaps you won’t be there to see them make the first-team, but you still have to look after them.

Coppell: You can’t plan for the long term now, really. What is long term? Long term is a season. The longer I’ve been in the game, the more I’ve wanted one-year contracts because that for me is long-term and if you survive one year, you’re doing all right. At the end of a year you’re not a lead weight around the club’s neck. You can make an objective decision, whether you want to stay, and the club can say, yes or no. It’s difficult to plan long term. In football now, at different clubs you don’t know who your boss is. You think it might be the chairman, you think it might be the board, but the crowd more and more are showing more influence because of the proliferation of phone-in programmes, 6-0-6 and all this. As soon as the crowd start criticising the chairman for employing a manager, the manager’s going to get it shortly. It’s hard to find out who you work for.

Boothroyd: People have short memories and unfortunately that’s the nature of the game. We live in a media-driven game and you’ve got to win. If you’re successful you’ve got to keep being successful because if you’re not you’re in the shadow of what you’ve done before. We all know that and we all fear that. Sometimes it’s a thankless task but football is such a brilliant game that you just love being in it and you love that next challenge. I don’t think in any other business you go in front of your shareholders and are ready for abuse once a week, twice a week. There’s a sick sort of challenge in there somewhere.

Are you optimistic for the future of the Championship?

Coleman: Looking at the teams in the Championship, it’s probably the strongest it’s ever been and that’s a good thing. It’s probably more competitive than it’s ever been and that’s a good thing. There’s always a surprise at the top, two or three suprises at the bottom. The Premier League is getting stronger and so is the Championship. It’s still very positive and in a good place and we’ve got to make sure we continue that.

Coppell: Yes, I really am because it’s a healthy, healthy division. Everyone is amazed throughout Europe when you think we’ve got 92 clubs and they all say you can’t maintain a standard. I look at the gates in the Championship, the emerging clubs, the cyclical – you always get clubs who are in crisis, like Luton - you see the journey a team like Hereford have taken, you think that is what football’s all about. We got to the Premiership two years ago, the first time in our history, Hull, the first time in their history; you think because of that kind of optimism and belief . . . every supporter at this time of year is super-optimistic thinking his club is going to win everything that’s going. That kind of thing is healthy for a local community and that’s why I do feel that the Championship is on the right course.

Boothroyd: It’s the fourth most-watched league in Europe. The viewers answer by pressing the buttons or voting with their feet and attendances seem to be up. It is an interesting league because anybody can beat anybody, there isn’t that massive divide. This year, although some good, big teams have come down, with huge budgets compared with some teams, on your day you’ve got a chance. And if you can keep everybody fit, a team like us with a £3.5 million budget can actually go against the odds and do it. That was a miracle because we managed to keep everybody fit. If we hadn’t, we’d have got nowhere near that.

The managers were speaking at a series of coaching seminars in The Boot Room at Nike Town London. The Boot Room provides a customisation service for footwear and kit. For more information visit The Boot Room, Nike Town, Oxford Circus, London.