The reward remains remarkable. The eventual prize is worth at least £134 million (Dh827.6m).
As the Championship kicks off this weekend, the reality is that a 10-month, 49-game marathon – for those who reach the play-offs – comes with the most desirable of incentives: promotion to the Premier League and the commensurate funds.
For the clubs who have tasted the riches of the world’s most lucrative league, the dilemma is clear: cut spending or speculate to accumulate.
Fulham, Cardiff City and Norwich City came down with the guarantee of £60m of parachute payments over four seasons, £23 million of it in the first year.
But top-flight contracts can swallow up much of what seems a windfall. The Championship landscape is pocked with clubs who thought they would make a swift return to the Premier League and did not.
In the past 28 seasons, only 21 teams have won promotion at the first time of asking. Last season, the ratio was one in three: Queens Park Rangers (QPR), who, reduced to 10 men and hanging on against Derby in the play-off final, somehow conjured a 90th-minute winner from Bobby Zamora.
QPR gambled. The likelihood is that when their financial figures are announced, they will reveal one of the biggest losses recorded by a Championship club. They kept on spending and got away with it. Others have plunged deeply into debt by chasing an ever more distant dream.
Fulham have shown the clearest sign of being influenced by their London neighbours.
They bought Ross McCormack, the division’s 28-goal top scorer last season, from Leeds United. The Scot will turn 28 next Saturday, has never played a Premier League game and cost £11m. It is an incredible fee. Fulham will deem it money well spent if he delivers the goals to take them up.
Norwich, too, have the view that investing in scorers pays dividends. The £3m Lewis Grabban struck 22 times for Bournemouth last season.
At a higher level, Norwich mustered only 28, the lowest tally in all four divisions.
The difference is that, by selling Robert Snodgrass to Hull City, they are in the black.
So are Cardiff, who sold Steven Caulker and Jordon Mutch to QPR. The arrival of Adam Le Fondre, a third proven scorer in the second tier, completes a common theme. It is a feature of a quixotic division that the Championship tends to reward specialists, men who have succeeded in the division before.
Read: Relegated sides from Premier League and teams promoted into Championship
It bodes well for Cardiff, who have retained several members of the 2012 promotion-winning side, but not for Fulham: after a 13-year absence, the Championship threatens to provide a culture shock.
The most inauspicious element for all three may be found in the dugouts. The three promoted managers last season were Harry Redknapp, who took QPR up, and Leicester’s Nigel Pearson and Burnley’s Sean Dyche, both accustomed to the Championship’s unique demands after years in its environment.
Fulham’s Felix Magath and Cardiff’s Ole Gunnar Solskjaer have won league titles in Europe while Norwich’s Neil Adams has never won a competitive game. They are bound together by inexperience at this level.
The Premier League pedigree of their players counts for something and many of their new peers believe parachute payments give them an unfair advantage, but the Championship tends to be compelling because it is so even.
It provides the spectacle of 24 teams, most of them evenly matched despite wildly differing circumstances, slugging it out.
The received wisdom is that everyone can beat everyone and a well-managed, intelligently compiled team can defeat the odds.
Burnley were promoted last season with one of the lowest wage bills in the division and after spending just £450,000 in the transfer market.
The favourites this year include Derby’s youthful attackers and Wigan’s tactically astute passers, who were both unlucky to lose in the play-offs.
Intrigue is provided by the return of Stuart Pearce, one of Nottingham Forest’s greatest players, as their manager and the appointment of Sami Hyypia, who led Bayer Leverkusen in last season’s Champions League, at Brighton.
There is Jose Mourinho’s former assistant Aitor Karanka at Middlesbrough and, at the other end of the spectrum, the non-league manager Dave Hockaday, strangely chosen to lead Leeds.
Blackpool barely have 11 players, but at the end of the season someone will be £134m richer. Though probably not them.
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