Not cynical at all, that was precisely why they came up with the ludicrous "Championship" rebranding, so they could market "The Championship" as some kind of rival to "The Premiership". Oh, and then there's Leagues 1 and 2, the embarrassing backward cousins kept hidden away in the corner in case they make a show of themselves in front of the guests. They've already started negotiating separate standalone second-tier sponsorship deals for the Championship, expect the gap to keep on widening
An example of how the Championship are distancing themselves from L1 and L2 and keeping large
ammounts of monies to themselves, would be Birminghams parachute payments.
As a result of Birmingham's promotion back to the Premiership,they won't need the parachute payments,
so the Football League have divided the 15 million between the rest of the league clubs.
Unfortunately,it's not quite as straight forward as that, with Championship clubs receiving a little over
half a million each.League 1 clubs receive 70 grand each,whilst League 2 clubs half as much again.