Cherish the Championship, its level playing field offers football as it should be | Jonathan Wilson

League is packed with clubs recalling past glories and desperate to escape it but success shouldn’t just be for the moneyed elite

The Premier League champions of 2015-16 play the winners of one of the greatest FA Cup finals. One of the original two super-clubs play the most successful Welsh side of all time. The seventh-most successful side in league history play a former Uefa Cup winner. Sunday’s Championship fixture list serves as a reminder of how fortunate the English (and Welsh) league is to have such depth – and perhaps also as a warning.

All six teams in action – Leicester, Coventry, Leeds, Cardiff, Sunderland and Ipswich – have won the league title or the FA Cup or both. Of the 24 sides in the Championship, only Plymouth have never won the league or reached a domestic cup final. The 2.Bundesliga has its share of fallen giants but nowhere else in the world is the spread of honours so great. And nowhere else in the world do games in even the fourth flight average more than 5,700 attendances as they did in League Two last season.