Or conversely, just for a another 2 or 3 years and eventually gone down anyway with Wimbledon and Coventry instead of Bradford(?)./ Charlton that year.
Or even stayed up and actually become Charlton by 2006 ish having decided a few consecutive top half finishes was old hat and hounding out the.manager before spending the better part of 20 years hence dreaming of the giddy heights of 21st in the Championship.
Yeah, while I'd love to believe keeping Cooper and Campbell (the former wanted to go "home" anyway and wasn't really a Bassett centre half, so was less avoidable) would have led to us being permanent premier league members, the unstable nature of the Soar/Scholar/Wray ownership would almost certainly have fucked us up before very long anyway.
I'm not sure he "wanted" to go home, until it was made clear (by Bassett agreeing to sell him to West Ham) that he wasn't wanted. AIUI, he told the club, he would only leave for Middlesbrough, and sure enough a deal was agreed with them within a few weeks.
As you say, he wasn't a Bassett centre half at all (we started the promotion season with Chettle and Hjelde as the CB and Cooper didn't play in defence until late September, after Hjelde got injured, having initially been picked in midfield)
And final destination, they all die in the same order that they would have in the crash (I haven’t seen any sequels). The plot of the film is literally fate refusing to be confounded.
Just like we ended up in the Prem. Just by different routes
So to keep going with analogy, the question is probably what seemingly inocuous thing changed our route. Thus most of our examples were probably fairly seismic at the time…