Cambridge United and a headline of two halves
One point from nine games has been a dismal start to the season, and all of this this is leaving quite a familiar name in quite a lot of trouble.
It was, for the want of a better phrase, a headline of two halves. On the one hand, the Cambridge Independent’s report on Cambridge United’s trip to Exeter City at the weekend started with, “Garry Monk cannot ask more from his players”, before the somewhat more deflating, “after winless run extends to 18 matches after defeat at St James Park”.
The recent woes of Cambridge United go back farther than this. They only won two of their last eighteen games from the middle of February, swinging perilously close to relegation before two wins at the end of March did just enough to keep their heads above water. Garry Monk, a name sufficiently high profile to elicit the raising of an eyebrow upon seeing him in this position, may already be fighting to save his job; if, indeed, he’s not already thinking that this might be more trouble than its worth.
After eight games of the season, Cambridge have picked up a single point, the worst record of any club in the three divisions of the EFL. There are two Premier League clubs with similarly dismal records—Wolves and Southampton—but they’ve played two games fewer. But none of their defeats have been particularly startling. They haven’t conceded more than two goals in a game yet, with only three of their seven losses coming by a two-goal margin. But for all this, they’re already seven points from safety.
League One is the junction at which football meets, from downwardly mobile former Premier League inmates to the brash new money of former non-league clubs seeking to make a name for themselves. But while they themselves were a non-league club between 2005 and 2014, Cambridge United feel like a ‘typical’ club in either League One or League Two.
They’ve broadly struggled at this level since promotion three and a half years ago, finishing 14th, 20th and 18th. To a point, it may just be that their start to this season is footballing gravity re-exerting its force upon the club following three years of them having defied it.
If there is something to back the idea that this could be more of a blip (beyond the fact that it’s really an extension of last season’s dreadful end), it’s that none of Cambridge’s have come against the biggest clubs in the division. Stockport, Crawley, Bristol Rovers, Mansfield, Wycombe, Lincoln, Rotherham and Exeter are the teams to have beaten them.
Stockport are moneyed and Wycombe have been as high as the Championship, but seven of these eight clubs have similar profiles. They’ve all played non-league football in the last 10 or 20 years, but none have huge crowds (other than Stockport) particularly deep pockets. That’s all still to come.
The only exception to this poor start was the sole point that they’ve achieved so far, from a 4-4 draw against Blackpool over the August Bank Holiday weekend during which they came from 4-2 down to scramble their way to a point. They haven’t otherwise scored more than a single goal in any game all season, and they haven’t scored at all in their last three. Eep.
As at any other club, results are all that essentially matter, and this leaves their senior management in an unenviable position. Cambridge United are not A Big Club, and Garry Monk is still kinda A Big Name, who signed a two-year contract at the start of the summer. Sacking him three months later will come at a financial cost.
And although his career has been in decline in recent years, Monk was a talented head coach not so long ago. He should have the chops to be able to get them out of this sort of mess. And furthermore… If you're bottom of League One with just one point from nine games looking to replace a manager at this time of year, what’s the calibre of potential replacements going to look like?
Furthermore, it’s certainly never a good idea to offload a manager without having a clear plan as to who the successor might realistically be, and barely three months into the season, with the manager having only recently arrived at the club, it’s entirely possible that not a great deal of thought had been put into this at a boardroom level. The international break may or may not offer some greater time for reflection on their part.
The last set of accounts were not great, but what would one reasonably expect for a League One club without a Former Premier League background? They lost £1.75m in the year to June 2023 against a profit of £332,000 a year earlier. There have been plenty, plenty worse at this level of the game, though it would be a stretch to suggest that losing the best part of two million quid over the course of twelve months is… good.
It should be added that the club’s redevelopment plans for The Abbey Stadium appear unlikely to do anything but move glacially slowly for now. Increasing the capacity of the ground will help the club to grow revenues and it is impressive that attendances have risen to above 7,000 in recent years, but it should probably also be recognised that the club will need to stay in League One if they wish to keep them at that level.
It’s not so much the relegation that may come this season—and it’s worth noting that Cambridge haven’t been relegated in the 19 seasons since they fell out of the EFL in 2005—because that is to be expected at this level of the game. It’s the prospect of this all being the start of a snowball. Everyone at this level of the game knows about Bury, about Scunthorpe United, about York City and plenty of others beside, the clubs who just kept falling, one of them extremely steeply and quickly indeed. And nobody wants to be one of those. No-one wants to feel that bony finger on their shoulder.
There have been injuries, yes, but everyone has those. The finances haven’t been great, but in the 54 years since they were first elected into the Football League in 1970 Cambridge United have only finished above midway in the third year on twelve occasions, and other than their 14th-placed finish four years ago the last of those came in 1994. “What more do you expect?” isn’t an entirely unreasonable question. But then again, so is, “Can we stop seeing news headlines including the words ‘winless’, ‘run’ and ‘extends’?”, because that doesn’t seem like an entirely unreasonable one either.