Can Wycombe Wanderers continue to upset the League One applecart?
There's a lot of money sloshing around at the top of League One, but the two pre-season favourites are playing second fiddle to a group of relative underdogs... for now.
For the second game in a row, things didn’t quite go according to plan for Wycombe Wanderers in their derby match at home against Reading last weekend. A week earlier, they’d maintained an unbeaten record stretching back to August by coming from two behind to force a draw at Exeter City. This time around, against local rivals that have been sailing close to the wind off the pitch and in front of a crowd three thousand higher than their normal four and a half thousand, they stalled a little again, coming away from the match with a 1-1 draw.
The result left them a goal ahead of Wrexham on goal difference, with the two teams tied on 40 points each and Birmingham City a point behind them both. And it’s this that puts the achievements of Wycombe so far this season into sharp focus. Wrexham, of course, have continued their ascent under celebrity American ownership and have the money to grown further. Birmingham City perhaps shouldn’t even be playing at this level in the first place, and although the ‘celebrity’ element of their takeover proved to be somewhat more of a mirage than Wrexham’s, they’re still monied and looking upwards. There is no question that, against these two, Wycombe Wanderers are underdogs.
This unbeaten record isn’t just any unbeaten record. It stretches back to the second Saturday of the season—four months, now—a period during which they’ve dropped just eight points, with twelve wins and four draws from their last 16 league matches. By coincidence, these two pre-season favourites were the first two clubs to play them and they—along with Aston Villa in the Carabao Cup—are the only to have beaten them in any competition this season. They’re also through to the FA Cup Third Round following wins against York City and Wealdstone and play bottom-of-the-Championship Portsmouth at home in that, next month.
High Wycombe sits in the Chiltern Hills, which run from Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire up to Hitchin in Hertfordshire. The town sits in the valley of the River Wye—no, not the same one as in Wales—from which it takes the first part of its name. With a population of just over 125,000, it is very much an average home counties town in which much of the local industry, in this case furniture-making, and in particular Windsor chairs (not for no reason are the local football club nicknamed ‘The Chairboys’), has been largely replaced by commuting to the Big City, which is thirty miles away.
These dormitory towns were not typical ‘hotbeds’ of football, and Wycombe Wanderers were a non-league club until the early 1990s. Indeed, they were an amateur club until the end of that distinction in 1974, and the period after the end of the distinction between amateurism and professionalism may be reflected back upon as lost years for the club, who turned down offers to join the Alliance Premier League—now the National League—over concerns about travel costs in 1979, 1981 and 1983.
By the middle of that decade promotion from the Isthmian League was no longer by invitation only and Wycombe became a bit of a yo-yo club between there and the APL before settling in the higher division. This, however, was only a temporary state of affairs. In 1989, Martin O’Neil arrived as manager. The following year they left Loakes Park for Adams Park, an outstanding venue for a smaller club. In 1991 they won the FA Trophy by beating Kidderminster Harriers in front of a then-record crowd of almost 35,000 at Wembley. And then, after missing out on a place in the Football League on goal difference to Colchester United in 1992, they claimed their place the following year and have never returned to the non-league game.
Were they to get into the Championship come the end of this season, of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that they’ve played at this level, though it already feels half-forgotten that this happened because so much of the 2020/21 season was played behind closed doors on account of the pandemic. Life at that level was too much for them, last time around. They lost their first seven matches consecutively and were only outside of the relegation places for the first week of the season because they ‘only’ lost 1-0 at home to Rotherham United. Otherwise, they were in the bottom three all season.
But despite that atrocious start, they came close to surviving, ending the season on 43 points, just one shy of the financially-stricken Derby County. There were some horrendous results in there, most notably a 7-2 defeat at Brentford at the end of January, but they weren’t as far from the pace as had been predicted before the start of the season. Were they to get back up come the end of this season, they may be tougher for that experience.
Of course, the big concern for a smaller club which gets that high is how far they’ll fall once gravity gets to them. The cautionary tale in this respect, of course, is Yeovil Town, who reached the Championship in 2013/14 but were in the National League South by 2023/24. But rather than following this downward trajectory, Wycombe have stabilised back in League One since their return, finishing 6th, 9th and 10th in the three full seasons since then.
It is worth remembering, at this sort of juncture, that this club gets by on home crowds of around 4,500. For a club of this size to remain competitive in League One over a sustained period of time is quite an achievement. Among the most impressive results of this season has been a 5-0 win at Stockport County on Bonfire Night, a win that came in the middle of a run of eight successive wins. Stockport are also moneyed, with ambitious plans to expand the capacity of Edgeley Park to 18,000. It is striking that, even though both Wrexham and Stockport were non-league clubs when Wycombe were last playing in League Two in 2018, it’s Wycombe who are the relative underdogs for promotion this season.
The club has been under new ownership since the start of May. Rob Couhig sold the club to Mikheil Lomtadze, a Kazakhstan-based billionaire who is ranked the 581st richest person in Europe, with a net worth of £5.8bn. Of course, until the first season’s annual accounts are published it’s impossible to see whether there has been any change in spending policy, but the last available set of accounts, for the 2022/23 season, showed the club to be loss-making (PDF). This, it should be added, is completely common at this level of the game, though the size of that loss, at £3m, was high.
One way in which Lomtadze landed on his feet at Adams Park was inheriting Matt Bloomfield as manager. Bloomfield was a one-club player, making 558 appearances for Wycombe over 19 years from 2003 to 2022. After retiring from playing following a concussion incident in February 2022 he was—somewhat ironically, considering the long-standing rivalry between the two clubs—appointed as manager of Colchester United, but it was only a few months before he was offered the manager’s job at Wycombe. Bloomfield was replacing the former Wycombe legend Gareth Ainsworth, who’d been eleven years their manager, including taking them into the Championship in 2020. But though may well have looked somewhat daunting from the outset, almost two years in, it seems fair to say that Bloomfield has been making solid progress.
His main man at the moment is Richard Kone, whose arrival at this level of the professional game is one of the more unheralded of recent years. It’s only been five years since Kone was playing for Cote d’Ivoire in the Homeless World Cup, but he broke through as a semi-professional with Athletic Newham (who we’ve seen play this season, as it goes) before getting a trial with Wycombe in the summer of 2023. He’s scored a goal every other game and may well be attracting the interest of other clubs.
Off the pitch, it’s all about being “focused on youth development and integrating technology with data analytics to take our sporting performance to new levels”. In real terms, that means the reopening of the club’s academy, which had previously been closed since 2012, with the intention of getting it to the highest level—Category 4—by 2026, and a focus on analytics when bringing players into the club. It’s a technique that has worked well elsewhere, and in the absence of any greater share of the game’s vast wealth, it’s as good a chance as Wycombe have of getting to a level of being financially self-sustaining.
This run, of course, may not last. The last two results have seen their lead at the top of the table chipped away to the slenderest of margins and there seems little likelihood of the two clubs behind them giving up the chase. But Wycombe’s excellent start to this season has been one of its less-heralded successes. Keeping a club of their size at this level of the game is by no means guaranteed, and to be challenging near the top of the table is an achievement worthy of note. And should they make it into the Championship next season, at least their fans would be able to see it, and that must count for something.
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