The Daily: 2nd August 2023

The start of a brief three-day preview for the upcoming EFL season, starting with... the Championship!

So, it’s preview season again. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll get them written for the new season. Over the next three days, I’ll get the Championship, League One and League Two done. Next week, the Premier League, Europe and non-league. Normal service will continue for paid subscribers; your next podcast will be out on Friday morning, and 200% remasters will go out on Saturday and Sunday. 

The EFL Championship, 2022/23

All aboard the roller coaster again, then. The EFL season kicks off again this weekend, and it won’t be long before the cloying scent of desperation starts to hang heavy in the air again. In League Two, there will be the familiar smell of dry rot and panic as the threat of falling into that vast behemoth known as “NON-LEAGUE” presents itself. League One, the Spaghetti Junction of the English club game, will be its usual combination of bigger clubs fallen on hard times and former non-league stalwarts wondering how it came to this for very different reasons. And then there’s the Championship.

The Championship is a parallel universe, a division in which the laws of football physics start to become warped by the gravitational pull of Premier League money. This is a division in which there were more managerial changes than clubs last season (29 to 24, to be precise), a division in which 108% of the total turnover of all 24 clubs was spent on player wages alone last season, and in which this figure was an improvement on the previous couple, as well as the fifth straight year in which this figure had been greater than 100%. This is a division in which two different clubs received points deductions alone last season over the basketcasery of their finances.

But for all that the possibility of untold riches can have the gravitational effects of an event horizon, stringifying hopes and expectations as the season progresses, so the reality of that money has a calcifying effect. Money talks, and if they aren’t spent catastrophically Premier League parachute payments should ensure that a club should have all the tools to be there or thereabouts come the end of a season following relegation.

It’s certainly not a guarantee, as Norwich City and Watford supporters will ruefully attest, but the three-year cycle of parachute payments even offers a go-around for them, albeit with their financial advantage slightly reduced. And the benefits of parachute payments continue to make a difference for those who miss out; for each of the last two seasons, the team going up automatically alongside a team bouncing straight back (Fulham and Burnley) has been one relegated two seasons earlier (Bournemouth and Sheffield United).

It doesn’t seem likely that this particular pattern will be extended for a third consecutive season. Neither Norwich nor Watford had the seasons they were expecting last time around and neither look significantly improved upon that, with Norwich under a new sporting director and Watford having been a simmering cauldron of unhappiness last season with the Pozzos, with all their eccentricities, still running the show.

The Top

There is a club freshly-relegated from the Premier League at which expectations for the new season are starting to balloon. Such optimism at Leicester City would have been difficult to believe at the end of last season, after a run of three wins from 22 games following the World Cup sent them plummeting from 13th place in the table into the relegation places. 

Spooked and running out of ideas, the club sacked Brendan Rodgers at the start of April without much of an apparent idea of how to replace him. Dean Smith was eventually hauled into the position, the managerial recruitment equivalent to throwing your arms in the air, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody whatsoever, nothing really changed. 

But that was then, and this is now. Relegation brings necessary changes. The past very quickly becomes a foreign country and what matters is how a club adapts to its new circumstances, and Leicester’s reaction has been to use their imagination rather than just bring in a wearyingly familiar face who may have been successful somewhere else in this division, once before. 

Enzo Maresca had a successful playing career, a Serie A winner with Juventus in 2002 and UEFA Cup winner twice with Sevilla. His actual career as a head coach himself amounts to only 14 games at Parma in 2021, but that’s not to say that he lacks experience. He’s had two years at Manchester City—one as assistant to Pep Guardiola and one as the head of their Elite Development Squad–-as well as spells as the assistant at Ascoli, Sevilla and West Ham. 

The new manager inherited an excellent squad, but one that is likely to change. Youri Tielemans, Harvey Barnes and James Maddison have already gone, and it’s likely that at least some of Timothy Castagne, Wilfred Ndidi, Boubakary Soumaré and Kelechi Iheanacho will join them. Others to have already left include Caglar Soyuncu, Ryan Bertrand, Jonny Evans and Ayoze Perez. 

There is obviously an element of gamble about taking on a head coach who hasn’t managed a team before, but this is compensated by the number of experienced players who will be staying with the club and, with the experience of Burnley last season fresh in mind, it’s difficult to see past them to lift the title and make an immediate return to the Premier League. This tendency towards experience is also reflected by the decision to spend £18.5m to bring in Conor Coady and Harry Winks from Wolves and Spurs respectively. 

All three of last season’s relegated Premier League clubs had a lot of work to do this summer, but what of the other two? Well, Leeds United seemed to enter the summer in a state of something approaching inertia. Sam Allardyce, of course, did not hang around after rubber stamping the relegation that had effectively been signed off before he arrived, but it took until the 4th July for the club to confirm that he had been replaced by Daniel Farke. 

Inevitably, there have been departures this summer. Brenden Aaronson, Robin Koch, Rasmus Kristensen, Diego Llorente, Marc Roca and Max Wober are among those who’ve left, while only Ethan Ampadu and Karl Darlow have arrived. But the biggest single change at Elland Road to have come this summer is at the very top, with Andrea Radrizziani having been replaced by the 49ers Enterprises, who had been incrementally building up their shareholding in the club for some time. With the previous owner never fully forgiven for the sacking of Marcelo Bielsa more than a year earlier, the 49ers have an exercise in trust-rebuilding to complete after the club’s ultimately abortive two years in the Premier League.

And then there’s Southampton. There is some degree of quiet optimism starting to grow around St Mary’s this summer following the acquisition of Russell Martin from Swansea City, but he had a lot of work to do from the outset. Southampton were in the relegation places from the start of November last season, winning just six league matches from 38 and enduring, in the form of Nathan Jones, one of the least successful managerial replacements of recent years. 

It is expected that James Ward-Prowse and Romeo Lavia will leave the club before the end of the transfer window and Southampton have already spent £10.5m (which could rise as high as £15m with add-ons) on another talented but raw youngster from Manchester city in the form of Shea Charles, while the accomplished and adaptable Ryan Manning followed Martin from Swansea. An automatic return to the Premier League may be a stretch too far, but the play-offs are certainly within reach. The owners of Southampton, Sport Republic, have money but have made bad decisions in the past. If they don’t start reversing that trend, they’ll likely find that they have substantially less money, and quite quickly. 

With three new managers and not-quite-mass exodus of players, there are fair reasons for optimism among the supporters of the three relegated clubs. But to an extent that seems surprising, considering the mood of the country in a general sense at the moment, there seems to be substantial positivity surrounding some of last season’s chasing pack, including one or two for whom excessive confidence in the past has previously been the precursor to something bad happening. Perhaps it’s what we might consider The Hatters Effect, with Luton Town’s promotion through the play-offs having fuelled a belief that, “Well, if they can do it…”

There are certainly Championship clubs whose successful end to last season has given them confidence for the new season. Middlesbrough were only narrowly beaten in the play-off semi-finals by Coventry City last season, and considering they were in 21st place in the table when Michael Carrick took over as manager in October. Carrick has had a transformational effect upon the team, taking them to 4th place in the table while playing attractive football and bringing crowds back to the club. Recruitment has been good and optimism is high. Middlesbrough expect to be at least thereabouts, come the end of this season.

There is a similar sense of optimism at The Stadium of Light to that which can be found at The Riverside Stadium at the moment. Sunderland sneaked into sixth place on the last day of last season and were narrowly beaten by Coventry City in the play-off semi-finals, and the signing that raises an eyebrow there this summer is that of Jobe Bellingham, the younger brother of the England international—and now Real Madrid star—Jude. 

Of course, there are no guarantees that Jobe will turn out to be the player that his brother is. Genetic code is no guarantee of sporting success. Compare and contrast, say, the careers of Romelu and Jordan Lukaku for proof of that. But Bellingham Junior was reasonably well thought of at his previous club Birmingham City and he doesn’t have to reach the spectacular heights already achieved by his older brother to have a more than reasonable career which benefits Sunderland as well as the player. 

The team that lost that play-off final at the end of last season have a particular-shaped hole to fill on their team-sheet, this time around. Victor Gyokeres was always likely to leave the club if they didn’t get promoted into the Premier League, and the fact that his €20m (plus €4m in bonuses) sale to Sporting CF during the summer was a record fee for the Portuguese giants and the reported €100m release clause in his contract says something about the esteem in which he’s held in Lisbon. 

But his 21 league goals last season are a big gap to have to fill, and with an ongoing saga over another player, Gustavo Hamer, continuing to rumble on in the background, it might well turn out that repeating their trip to Wembley at the end of last season was a moment of overachievement which proves difficult to repeat. But considering that manager Mark Robins has now taken them from League Two to within 90 minutes of a place in the Premier League, it absolutely can’t be completely ruled out. 

The same could be said for Millwall, who’ve been within touching distance of a play-off spot for the last four straight seasons without having been able to make that final step into the top six. That they’ve managed this in the first place is something of an achievement. There are plenty of wealthier clubs who’ve not managed as much as four straight seasons in the top half of the Championship. Manager Gary Rowett remains something of a divisive presence. Some might argue that Rowett has “taken them as far as he can” and consider his brand of football to be somewhat reductive. 

Others might counter that the financial disadvantages that Millwall face in a division of deep financial inequality may govern much of his decision-making, and that the evidence of the previous four years is that Rowett is pretty good at defying the odds. It remains to be seen how much psychological trauma may have affected the squad after losing a 3-1 half-time lead to Blackburn Rovers on the last day of last season and consequently missing out on a play-off place and it seems unlikely that they’ll reach last season’s highs, but that’s been said about Millwall before more than once, over the last three or four years. 

Similar questions surround Blackburn Rovers, who failed to make the play-offs despite their dramatic win at Millwall, and who have lost key players Bradley Dack, Daniel Ayala and Ben Brereton Diaz during the summer. Blackburn have managed 69 points in each of the last two seasons, just missing out on the play-off places both times. Managing something nicer than this in 2023/24 is certainly achievable—there are at least a dozen clubs for whom this could be considered the case this season—but far from certain.

The Middle

Such was the nature of the closing weeks of last season in this particular division that many of those who finished around the middle of the table—and one or two of those who finished lower than that—will start the new season looking firmly in an upward direction. The reasons for doing so should be obvious. Last time around, just seven points separated sixth-placed Sunderland and 13th-placed Norwich City, and Norwich only finished that low after taking just one point from their last four games. Couple that with the fact that three relatively unexpected teams—Luton, Coventry and Sunderland—got that high, and you start to see how optimism for the season could spread down the table. 

Of the three teams promoted from League One at the end of last season, the moneyed Ipswich Town are the most likely to be able to at the very least hold their own at this higher level, and possibly even make a push for a second successive promotion. Ipswich ran up 101 goals and 98 points in League One last season, and all looks set pretty fair going into the new season. 

Manager Kieran McKenna, now just over a year and a half into his first job, has not been lured away. Striker Conor Chaplin, whose 29 goals in all competitions last season were so crucial to their promotion, has signed a new contract. And these details matter. Promotion-winning teams can easily be broken up if the money is right. Ipswich have the security for that to be less of a concern than some others have had in this division of late. 

Plymouth were outstanding last season, deserved their promotion, and are an excellently-run club, but this is also their first season at this level since 2010. Sheffield Wednesday’s extraordinary promotion could have resulted in a momentum to carry them through this season in the Championship, but the replacement of the popular Darren Moore despite picking up 96 points in the league and then overcoming huge obstacles to fight their way through the play-offs, has let an awfully large amount of air from that particular balloon. Either would likely be happy with a mid-table place, and content enough not to get sucked into a fight against relegation.

Last season’s other mid-table teams all come with asterisks. West Bromwich Albion are probably the Championship club most likely to become a basket case over the course of the season, even though there have been reasons for cautious optimism at The Hawthorns during 2023. For all the tumult over unpaid loans and the complexities of the club’s ownership last season and over the course of this summer, Albion only finished three points from a play-off place last season, and all of that came about after Steve Bruce offered up a double-dose of late-period Steve Bruce-ness to put them in the Championship relegation places by the time of his departure on the 10th October. They were bottom of the table by the end of the month. 

Carlo Corberan has clearly been a huge upgrade on Bruce, and there may well be much for Albion supporters to get excited about from the prospect of him having spent an entire summer with the team. Transfer activity has been quiet, with excess baggage having been largely released without replacement thus far, but if they have been on an upward trajectory since the new manager’s arrival, how much more change do they actually need? 

Well, there is one obvious place in which they do; the boardroom. There remain serious questions about the club’s ownership and behaviour which have not been answered, and this behaviour arguably has the greatest likelihood of disrupting the progress made under Corberan. There are viable plot-lines which end with West Bromwich Albion in crisis next season, but there are also some which end with them back in the Premier League. 

Similarly difficult to predict are Hull City, though again this looks like a team too good to get dragged into a relegation fight. Leroy Rosenior has come in for some praise since taking on this job after a couple of years as assistant without portfolio at Derby County. There is something heartwarming about the possibility of Rosenior and Hull succeeding together. After all, he made more than 150 appearances for them as a player, including being a regular in the team that got promoted to the Premier League in 2012 and the FA Cup final two years later. 

And the team’s improvement under Rosenior has been clear. He only lost seven of 29 games as their manager last season, lifting them from a precarious spot just above the relegation places to a comfortable 15th-placed finish. The concern is that they only won eight of these games with 14 draws, and considering that they only scored more than once on one occasion over their last eleven matches of the season, the attack does look a little lightweight. Oscar Estupinan was their top scorer with 13 goals last season; he scored more than half of them by the end of August. 

Similarly upward-looking will be Birmingham City, who are finally under new ownership, though this season may be a bit soon, with 15 players having left this summer and eight having arrived, and the first priority should be to get St Andrews back open as soon as possible. This is currently scheduled to be finished in November. Similarly lightweight in attack are Bristol City. Nahki Wells was their only player to finish in double figures for goals last season and this may prove a stumbling block against progress from last season’s lower mid-table finish. But again, there is optimism at Ashton Gate. Alex Scott has been the subject of transfer gossip for a long time; if he stays beyond the end of the summer transfer window, that opens up a lot of potential options for them on the pitch. 

Has there ever been a more perfect end to a season than Preston North End in 12th place in the Championship table last season? In an otherwise chaotic division, Preston were an oasis of serenity and stillness, failing to even demean themselves by scoring or conceding goals throughout the opening weeks of the seasoln. By the time they’d played eleven games they’d had six goalless draws, having scored three and conceded four. 

Catenaccio had found its true home, and it was the cobbled streets of Lancashire rather than the piazzas of Milano or Torino. It seems inconceivable that a team capable of such mid-tableness can have lost these tendencies in less than a year. Stoke City haven’t finished above 14th place in the Championship since their 2018 relegation from the Premier League. The worst of their post-parachute payment woes have now eased, but much improvement on last season seems unlikely. 

When Swansea City were beaten 2-1 by Millwall in the middle of March, it felt like the Swans were heading for a moribund end to a moribund season. The result left them 17th in the table with ten games to play, and losing at Millwall left them eight places above the relegation places. They were unlikely to get sucked into a relegation battle, and so it proved. An unbeaten run over those last ten games seemed to indicate a team heading in the right direction, with eight wins and two draws lifting them to a creditable 10th placed finish.

This was enough to persuade Southampton that manager Russell Martin was the man they wanted to set back on course in the direction of the Premier League following their season of Hassenhuttl, Jones and Selles, but Swansea have become somewhat used to finding managerial gems only to have them prised away by others. But we should hardly be surprised that the club at which Martin’s immediate predecessors were Graham Potter and Steve Cooper had an answer. 

Michael Duff took Cheltenham Town to promotion from League Two in 2021 and then to their highest ever league position of 15th in League One the following season before moving on to Barnsley, where a last minute diving header in the play-off final heartbreakingly lost them the match against Sheffield Wednesday. Swansea will be targetting the play-offs, but it’s likely to get congested.

The Bottom

The good news at the bottom end of the Championship table is that, although there is little good financial news—let’s not go forgetting which division it is we’re talking about here—there are no clubs currently showing too many signs of the sort of floundering that often precedes a close brush with insolvency. West Bromwich Albion have their ownership issues. Cardiff City we’ll come to presently. But otherwise, Reading and Wigan Athletic were both deducted points last season. They’re League One’s problem now. More on them tomorrow. 

Three have to fall, so which three will be? Both Plymouth and Sheffield Wednesday might be well-advised to start the season with one eye looking over their shoulders, but otherwise it could be tight at the bottom again. Cardiff City ended last season one place and five points above the relegation places—they’d have gone down themselves had it not been for Reading’s six point deduction—and have replaced Sabri Lamouchi with the former Fenerbahce head coach Erol Bulut. They’re in second place behind West Bromwich Albion in the Championship Basket Case Potential Prediction League because Vincent Tan.

There’s a bit of a twist. Aaron Ramsey has signed from Nice. If they can keep him fit, he is a player with the ability to be transformational in a midfield at this level, but the word “if” has to do a Herculean amount of lifting, there. Ramsey’s record with injuries is far from stellar and if nothing else the Championship is a slog, with a 46-match season and the possibility of three play-offs at the end of it all. Strong loan signings from last season do not seem to have been adequately replaced and with just 41 goals, only bottom of the table Wigan Athletic scored fewer last season. Bulut has quite a job on his hands.

Not only did Rotherham United finally end their five year yo-yo streak by staying in the Championship at the end of last season, but they did so without spending a single day in the bottom three. 19th in the Championship was their highest league finish in twenty years, but the season after that they were relegated, and that’s the concern this time around. It’s all very well being overjoyed at staying up, but unless positive changes are made the likelihood is that you’ll find yourself back just above those relegation places a year later. Chiedozie Ogbene has gone to Luton. Key loan players have returned to their motherships. Rotherham finished six points and three places above the relegation places last season. Things are unlikely to be much easier, this time around. 

It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Huddersfield Town have taken an unnecessary risk by extending the contract of Neil Warnock for another year. There is no reason why Huddersfield supporters shouldn’t treat him as the second coming of Herbert Chapman for keeping them up last season. But that was a fire-fighting mission, and Neil Warnock turns 75 years old before this year is out. The club are under new ownership which is still very much in the ‘wait and see’ period, but… what is the long-term plan here? What happens in a year’s time, when Warnock’s extension ends, and does that impact upon transfer decisions being made now and in January? 

And finally, there’s Queens Park Rangers and their ‘season of contrasts’, last season. On the 19th October 2022 they beat Cardiff City 3-0 to go top of the Championship table, an excellent return for a strong start. But by the end of the following month manager Michael Beale had left and by the end of the season, having already burned through Neil Critchley and replaced him with Gareth Ainsworth, only to find that the slump couldn’t be arrested. QPR survived, but it required two wins from their last three games to get over the line to do so including an away win against a Burnley team who were already sufficently on post-promotion leave to practically turn out for this match with straw donkeys under their arms. Prior to this, they’d only won twice in the league since Beale left.

So, where’s the improvement coming from? Ainsworth was popular as a player at Loftus Road, but he’s a manager now and there were few signs that his direct style of football was doing him many favours last season. Ther trade-off, as ever, is results. Less than aesthetically sparkling football will usually be forgiven so long as the results are flowing, but that quite clearly hasn’t been happening and the squad doesn’t seem any stronger than last season. There are decent players, such as Ilias Chair, Sam Field and Andre Dozzell, but the make-up of the squad doesn’t seem particularly well suited to the style of football that Ainsworth usually plays and that famous ‘motivation’ seemed to have limitations, last season. In the absence of any obvious improvement, this looks like being another season of struggle at Loftus Road.

With a new broadcasting deal kicking in from the start of the 2024/25 season and the glittering riches of the Premier League within touching distance, there are few reasons to believe that many Championship clubs will be any more sensibly run than they have in recent years. Overspending will continue because everybody else is doing it. Speculators drawn by the earnings potential and the lack of ramifications should they fail will continue to circle. But with three relegated clubs of Premier League pedigree, two bigger clubs reviving themselves, and usual list of suspects, at least it will be, if nothing else, interesting.