The Daily, 3rd August 2023
A little later than advertised, it's time for a League One pre-season preview.
There are plenty of good reasons why League One looks as open as it does this season. The three best teams in the division at the end of last season—and by a substantial margin—were all promoted. Although there were plenty of other substantial clubs who’d previously fallen on hard times already playing in League One last season, none of them slipped towards the relegation places. And none of the three teams relegated from the Championship at the end of last season look particularly likely to bounce straight back at the first attempt this time, either.
And that, perhaps, is the raison d’etre for League One. This is the meeting place, the store where the creatures meet. It’s English football’s most diverse transit hub, a junction taking in former Premier League clubs and cup winners, those who are still licking their wounds after close brushes with football’s equivalent to the Grim Reaper, the Official Receiver, and upwardly mobile former non-league clubs who already know that there is a glass ceiling within this organisation somewhere, but who either haven’t managed to smack headfirst into it just yet or have and are already starting their return journey. All life is here.
At the top end of the table, there is hope. Southampton did it in 2012. Norwich City did it a year a year before them. Two successive promotions is all it takes, and you too could be hob-nobbing with the elite, sipping champagne and eating prawn sandwiches with Roy Keane, and telling smaller clubs that they’re greedy for asking for enough money to get buy while lobbying left, right and centre so that you can permanently become a steamroller, rather than a steamrollee.
At the bottom end of the table is an equivalent amount of fear. Plenty of stories of chaotic football club mismanagement have started in the lower reaches of League One. This season’s poster boys for an independent football regulator, Scunthorpe United and Southend United, both started their precipitous falls from the lower reaches of this division. Two successive relegations is all it takes, and you too could find yourself kicking off at 5.20 on a Friday afternoon for BT Sport, playing in something called the “FA Trophy”, and decrying the whole thing as ‘tinpot’ even though your lot still seem to be losing 3-0 every week.
While the events of the end of last season have taken a European trophy winner and a 1966 World Cup finals venue out of League One this year, this year’s League One does still contain a team that has won European ties against Benfica, Juventus and Real Madrid, two which have won the FA Cup this century and the team who had arguably the most boring 2022/23 league season of all.
The Top
As if to say that it’s time to put it all behind them, four of the favourites to claim one of the two promotion places come the end of the season are clubs who have found themselves in a financial pickle in recent years. The pre-season favourites to get promotion back are Derby County, and unsurprisingly so. This time last year, Derby supporters were still celebrating the eventual sale of their club to local property developer—and, fortunately for supporters, lifelong fan of the club—and the end of a tortuous administration process.
Derby missed out on a place in the play-offs last season by a single point, but they’re primed and ready for the new season, with an impressive array of new signings including Sonny Bradley, Curtis Nelson, Joe Ward, Callum Elder, Conor Washington, Kane Wilson and Josh Vickers, while the determination of manager Paul Warne may best be summed up by the fact that, despite all the problems that the club had been through in recent years, he described that league finish as a “failure”. With a big home crowd behind his team at Pride Park this season, he has an excellent chance to set that straight.
The team most likely to disrupt Derby at the top of the table might well turn out to be another club fighting their way back after managing to postpone an appointment of their own with Doctor Death. Bolton Wanderers had a mixed season, last time around. They finished in 5th place in the table but were narrowly beaten in the semi-finals of the play-offs by Barnsley, but consolation was to be found in the final of the EFL Trophy, where a stunning performance in the final saw them put four goals past eventual champions Plymouth without reply at Wembley. Fans might have preferred promotion back to the Championship a couple of months later, but as consolation prizes go this wasn’t a bad one.
Of all the teams in the entirety of League One, the club to have come closest to being killed off altogether was probably Portsmouth. Pompey were saved by their supporters trust but then sold into private ownership in the form of Disney executive Michael Eisner in the face of belief on the part of supporters that trust ownership had taken them as far as it could. Ironically, the club have stood still in League One since then, with six consecutive appearances in the top half of the table including two play-off defeats adding to a feeling of some frustration on the Hampshire coast.
The decision to poach manager John Mousinho from Oxford United in January turned out to be a wise one. Portsmouth were in 15th place in the table when he arrived at the club, but 39 points from 23 games lifted them to 8th—had they repeated that form throughout the season they’d have managed a play-off place—and there have been substantial changes over the summer, with 17 new players having arrived and 14 having left. In a division of 24 teams, expecting automatic promotion would be a bit of a stretch, but Mousinho seemed to get some order into the team after the eventual failure of the Cowley brothers era at the club and with a couple of key players also returning from injury a place in the top six should be achievable.
Another club who’ve had serious ownership issues in recent years but may now finally be on the way to some sort of recovery is Charlton Athletic. They brought in Dean Holden just before Christmas, and his record at The Valley over the second half of last season was very similar to that of John Mousinho at Portsmouth, with 38 points from 25 games. The big end of season story at Charlton was the sale of the club into new ownership. Former Sunderland co-owner Charlie Methven and banker Edward Warrick were listed at Companies House as directors of SE7 Partners Limited, who completed the purchase of the club at the start of June.
Of course, Charlton are capable of better. They were a Premier League club for the best part of a decade. And there will be plenty who watched Sunderland Til I Die on Netflix and will be hoping for better from the public face of the new ownership, Charlie Methven. Has he learned from the mistakes he made at Sunderland? It’s a question worth asking, because the fate of Charlton has at times looked a little like the worst of what happened at Sunderland, at times.
Of the three clubs relegated from the Championship at the end of last season, only one can be considered to have a reasonable chance of getting out of it in an upwardly direction this season. Blackpool had a calamitous time of things last season, ending the season in 23rd place in the table, and in order to try to get the club back up at the first attempt they have called on the services of a manager whose return to the club has not been without controversy.
Neil Critchley was one of the more successful Blackpool managers of recent times, getting them promoted in 2021, but his departure in the summer of 2022 to take up the assistant manager’s position at Aston Villa wasn’t well-received. Well, now he’s back and the expectation levels may well be high. But last season was chaotic—Blackpool only won five games from the end of October on and had three managers, the owner who rescued the club from the most chaotically turbulent in its history has had a rude awakening, and the identity of the new manager hasn’t been universally popular. A slow start could see Bloomfield Road become a restless place by the autumn. But the flipside to this is that the chance is there, with the division looking reasonably open this season, and that Critchley, who got them into the Championship a couple of years ago, may be one of the best qualified individuals to be able to get them back up into the second tier.
And fans of experiments featuring cruel and unusual punishments will be interested to see how Peterborough United and Barnsley fare in the aftermath of their defeats to Sheffield Wednesday in May. Unsurprisingly, Darren Ferguson is still in position at Peterborough, with a slightly younger looking squad refreshed by some promising names from the non-league game. When they were relegated from the Championship in 2013 it took them eight years to get back, only to spend just the one year there. After missing out so narrowly in the semi-finals of the play-offs last year—and especially after the manner in which it happened—going one better isn’t beyond them.
If Peterborough opted for some degree of continuity this summer, the same cannot be said for Barnsley. The team beaten by a last minute diving header in the play-off final have lost manager Michael Duff to Swansea City, captain Mads Andersen to Luton for £3m and goalkeeper Brad Collins to Coventry City for £500,000 since the play-off final. Duff’s replacement is Neill Thompson, whose career pivoted to the USL Championship after a career in England which took in Sunderland, Hartlepool, Wolves, Sheffield United, Preston and Leeds. After two years playing for Tampa Bay Rowdies he was appointed as their manager with a reasonable degree of success, getting to the final of the league’s play-offs in 2021. It is, depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty, an imaginative appointment or a gamble on someone with no coaching experience in this country. Choose your poison.
The Middle
The good news for Wycombe Wanderers is that they have survived something which, if not well managed, can have a very bad effect on a football club. They only lasted one season in the Championship in 2021, but relegation back for a smaller club after a short period at this level can be a difficult pill to swallow. Yeovil Town had a season there in 2014. They start next season in the National League South. Scunthorpe had two, between 2007 and 2011. They start next season in the National League North. These are extreme examples, obviously, but it is worth remembering that Wycombe Wanderers were a non-league football club themselves until 1993, and any club that overreaches can find the cost of having done so to be severe. Wycombe returned to League One with 6th and 9th placed finishes, perfectly respectable seasons at this level for a club of their size.
And settling back at this level means that a push towards the promotion places only requires a nudge. Richard Keogh, the EFL’s most lugubrious presence, joins at what is surely now the tail end of a career which has taken in more than 700 games, but there’s youth as well. Dale Taylor arrives from Nottingham Forest on a year long loan having been at Burton Albion last season, while Kian Breckin was part of the Manchester City under-21s team that won Premier League 2 last season.
Elsewhere, Bristol Rovers and Lincoln City should both be comfortable in mid-table. Like everyone else they’re partly reliant on loan signings, but this comes with a degree of inherent risk. Bringing in loanees from another club may get you better players as raw materials, but it can be difficult to build a squad over time if key players are going to leave at the end of each season. Burton aren’t in crisis from the loss of loan players, but it doesn’t help. Burton had a slow start last season before Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was Jimmy Floyd Hasselsaicked and replaced by Dino Maamria, who got them up to 15th.
But the most arresting story in the middle of the table may be that of Oxford United. Oxford were well funded last season but only managed to avoid relegation by two places and three points. Karl Robinson paid for that with his job and his replacement is Liam Canning. Ruben Rodrigues has arrived from Notts County and alongside Josh McEachran from Milton Keynes. Canning, a product of the City Football Group, was sacked from Milton Keynes in December. They were relegated regardless. He’s got a bit of rebuilding work to do.
The Bottom
The eagle-eyed among you may already have noted that the top and the middle of this division only featured twelve of the 24 teams in League One this season. There’s a good reason for this. It’s reasonable to say that the bottom half of this division was congested last season. Shrewsbury Town finished in 12th place in the table on 59 points, but even they were only separated from 23rd-placed Accrington Stanley by 15 points, while they were 18 points from 6th-placed Peterborough. If the new season is to follow the pattern of last season, it’s entirely plausible that something similar could happen again, this time around.
Of the four newly-promoted clubs, Leyton Orient were the champions and the most likely to be able to steer their way to the middle of the table with comfort. The loss of popular and accomplished goalkeeper Lawrence Vigouroux to Burnley is a big loss, while Paul Smyth has also stepped up a level—for now, at least—to go to Queens Park Rangers.
But Orient ended last season riding the crest of a wave after having led the table since the middle of October. Summer recruitment has been decent, other key players have stayed, manager Richie Wellens is popular and playing decent football, and owner Nigel Travis—and this is an important detail at a club like Orient, which has had periods of being treated obscenely badly by owners in the fairly recent past—is doing a good job of running the club as a business. The first step for any newly-promoted club is to ensure survival, but there’s no reason to believe that this should be the limit of their ambitions for the new season.
The other three promoted clubs will likely all consider staying up to be a success. Stevenage haven’t played at this level, and with Steve Evans managing them may continue to find well-wishers to be thin on the ground. Considering the £10m that went missing as a result of a loan to a crooked former chairman through an equally crooked local council, Northampton have done pretty well to get through the last decade fairly unscathed. With this being their fourth spell at this level this century, it’s probably fair to consider them one of the League One/League Two yo-yo clubs, and will be fully prepared for a season when fifth from bottom is an aspiration. Carlisle haven’t played at this level for a decade and have lost last season’s top scorer Kristian Dennis, who opted to stay in the same division by rejecting a contract extension and moving to Tranmere instead. Carlisle out-performed many expectations by getting as high as the play-offs last season, but things are about to get even more difficult.
It might not be that surprising to find that more than two of the newly-promoted end up relegated come the end of the season, and while this won’t provide much comfort to the supporters of the newly-promoted clubs, it will provide some succour to those who might be looking over their shoulders. Cambridge United only avoided relegation by the skin of the teeth on the last day of last season and have lost both of their forwards—including last season’s top scorer Sam Smith, who scored 13 in the league for them—and it seems difficult to believe that they won’t find themselves in the middle of the mire again this time around. Both Port Vale and Exeter survived their first seasons back in this division, but may not find things quite as comfortable this time around.
Port Vale only won one of their final eleven league matches of last season and ended up just four points above the relegation places. And this hasn’t been an especially happy summer at Vale Park, and with the sacking of manager Darrell Clarke—who took them to promotion the year before—not having proved popular, his replacement Andy Crosby has his work cut out to win over a sceptical crowd.
There were few visible signs of improvements in the four games that he took over for; they won one and lost three. Exeter City are also in their second season back at this level, but they finished last season in a relatively comfortable 14th place and with manager Gary Caldwell now heading into his first full season as their manager, there’s no reason why that sort of finish can’t be repeated, perhaps even higher, with a fair wind.
That leaves three clubs, who face three very different predicaments which require different responses. The imprisonment of the Fleetwood Town owner on fraud charges earlier in the summer was brushed off by the club, who quickly issued a statement emphasising their independence from Pilley. But there remains a suspicion that the connections aren’t quite as easy as just shuffling some names off the official paperwork and keeping your fingers crossed.
The truth is that the imprisonment of Pilley is pretty much without precedent in the recent history of English football, the owner of a football club who had become extremely closely identified with that club suddenly being sent to prison for a very long time over quite serious financial crimes, which were carried out as the football club benefited from its connections with both him and the company at the heart of this fraudulent activity. But no-one can really say what, if anything, will happen. This could have no effect on Fleetwood Town whatsoever, but it also remains a possibility that there could be other effects upon the club which it’s not yet easy to even quantify, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever that any they would be resolved quickly.
Wigan Athletic are under new ownership. Not for the first time since Dave Whelan left Wigan a decade ago, the club was in a chaotic state, failing to pay wages on time five times throughout the year as they limped to relegation. Everything is rosy in this particular corner of Lancashire but for one thing; an eight point deduction issued by the EFL over the club’s failure to properly administer itself last season.
It doesn’t seem likely that Wigan will be pulled into a relegation fight in League One. An eight point deduction felt like a potential crisis waiting to happen for this season, but that was against a background of the club’s previous ownership, including a winding up order hanging over the club which had not yet been discharged. But that is all taken care of now, and that changes the entire dynamic of their season.
But it should be added that Wigan will still almost certainly pay some sort of price for their points deduction. The only question is: what will it cost them? It could be that they finish within eight points of a play-off place or within eight points of an automatic promotion place. Should that happen, it may justify asking the question of why these punishments continue to hang around after ownership has changed hands. Who, exactly, is paying the price for this maladministration?
I do understand that it’s a ‘deterrent’, and that there has to be some degree of punishment for clubs who cannot fulfil this most basic of functions. And that’s before we get onto the matter of sporting integrity. Why should a team be able to field any player whose wages they can’t afford, and isn’t the real issue here that the governing bodies act too slowly, meaning that by the time punishments are being meted out those responsible are often either long gone or heading for the exit?
Of course, these philosophical questions do Wigan Athletic no favours in the here and now. Manager Shaun Maloney just has to get on with it. The good news there is that things have been going his way since his appointment at the end of January. Wigan were relegated from the Championship by seven points, but three of those came about on account of another points deduction over unpaid wages and the team only lost three of their last ten matches. If Michael Danson—local-born, extremely wealthy, apparently not some sort of front for an illegal betting syndicate, a country which beheads its political opponents or land fraud—has had one effect on Wigan Athletic already, it’s been to give the club hope. In these increasingly troubled times, that in itself is worth an awful lot.