We’re moving into the positive end of the table, and for each of these clubs, there is genuinely something underneath the number. A strong manager, an owner with resources and intent, a well-earned promotion, a clear identity and approach.
The problem is that “something there” and “about to be good” are not the same, and telling them apart in August is close to impossible. Every club in this group has an asset that could carry a season, but likewise, has a reason why that asset might not be enough.
We’re also moving through the important “zero line” in this tier. Belief below zero works against you and compounds your misery. Above it, it compounds the positive. You might be surprised at which club is the one to take us over the threshold.
Sheffield United
Belief Score: −4.3 | Manager: Chris Wilder | Players to watch: Michael Cooper, Gustavo Hamer, Patrick Bamford
One burning question
Chris Wilder keeps saving this club. Is that really a good thing for Sheffield United’s long term goals?
First, some context…
Sheffield United carry the second-heaviest inherited expectation in the division at 74.6, behind only Wolves, and the reason runs deeper than most. First Division champions in 1897-98, four FA Cups, and Bramall Lane, the oldest football ground in the world still in use (they’ve hosted football games since 1862, with Sheffield United playing their first game there in 1889).
But the deep history is not what is doing the work. It is 2019-20, when Wilder’s squad finished ninth in the Premier League and briefly convinced everyone watching that something genuinely distinctive had arrived from the Championship. That is six years ago. It is close enough to feel like a reference point rather than a memory.
Then the fall, which was total. The 2023-24 season produced sixteen points and 105 goals conceded, the worst Premier League goal difference on record. The club that competed for a Champions League place in 2020 was relegated in last place with three and a half games to spare four years later.
Trust sits at −30, tied third-lowest in the division, and the sequence that produced it is worth laying out plainly. Wilder out by mutual termination in summer 2025. Rubén Sellés in on a three-year contract. Sellés out after five straight defeats, the worst start in the club’s 137-year history. Wilder back the following day on a two-year deal, his third stint. Every step of that damages trust, because outsiders cannot form a stable view of what this ownership will do next. The Yorkshire Post described the summer recruitment as being carried out at the whim of data analysts, and the squad that resulted was handed to a manager who did not want it, and is now being run by a manager who did not pick any of it.
And here is the uncomfortable part. Without the Sellés opening, Wilder’s side played at roughly 1.5 points per game across forty-one league fixtures. That is automatic promotion pace. The thirteenth-place finish and the zero goal difference were not the club performing to its level. They were one man dragging a season back from the floor.
Which is the question. Wilder’s competence is real, and it is also the reason nobody at COH Sports has yet had to become competent themselves. The recovery was personal, not structural. A club that keeps being saved by the same person is a club that never has to fix the thing that keeps needing saving.
Vibe check: Uneasy calm
Stability at the manager position for the first time in eighteen months, and very little underneath it. Parachute payments end this summer, which makes this the first honest Championship season since the yo-yo began. Sheffield United are in a tough spot, where a strong start will get discounted as merely expected, while a poor one will confirm every fear.
On the pitch
Michael Cooper is the reason the goal difference reads zero rather than minus fifteen, with a 67.4 per cent save percentage and eight clean sheets behind a defence that shipped sixty-six. Gustavo Hamer was the creative engine, five goals and twelve assists. Patrick Bamford is the variable that matters most: twelve goals in twenty 90s is a rate that produces twenty across a full season, and whether he plays that season is the single biggest attacking question at the club. Sydie Peck at twenty, five goals and four assists from the pivot, is the one to watch for what comes after.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them finishing the season in eighth. I have them just a little lower in eleventh.
Bolton Wanderers
Belief Score: −4.2 | Manager: Steven Schumacher | Players to watch: Josh Sheehan, Sam Dalby, George Johnston
One burning question
Bolton are back at the level that nearly killed them. So is this a homecoming, or a reckoning?
First, some context…
There is a live folk memory in this fanbase, and it is not vague. The last Championship season was 2018-19. It ended in relegation and administration. Wages went unpaid for months. The training ground ran out of hot water. This is the level at which the previous version of Bolton Wanderers ceased to function.
Which sits strangely against the fact that this is also, plainly, where the club belongs. Charles Foweraker managed Bolton for twenty-five years and won three FA Cups in 1923, 1926 and 1929, including the White Horse Final, and another followed in 1958. A more modest but more modern version of success came in the Sam Allardyce era in the early 2000s. The Toughsheet pulls crowds most Championship clubs would envy. The history and the infrastructure both say this club belongs in the second tier.
Seven years on from near-extinction, Bolton hold the fourth-highest institutional trust score in the division at +32, and the reason is Sharon Brittan. Six full years of continuity since taking over from the administrators in 2019, including through a pandemic. A promotion. A play-off final defeat. Two managers in six years, Ian Evatt through to 2025 and Schumacher since. The score would be higher still if the existential crisis were not so recent.
They got here the hard way. Third with automatic promotion in sight on the final day, then a 2-3 home defeat to Luton dropped them to fifth. The play-offs were redemption: Bradford beaten over two legs, then a 4-1 win at Wembley over Stockport, the side that had beaten them on the opening day, in front of 48,268.
But the regular season showed Bolton’s true colours. Nineteen wins, eighteen draws, nine defeats. Only three clubs in the division lost fewer games last season. Bolton took 766 shots to their opponents’ 455, a shooting dominance ratio close to 1.7 to 1, and converted at 0.08 goals per shot against their opponents’ 0.10. This was a team that ran matches, moved the ball into the final third, but then could not break down a set defence. That failure mode is survivable in League One, but it could get punished in a division where the bottom half defends deeper and better.
Vibe check: Brace for impact
Schumacher has spent the summer hosing down expectations, which is the right move. This is a thoughtful club for whom staying up would be a genuine win, and there is a case that the clarity itself is protective. Coherent identity, coherent strategy, no one pretending. Schumacher’s own Stoke experience, nine months and sacked, is a reminder of how fast this level can turn on a young manager.
On the pitch
The creative burden last season fell almost entirely on Amario Cozier-Duberry, eight goals and eleven assists on ninety-seven shots, and he has gone back to his parent club. Mason Burstow’s twelve goals were also a loan. Schumacher’s late-July admission that the forward areas remain short is a direct reference to both. Josh Sheehan led the club in expected assists at 5.16 while collecting only four actual ones, which is the classic reading of a creator whose finishers are not finishing. Sam Dalby ended as top scorer across all competitions with fourteen and came through when it counted. George Johnston played every available minute at centre-back.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them just above the relegation zone in 19th. That would be a huge win for Bolton, so I’m also a believer, and have the same.
Norwich City
Belief Score: −1.3 | Manager: Philippe Clement | Players to watch: Andre Brooks
One burning question
The owner says top two. The fanbase remembers October. Who is right?
First, some context…
Norwich hold an unusual distinction, shared only with Burnley: six separate spells in the second tier, the most of any English club. This is a yo-yo club in the purest available sense, and the Delia Smith and Michael Wynn-Jones era is the reason it is baked so deep. Twenty-eight years, six promotions, six relegations, fifteen managers. Daniel Farke went up in 2019 and again in 2021, and both were followed immediately by relegation. The most recent Premier League stay lasted a single season.
That era ended in 2024, when Smith and Wynn-Jones sold to Norfolk FB Holdings, the group led by Mark Attanasio, who also owns the Milwaukee Brewers. They reduced to a ten per cent holding and left the board by October 2024. Twenty-eight years of local, famously frugal, community-embedded ownership giving way to American investment is not a footnote, and the fanbase is still processing it as an identity shift rather than a transaction.
Attanasio’s first full season in sole control started badly enough that the word used at the time was disastrous. Off-field discontent aimed at sporting director Ben Knapper, results sliding toward relegation form, real pressure on Liam Manning. The ownership publicly backed Manning, on the record, and then sacked him anyway when the results did not turn.
That decision is the single event doing the most work in the trust score of −8, and it turned out to be right. Philippe Clement took 1.81 points per game across thirty-one Championship matches, and only Southampton took more points than Norwich across the second half of the season. Only Millwall conceded fewer. Ninth place, and a final-day defeat at Hull that left them outside the play-offs on other results rather than on merit.
So the gap. Attanasio went on BBC Radio Norfolk after that Hull defeat and set the target for this season not as the play-offs but as the top two, stating plainly that failing to reach the Premier League within five years of his takeover would be a personal failure. That is a remarkable thing to say in print this early. It is also being read by a fanbase that spent last October bracing for a relegation fight, and whose honest answer to whether they believe is: more than we did in the autumn, considerably less than the owner apparently does.
Vibe check: Cautiously energised
Whiplash produces a very specific kind of optimism. Norwich supporters went from relegation-tier anxiety to nine points clear and within touching distance of the play-offs inside a single season, and they know exactly how close it came to going the other way. They are also watching Birmingham’s Knighthead and Wrexham’s Reynolds with open interest, because those are the comparisons for what their own version of new ownership becomes.
On the pitch
Ninth on sixty-five points, nineteen wins and nineteen defeats, and a goal difference of only plus seven. That last number is the honest one. This was not a vintage Norwich side that underachieved; it was a genuinely middling team that found a level in the second half of the season and rode it to the fringe of the play-offs. The split tells the story the trust section already sketched: Norwich took more points away from home than at Carrow Road, thirty-five to thirty, which is unusual and not entirely flattering, and the record was built out of a wretched autumn and a strong spring rather than anything consistent across the year. The five-nil at West Brom and the four-two at Bristol City in the closing weeks are the Clement version of the team. The run of defeats through October and November was the other one.
The goals are where the caution lives. Sixty-three scored is fine, not frightening, and more to the point they came from a young and scattered cast rather than one dependable centre-forward. Jovon Makama top-scored with ten, which is a good return for a twenty-one-year-old and a slightly worrying one for a promotion hopeful, because the sides that go up almost always have someone in the high teens. Josh Sargent has that level in him, seven goals in the equivalent of twenty-one full matches, but he managed only twenty-three appearances all season, and his availability is the single biggest swing factor in the attack. The genuine curiosity is Mo Touré: nine goals in the equivalent of six and a half matches, a rate that is either a small-sample mirage or the most interesting young player at the club, and the season will decide which.
The spine is steadier than the finishing. Vladan Kovačević kept eight clean sheets at a 67.4 per cent save rate and played every league minute bar ninety. Kenny McLean captained the side through almost all of it and led the team in crosses. Into that, Andre Brooks arrives from Sheffield United with six goals from the right, brought in to add a threat Norwich lacked and, the club hopes, to cover some of the creativity lost when Marcelino Núñez faded out of the picture. It is a squad with a solid base, a promising spread of young attackers, and no proven twenty-goal man, which is precisely the profile of a team its owner is calling top two and its fanbase is calling, with some justification, a work in progress.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them in not quite in the top two, but in the playoffs, finishing seventh. I have the same.
Bristol City
Belief Score: −1.1 | Manager: Michael Skubala | Players to watch: Dom Ballard, Jason Knight, Sam Tickle
One burning question
Is mid-table enough, or is there (finally) something more here?
First, some context…
Bristol City are the most symmetrical club in the Championship. Nothing in their history is heavy enough to weigh them down, and nothing about their circumstances is unlikely enough to lift them up. The two forces sit within a whisker of each other, both almost exactly on the division average, alongside an ownership picture that is faintly positive. What they carry into this season is a genuinely open present, which is rarer in this division than it sounds.
The history is modest by design rather than accident. A single top-flight window from 1976 to 1980, immediately followed by four consecutive relegations that took the club from the First Division to the Fourth in four seasons, one of the steepest falls in English football, and liquidation in 1982. No major trophy in the club’s history. This is not a club whose identity was ever built on top-flight expectation.
Since coming up from League One in 2014-15, City have been a Championship fixture, and this will be their twelfth consecutive season in the second tier without ever seriously threatening the top two. The closest brush was Liam Manning’s unlikely late charge in 2024-25, ending in a play-off semi-final defeat to Sheffield United.
The resources are real. The Lansdown family, through Pula Sports, have covered operating losses since 2014 to a cumulative figure reported above £250 million, roughly £20 million a year, which is significant even by Championship subsidy standards. Ashton Gate holds 27,000 after a £45 million redevelopment and is one of the better-regarded grounds outside the Premier League. Attendances sit consistently above 22,000. There is hardly any crisis energy anywhere near this football club.
Last season did carry one wobble, though: Gerhard Struber appointed on a three-year deal before the season, removed on 27 March with the club mid-table, and Roy Hodgson taking interim charge at seventy-eight to guide them to twelfth. A three-year contract lasting barely half a season is not disqualifying, but it is not nothing.
What lifts the number, and what makes this club interesting for the first time in years, is the summer. Michael Skubala arrives on a three-year contract one month after winning the League One title with Lincoln by twelve points, with a twenty-nine-game unbeaten run inside it. Poaching a manager directly from a newly promoted rival, weeks after his title win, is a signal of high intent.
So the question is the one this club has been able to avoid for a decade. Twelve seasons of comfortable, well-run mid-table is its own kind of story, even without trauma attached. The ownership has money, the ground is ready, the club has been stable for ten years, and now there is a manager whose most recent credential is directly relevant to the job of getting out of the middle. Everything is in position.
Vibe check: Prepare for launch
The framing among supporters is not relief or rescue, because nothing needed rescuing. It is opportunity, which is a much less common mood in this division and a considerably more fragile one.
On the pitch
Skubala’s Lincoln side won a division by twelve points playing a specific and coherent way, and the first real question is how much of it survives contact with better players and higher expectations.
What he actually does is worth knowing, because it is unusually well defined for a manager at this stage of a career. The base is a 4-2-3-1, but the distinctive habit is changing shape inside matches rather than between them, so a side that defends in a 4-4-2 might attack in a 3-5-2 depending on what the opposition are trying to protect. Out of possession he wants counter-pressing and immediate aggression to win the ball back. In possession he wants vertical, direct football through the middle rather than sterile circulation around the outside. He talks about controlling the axis, by which he means the centre of the pitch, and he is unusually serious about set pieces, on the reasoning that a third of goals at every level of the game come from them. There is also a futsal inheritance in there from his time running the England programme, mostly visible in the spacing and in how quickly he wants the first pass forward to happen.
The rest is method. Everything is data-led and everything is meant to be aligned, on-pitch with off-pitch, analysis with sport science, and he is explicit that success comes from the training week rather than the Saturday. He is also explicit that the coach has to meet the project, which is why he took Lincoln rather than a bigger job that was less stable. Bristol City is a considerably bigger job. Whether it is the same kind of stable is the thing to watch.
The Manning near-miss showed the ceiling exists when the pieces align.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them in 13th. I am far more optimistic, and have them right in the playoff picture in 6th place.
Lincoln City
Belief Score: −0.5 | Managers: Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw (joint) | Players to watch: Tendayi Darikwa, Jack Moylan
One burning question
Can good vibes be enough to keep a team up?
First, some context…
Lincoln City hold the highest institutional trust score in the Championship at +40. Above Wrexham. Above Millwall. Above everyone. They also have the second-lowest inherited expectation in the division at 14.5, the second-highest miracle coefficient at 71.8, and a belief score that lands at almost exactly zero.
That is not a contradiction. It is the model doing precisely what it was built to do. A club the framework believes in institutionally and doubts competitively, in almost equal measure, with the two cancelling out to nothing.
Let’s start with the improbability, because it is genuine. Lincoln’s only sustained second-tier spell ended in 1961. Sixty-five years ago. Most supporters watching this August have never seen their club play at this level. In between there was relegation out of the Football League entirely in 2010-11 and six seasons in non-league, administration in 2002 when the ITV Digital deal collapsed, and a climb back that ran National League title in 2016-17 under the Cowley brothers, an FA Cup quarter-final as the first non-league side there in 103 years, the EFL Trophy in 2018, the League Two title in 2019, and then seven consecutive League One seasons before last year’s 103-point title.
The city is around 100,000 people. LNER Stadium, still Sincil Bank to everyone who matters, holds 10,669, comfortably the smallest ground in the division. The gap in broadcast revenue between League One and the Championship is one of the steepest in English football, and Lincoln are stepping across it with the smallest budget in the division.
Now the trust, and the specific thing that earned it. Ron Fowler, who came in citing the David and Goliath appeal of the club, told the BBC in January that you cannot compete with the big dogs by doing what they do, and that his ownership strategy is based on sanity, given how much insanity there is in sports ownership now. Which sounds like a line until you look at what happened in June. Skubala won the title and left for Bristol City within a month. Lincoln did not go to market. Within thirty minutes of confirming his departure they announced his own assistants, Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw, as joint head coaches. Director of football Jez George framed it directly: the title-winning season had dispelled the idea that a football club needs a single dictatorial voice at the front of the room.
That is a club making an institutional statement at the exact moment a less confident one would have panicked into a marquee external hire.
The open question, which the number does not yet price, is that joint head coaches is a genuinely rare structure at this level, and the goodwill Skubala would have carried into a difficult August does not automatically transfer. The trust is in the institution. Whether it holds for the two men now carrying it is what the season tests.
Vibe check: Quietly proud
The Skubala departure landed as a mixed feeling rather than a betrayal. Public thanks on both sides, no rancour, and he still left a month after the trophy for a direct rival. Supporters understand the football logic without enjoying the timing. What steadies the mood is that Cohen and Shaw were visible throughout the title run. This is not an unknown quantity holding the fort. It is the same staff continuing the same work under new titles.
On the pitch
Survival, stated plainly and understood by everyone, is the clear goal. Finishing outside the bottom three on a 10,669 capacity and the smallest budget in the division is this season’s version of success, and quite rightly so.
What earned the promotion is worth reading closely, because it is a genuinely Skubala-shaped set of numbers. The goals came from everywhere rather than from one man: Reeco Hackett-Fairchild and Jack Moylan led the way with eleven each, but Robert Street added ten, and Freddie Draper and Ben House seven apiece, and even Tendayi Darikwa, the captain and a defender, chipped in six. Eighty-three league goals spread across a squad rather than banked in a single striker is the system-over-stars idea made concrete, and it is also the thing most likely to be exposed a division up, where the individual quality required to score is higher and the spread of it thinner.
The foundation, though, was the back of the team. Lincoln conceded forty-one goals across forty-six matches, the meanest defence in the division, behind George Wickens in goal, who kept nineteen clean sheets at a 69.4 per cent save rate. That is the defensive stability Skubala talked about inheriting and protecting, and it is the single most transferable asset the club carries up with it, because low-block resilience travels across divisions in a way that free-flowing attacking numbers do not. The other number that ought to frighten opponents is the home record: eighteen wins, four draws, one defeat, fifty-eight of the club’s 103 points won at Sincil Bank. A 10,669 capacity does not sound like a fortress until you see that Lincoln lost there once all year.
The caveat sits over all of it in bold: this was League One. The gap to the Championship is the steepest revenue and quality jump in English football, and a spread of seven-goal contributors in the third tier does not automatically become a spread of survival-grade contributors in the second. But the shape of the promotion, mean at the back, plural in attack, unbeatable at home, is exactly the shape a newly promoted club would want to carry into a relegation fight.
Prediction
Bookmakers do not believe, and have them picked in last place. I think there’s more there, perhaps romantically, and have them just escaping relegation in 21st.
Burnley
Belief Score: +1.5 | Manager: Nicky Hayen | Players to watch: Zian Flemming, Josh Cullen, Lyle Foster
One burning question
Burnley have worked out how to win this division. So why are fans so worried?
First, some context…
Burnley are the first club in this entire countdown to sit above the line, which means belief is now compounding in their favour rather than working against them. Hold that thought.
The football club is one of the genuinely storied institutions in the English game. Founding member in 1888. Two league titles, 1921 and 1960. FA Cup in 1914. One of only five clubs to have won all four professional divisions, alongside Preston, Portsmouth, Sheffield United and Wolves, which is an achievement and also, if you think about it for a second, a slightly ominous one. A serious youth academy through the fifties and sixties, until the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961 made it structurally impossible for a small-town club to compete.
And this is a small town. Ninety thousand people in East Lancashire without a broad regional catchment. A genuinely civic football club, and one that spent ninety-six per cent of its history owned by local businessmen and supporters.
The modern identity is Sean Dyche’s, and it is the rare case of an identity that actually took root: work ethic, compactness, defiance, punching up. It threaded a needle between hard-scrabble character and effective football, and it lives in the fanbase now independent of whoever is in the dugout.
Which brings us to the question the supporters are actually asking. Listen to The Clarets and what you hear is not fear of relegation. It is a worry that the club’s identity has started yo-yoing alongside the divisions. Or, put more sharply: is Burnley’s real identity that they dominate when there is nothing to lose and struggle when they have to hold on?
Then there is the ownership, and I want to be careful here. Alan Pace and ALK Capital took over in December 2020, the first time Burnley had been run by anyone other than local businessmen and supporters. The analytical claim is not that the ALK model was risky. It is that it was mechanically wrong for the sport.
A leveraged buyout borrows to buy an asset, puts the debt on the asset, services it from cashflow, and exits at a higher valuation. It works when revenue is stable. Football revenue is not stable, it is bimodal. Premier League clubs generate roughly £120 to £160 million in broadcast income. Championship clubs generate £6 to £8 million. That is a twenty-fold swing on a single sporting outcome. You cannot leverage-buyout a yo-yo club, because the debt is constant and the revenue is not.
Burnley were entirely debt-free before December 2020. The debt ALK took on to buy the club now sits on the club’s own balance sheet, which means Burnley are underwriting the risk of their own acquisition. If it works, ALK extract value. If it does not, the club and the town carry the cost.
The 2024-25 accounts show what that looks like when the sporting outcome turns. Turnover down 46.3 per cent, from £133.6 million to £71.7 million. A post-tax loss of £28.5 million, following £24.9 million the year before. The £59 million profit on player sales is the only reason the numbers work at all; without it the pre-tax loss approaches £88 million. Wages at 114 per cent of turnover, in a division below the one those wages were built for. Net current liabilities nearly trebled to £83.7 million. Total interest-bearing debt at £142.4 million.
And then the part that stops you. Auditors BDO LLP inserted a material uncertainty related to going concern paragraph into the filing. That is not a routine footnote. That is an auditor formally recording that the club’s ability to keep operating is uncertain. Solvency now depends on continuous player trading and on cash injections from parent company Velocity Capital, which already owes Burnley £80.99 million through the intercompany account. Burnley’s solvency depends on money from a company that already owes Burnley eighty million pounds. That is the loop, and that is what the auditor is flagging.
In fairness to ALK, and this needs saying or the whole thing reads as an anti-American hit job: they have backed the club. They paid the compensation to bring Vincent Kompany in from Manchester City. They did not strip the squad after the 2022-23 promotion. Pace is not lying when he says he wants Burnley to succeed. The problem is not the decisions made inside the deal. The problem is the deal.
It is worth naming the distinction against Watford, at the other end of this countdown. Watford is an owner problem, a club subordinated to another club in a network. Burnley is a structure problem. Both damage trust. Only one of them is the auditor’s problem.
Vibe check: Confident, with a hum underneath
This is a club that knows how to win the Championship, and there is a real argument that dominance at this level is the most reliable thing Burnley possess. The unease is not about the football. It never has been. Burnley are going to be the retrospective test case for the Independent Football Regulator, not because anyone has done anything illegal, but because the shape of what happened in December 2020 is precisely what the regulator was created to prevent.
On the pitch
Last season was a Premier League relegation, and not a narrow one. Twenty-two points, nineteenth, seventy-five goals conceded, and a shot count that tells the story without help: opponents had 636 attempts to Burnley’s 355, week after week of a side pinned in its own half and hanging on. Only Wolves, also down, were worse. Martin Dúbravka faced better than five shots on target a game and still finished with four clean sheets all year. This was not a team unlucky to go down. It was a team that belonged where it finished.
Two players kept it from being a humiliation. Zian Flemming top-scored with eleven in barely twenty starts’ worth of minutes, better than a goal every other game, and Jaidon Anthony added eight from the left. Almost everything Burnley made ran through those two.
But the on-pitch story this summer is not last season. It is the sound of a squad being sold for parts. Maxime Estève to Leipzig for twenty-five million. Loum Tchaouna to Coventry for twenty-three. Jaidon Anthony, the eight-goal winger, to Brentford for seventeen and a half. Luca Koleosho to Paris FC for fourteen. Ugochukwu, Dúbravka, Ward-Prowse, all gone. Departures north of a hundred million against arrivals of twenty-nine, and if the shape of that looks familiar it should, because it is the exact mechanism the accounts described. The fifty-nine million in player-trading profit that kept last year’s numbers upright was never a one-off. It is the operating model. The auditor wrote that solvency depends on continuous player trading, and here, in real time, is the continuous player trading.
Which leaves Nicky Hayen, appointed in July on a three-year deal, to win this division with what remains. Flemming is the one proven goalscorer still standing and the obvious man to build around. Josh Cullen anchors the midfield and wears the armband. Lyle Foster gives a second forward option. It is a younger, thinner, cheaper squad than the one that went up two years ago, assembled to a budget the structure now demands rather than the ambition the fanbase still carries. The pattern says Burnley are good enough to win the Championship. The balance sheet is quietly asking them to do it for less.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them in fourthm, which honestly, to me is a bit of a sign of the lack of faith outlined above. I’m doubling down on that lack of faith, and have them missing out of the playoffs in 9th.
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