More managers lost their jobs in the Championship last season than in any other major league, in Britain or across Europe, and Sean Dyche is the last person to imagine that rejoining the fray from the Premier League will give him or his side any sort of advantage.
“I know the Championship very well,” the Burnley manager says. “I’ve played in it, managed in it, been promoted from it and now relegated back into it. It’s a tough, tough league and there are no guarantees for any club. We have lost some good players from last season too, so we are under no illusions. We are going to have to work really hard again.”
As if to underline the point, one of the players Burnley lost over the summer was the club captain Jason Shackell, and he joined Derby County. Dyche can just about cope with losing Danny Ings to Liverpool or Kieran Trippier to Spurs, but Derby are promotion rivals, and he has the strong sense that they and Middlesbrough are investing heavily in an attempt to get out of the division this time after narrowly missing out last season. “It’s obvious that Derby are giving it a real go, and Steve Gibson is backing Boro again, like he does year on year,” he says. “The money they have spent already is a statement of intent; some of the sums Championship clubs are paying are astronomical.”
Burnley were notably frugal in their approach to the Premier League last season, when they refused to be suckered into spending contests with clubs with much bigger budgets, and Dyche initially thought relegation might at least level out the playing field. “I’ve had to recalculate,” he says. “I’m stunned, to be honest, by some of the wage deals that are being struck in the Championship at the moment. Some clubs are offering players packages way ahead of what we were paying in the Premier League.”
Burnley have brought in the strikers Jelle Vossen and Chris Long over summer, from Genk and Everton respectively, signed Matt Lowton from Aston Villa and picked up the former Manchester United trainee Luke Hendrie from Derby.
Dyche is confident a few more players may be brought into the club before the end of the transfer window, though Burnley have no immediate plans to join the big spenders.
They open their Championship programme against Leeds at Elland Road on Saturday lunchtime with broadly the same squad that earned them promotion two years ago, give or take a goalscorer or two, and hopefully the same team spirit that has served them so well under Dyche.
They still have George Boyd, for instance, scorer of the goal that beat Manchester City last season, and the winger believes there is more to a successful squad than merely buying in new players. “We can see some clubs have been throwing their money around,” Boyd says. “Stewart Downing was a massive signing for Middlesbrough that shows the strength of the league, but no matter how much money you throw at promotion it won’t necessarily happen unless you have the right personnel and a strong group ethic.
“That’s what the manager has been good at building at Burnley. We all know each other, we all work for each other. Once you start splashing the cash around you can easily get that little divide between the new players and the old, but that won’t happen here. We have lost some players but have tried to replace them with people who can perform at this level and fit in with the rest of the group.”
There are more games in the Championship than the Premier League, an extra eight in a 46-match season, though Boyd almost sees that as a plus. “Playing Saturday and Tuesday tends to take its toll in the end, though to be honest we could have done with the games coming round a bit more often in the Premier League. With all the international breaks there was almost too long between games in the Premier League sometimes. You were always fresh but half the time you just wanted to stop waiting and get on with it.”
Inevitably, Boyd admits, much of the summer has been spent discussing what might have been, going over the dropped points and missed chances that might have led to Premier League survival, but now the new season is here all that has to stop.
“I don’t think you ever get your head round relegation, but the important thing is to set new goals and not dwell on it,” he says. “The sooner you squash all that disappointment and concentrate on the present the better. When you change your division your goals have to change too.”
The same applies to supporters, though as Dyche points out there are worse positions to be in than Burnley’s. For some clubs the terms “yo-yo” or “division one and a half” are not necessarily badges of failure but of ambition and achievement. “The fans here understand the reality,” Dyche says. “They get it, and I’m pleased about that. We had a fantastic season two years ago, last season was different again but exciting in its own way, and now we are back trying to do it all again. For clubs like Burnley it is all about striking the right balance, doing as much as you can, and I think the supporters appreciate that.”
All three clubs relegated from the Premier League last season start the Championship campaign with the same manager in place, perhaps recognising that continuity has some value and might even be preferred to knee-jerk reactions and expensive squad overhauls.
“I’d like to think that might be the case, speaking with my LMA [League Managers Association] hat on,” Dyche says. “But you only have to look at last season’s Championship to see it does not necessarily have a bearing on promotion. Watford got promoted with four managers, Bournemouth did it with one. Look at what happened to some of the other teams recently in the Premier League. Norwich have just gone back up, Wigan dropped out. There are no guarantees in this division, none at all.”
