MURRAYFIELD – It’s safe to say Newcastle United 2.0 remains a work in progress.
The word on the ground is that new boss Matthias Jaissle has made a strong start at St James’ Park. Behind the scenes, the work has been sharp; the sessions – the ones he’s been able to fit in between games – are fresh and intense.
He has projected confidence without over-promising and has had a word and a handshake with everyone at the club, from the doorman to the director of football. “A people person” is how one source describes him.
But even a manager that Newcastle believe will become one of the continent’s elite head coaches in time can only do so much with a squad that feels short of the quality required to hit the club’s goal of returning to European competition this term.
Fans have been prepared to buy into the Jaissle revolution but he needs help. A comprehensive 3-1 defeat at Murrayfield to a battle-hardened Everton – albeit with the usual pre-season caveats – was chastening. Incomings are needed as soon as possible.
Newcastle lost 3-1 to Everton at Murrayfield (Photo: Getty)
“You’re smart enough to see the needs in the squad. We handle these things internally. We are aware of what we need,” Jaissle said afterwards. It was direct and dumped responsibility at Ross Wilson’s door for the reinforcements the club desperately need.
There is little disagreement internally. One insider admitted there was a need to “massively improve” in certain areas and that is no understatement.
Two full-backs, a Bruno Guimaraes replacement and a forward capable of putting the pressure on Yoane Wissa and Will Osula seem like the minimum they need. The expectation is at least three will join. A fourth is not necessarily guaranteed.
There are 19 days until the transfer deadline and 10 days until Liverpool arrive for the Premier League opener. That does not feel like much time, although Wilson, the club’s influential sporting director, projects calm.
They are working on “multiple” deals for an experienced holding midfielder – much-needed for “Jaissleball” to click – and a right-back.
The word is a breakthrough on at least one is close and news could coincide with the weekend double-header against Bayer Leverkusen and Strasbourg. “Could be,” was Jaissle’s cryptic answer when asked if anything was imminent.
Benfica’s Amar Dedic – another potential recruit without a minute of Premier League experience – is among those being considered.
Benfica right-back Dedic is a target for Newcastle (Photo: Getty)
There is clearly money to spend – £150m of headroom, even with Uefa’s suffocating financial rules taken into account – but Newcastle sources talk of being “strategic” and “measured”.
Good clubs do not panic in the transfer market, we are told. Jaissle’s appointment – and quick-fire assessment of the squad – has held up business a bit.
That is all well and good. But Newcastle now need to do business to show they mean business.
That much was clear in the Scottish capital, where a strong start did not hide a few nagging concerns. Chief among them is the form of Sven Botman, an influential player earmarked for a big role this season under Jaissle.
It was his mistake that allowed Iliman Ndiaye to race clear in the run-up to Everton’s first goal – not the first time he has been found wanting in Newcastle’s pre-season campaign.
Pre-season form can be a mirage but Botman is coming off some serious injuries.
The other big anxiety is where the goals are coming from. The departure of Gordon and Guimaraes has shaved a lot of last season’s firepower from this squad and while Wissa looks sharp, he still missed chances in a first-half purple patch.
Osula can blow hot and cold, while Nick Woltemade, a second-half substitute, was fairly anonymous.
On the plus side, Bazoumana Toure appears to be a real find and, along with Sean Steur and Lukas Hornicek, looks ready to start against Liverpool. Newcastle evidently need a few more in their ilk.
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After a bruising summer, the Fabrizio Romano “journalism” show appears to be coming to an end.
The 33-year-old Italian has become the unofficial face of the transfer market over the past decade – a digital explosion that has netted him 135 million followers and a considerable amount of cash.
Yet in a cryptic LinkedIn post, Romano hinted that he is about to change career all together.
“I’m probably not gonna continue into the transfer market industry as I’m doing right now for longer,” he wrote. “It’s time to change the approach, the view… but this will be another topic soon, after the transfer window closes.”
“Journalism” is used in quote marks above because Romano is considered by his critics to be an influencer, a marketeer or an aggregator, rather than an objective reporter.
The i Paper has spoken to sources across the game for a comprehensive profile of Romano.
It shows how his influence has added millions to transfer fees – and what agents, clubs and his rivals really think of him.
Allegations of plagiarism
Romano spent the World Cup final posting banal information about players like Lamine Yamal (Photo: Getty)
Romano had a great World Cup, at least in terms of earning advertising cash from a global fast food giant, a betting firm, and a cryptocurrency “prediction market” that accepts wagers on everything from sport to the outcomes of wars.
With the transfer window back in full swing, the rise of arguably the world’s most popular football journalist has appeared at times unstoppable. He is adored by his most devoted fans, who believe he is the best source of transfer exclusives, but he comes with substantial baggage.
Allegations have been levelled against him about plagiarism and his complex relationships with agents, and his commercial activities with controversial entities, not least the Saudi Arabian government, an arm of which he promoted in an obsequious video earlier this year. He has also earned cash from promoting Fifa, beer and other products.
What is perhaps surprising about Romano’s output for someone with his reputation is quite how banal much of it is. Consider what his X account was posting around the recent World Cup final. It was, effectively, an aggregator account, posting bland information – available all over the internet – of Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal arriving at the stadium, and “news” that Spain had won, and video clips of the post-match celebrations or sadness.
Romano is probably best known for his transfer “exclusives” but he has been accused of copying other “ITK” (in the know) accounts and journalists.
In 2022, for example, Marcel van der Kraan, the head of sport at the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf accused Romano of lifting exclusives from other reporters, including by his colleague Mike Verweij. In summer 2022, Verweij reported that an Ajax player, Antony, had missed training, a scoop that Romano reported as an “exclusive” two minutes later. The only response to these allegations from Romano was a thumbs up and smiling emoji.
The i Paper asked Romano a long list of questions in writing about his work and he failed to respond to any question or answer any calls.
A key question around the 2026 World Cup is whether Romano made a factual error around England star Elliot Anderson’s imminent move from Nottingham Forest to Manchester City because he initially copied information from someone else, or just had an inaccurate source.
On 25 June, he posted on Instagram that Anderson was moving to City for £130m. That was wrong. In fact it was later confirmed Anderson would move for £116m with no add-ons, something Romano himself then posted on X.
When challenged on social media why he changed his story within hours, he said other media were originally reporting the same £130m figure as him, which suggests he either had an unreliable source in the first place or was simply copying the reporting from others.
Blurring lines between journalism and PR
Romano poses with Ashley Cole in the Heineken tent at the Champions League final in Budapest (Photo: Getty)
Romano has also been accused of accepting money to make social media posts about footballers, from their agents or others close to them), to raise their profiles. A journalist in the US, Jose Roberto Nunez, alleged Romano had posted innocuous “news” about Philadelphia player Chris Donovan getting a new contract, for a fee of $1,100 (£800). The i Paper asked Romano to comment but he did not respond.
Romano also appears to have a relationship with a Glasgow agency, StormSportsSX, with Romano posting about low-profile players such as Josh Mulligan moving to Hibs from Dundee. The agency has boasted of “a close network of trusted journalists to advance our clients’ interest in the media”.
Asked by The i Paper if there had ever been a direct cash incentive to promote such deals, Romano did not answer. Similarly he was less than clear about his relationships with players at clubs in 2024 after it was reported that he was making social media posts for cash, not least in Scandinavia.
Norwegian club Valerenga FC told journalist Andreas Selliaas that it had been approached about such an offer by an intermediary linked to Romano, called Memmo.
Romano denied to Selliaas that he has ever received money for tweeting about potential transfers or the promotion of players.
Backlash from rival journalists
Romano has proved an unpopular figure with his rival journalists (Photo: Getty)
Romano has had a number of high-profile run-ins with journalists from the mainstream media about his methods.
Florian Plettenberg, a reporter at Sky Germany, recently accused Romano of “fail[ing] to credit the original source in a large share of your Instagram posts” and deleting stories that turned out not to be true. In response, Romano accused Plettenberg of “fake news”.
Luke Edwards of The Telegraph also took Romano to task about his reporting of Julian Alvarez’s supposed desire to leave Atletico and move to Barcelona.
Edwards said Romano helped “start the fire by excitedly reporting the interest. Add kindling to ensure it keeps burning by constantly tweeting the same thing with the words changed or moved into a different order”.
There was a public spat, with Edwards saying Romano has no relationship with Newcastle United because, unlike other clubs, “they know what you do”. Romano did not respond to this allegation.
The i Paper has spoken to multiple executives at English top-flight clubs and most view Romano as “an agitator”, often playing a role for a player or agent in seeking a move.
“Agents have traditionally played this role themselves, going direct to media contacts,” one source said. “But now Romano just tells 135 million people, which creates waves, and pressure.”
One executive from a mid-table Premier League club told The i Paper that a “Big Six” club wanted one of their players and involved Romano in “promoting” this link – although we have no evidence a fee was involved.
According to the source, Romano reported the move as a “done deal” based on information from the buying club, despite the transfer not having been agreed.
The buying club ultimately paid more than intended, while the selling club received a higher fee than expected. “[It] didn’t make us happy Romano was involved but we got millions more than expected,” the source said.
‘The most disgusting thing he’s ever done’
Romano incorrectly posted that Christian Atsu had been found alive (Photo: Getty)
Arguably Romano’s most controversial event was reporting that former Chelsea, Everton and Newcastle player Christian Atsu was alive after an earthquake in Turkey.
One correspondent and former associate of Romano claimed “this was probably the most disgusting thing he’s ever done”.
On his Facebook page, Romano told his followers on 7 February 2023 that Atsu was alive and in hospital after being found with a foot injury and breathing difficulties. Actually Atsu was dead, and his body was found on 18 February.
An actual journalist, with any scintilla of credibility, would have reported that Atsu was alive “according to” whoever provided that information. But Romano instead stated as fact that Atsu was alive, and his family took hope from this declaration from an “authoritative” source, apparently close to footballers.
While many people find Romano’s work distasteful, and his adverts for so many companies to be crude, he will be front and centre during the rest of this summer’s transfer window, entertaining and informing his many millions of fans.
What the future holds is less clear, with a transfer into straightforward PR apparently on the cards, after he recently incorporated a new company in Italy which will “specialise in marketing and sponsorship activities”.
As the man himself might say, using a catchphrase he has been accused of nicking from someone else: “Here we go!”
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It is as if everyone at Tottenham Hotspur has suffered a collective bout of amnesia of late.
Some of it has been justified. When you have just watched two full Premier League campaigns of non-stop suffering and nearly been relegated, why wouldn’t fans be excited about making signings for £100m?
And supporters should be hopeful. They live to enjoy because they never know when they will have to live to merely endure again. That shouldn’t be the moxy with which the operators of a football club do their business, however.
On Monday evening, Tottenham announced they had tied Micky van de Ven to a new contract which will run until 2031. It was reported in his native Netherlands that he will earn €75m (£64m) across the length of that deal, roughly translating to £240,000 a week. This brings him in line with the club’s newest set of top earners, alongside Sandro Tonali, Conor Gallagher and Xavi Simons, all of whom were signed within the last 12 months.
It’s a clear pivot in strategy from Spurs to up their wage bill in order to beat rivals to key targets – Arsenal and Manchester City were keen on Tonali, Aston Villa thought they had Gallagher and Chelsea were interested in Simons.
The Dutchman was sent off during last season’s 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace (Photo: Getty)
But it doesn’t make as much sense to greatly reward Van de Ven for the three years he has had at Spurs so far, let alone off the back of his most self-destructive one.
Tottenham’s troubling results last season were largely down to the coaching of their ill-fated managers Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor, though the players who didn’t fall victim to their injury crisis mustn’t escape blame either.
Van de Ven, once infamous for paper-thin hamstrings, started more games than any teammate with 45. He captained the team 18 times having been promoted into the first-team’s leadership group by Frank. Spurs finished 17th, again.
Even if you remove Tottenham’s final position from the equation, Van de Ven’s performances were inconsistent, particularly after his early-season scoring surge. Most notably, he got himself sent off in a 3-1 loss at home to Crystal Palace in March, which signalled to the world Spurs were serious relegation candidates.
With Cristian Romero – Tottenham’s most disgraceful captain since Sol Campbell – set to be sold, Van de Ven will become the best outright defender at the club. Still, that did not require Spurs to hand him a ludicrously lavish new contract, especially given his previous deal still had three years left to run.
If Van de Ven is your top centre-back on £240,000 a week, where are you going? Is this real ambition or simply trying to one-up the previous regime built on frugality? Who else was going to pay him anywhere near that salary?
Most of Tottenham’s summer business screams that they simply don’t want to be associated with the Daniel Levy era any longer.
Van de Ven is still a decent player with scope to improve quickly. Were he to have been shopped around, a fair few of Europe’s elite would have shown some level of interest. The hope with him is that, at 25, his best years are still ahead of him.
But he is hugely reliant on pace and there is little evidence he can be an above-average box defender. Those are uncertainties that should have put the frighteners on those in Spurs’ risk management department.
This is all just another sign that Tottenham are trying to draw a line under the 2025-26 season without acknowledging or attempting to understand why it happened in the first place.
It is not only spending which has been a problem for Spurs, but spending wisely. They are continuing to show they deserve the same level of trust in the transfer market as you would give to a five-year-old with a £50 note in a sweet shop.
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The strength of this season’s Championship is arguably best illustrated by West Bromwich Albion’s promotion prospects.
The ultimate yo-yo team of the 2000s, the boing boing Baggies have recently lost that spring, last playing in the Premier League in 2021.
And last season, a two-point deduction contributed towards West Brom’s joint-lowest finish since 1993 – 21st in the second tier – and meant they only narrowly escaped relegation. They would have gone down had Leicester City not been deducted six points themselves.
It made for a bleak campaign featuring three permanent managers, with chairman Shilen Patel going on to apologise to supporters in June for a “historically poor” campaign.
But survival was crucial and though promotion appears to be a distant goal, at last there is some hope under head coach James Morrison’s watch.
The state of West Brom’s finances
Albion fans will hope their financial woes are behind them (Photo: Getty)
West Brom are in a “significantly healthier financial position” heading into the new campaign, according to football finance expert Professor Rob Wilson.
The scale of Bilkul’s repair job has been substantial since its takeover in February 2024, and though it was unable to prevent last season’s breach, the outlook is brighter thanks to Patel’s cash injection.
“On another points deduction, I’d regard the risk as substantially lower,” Wilson says.
“The two-point deduction last season related to the three-year period ending June 2025, with Albion saying the breach was less than £2m. Crucially, the £37.6m 2023-24 loss now rolls out of the calculation.”
The Championship, like the Premier League, have switched to squad cost ratio for the upcoming campaign, meaning clubs must operate under a new financial framework.
The 2026-27 allowance means clubs can spend 85 per cent of their income on player and manager-related costs.
“We are comfortable that we can execute our plan within the new regulations,” Patel said.
What West Brom can spend
Fourteen Championship clubs have outspent West Brom this summer transfer window, with the arrivals of Felix Horn Myhre, Barney Stewart, Jimmy-Jay Morgan and Nolan Galves for a combined £6m proof of their search for a bargain (Morgan’s fee could rise from £1m to £4m with add-ons).
They then confirmed the arrival of France U20 midfielder Rabby Nzingoula from Strasbourg on Tuesday for an undisclosed fee.
West Brom’s prospects of suddenly spending big are slim. Wilson estimates there is scope for another £3-6m to be spent but that will depend heavily on wages, deal structures and any further sales.
“They remain a Championship club that needs to be disciplined, but the financial picture is considerably more stable,” Wilson adds.
“There should be room for further recruitment, albeit probably in the low single-digit millions rather than a major spending spree.”
Possible transfer targets
After a loan spell at Wrexham last season, Issa Kabore has been linked with West Brom. Manchester City have loaned the right-back out seven times since he joined in 2020 with the 25-year-old yet to play for the club.
The free agent market is also a treasure trove and with Morrison recently addressing their need for new wingers, there are experienced options available.
Sunderland released Bertrand Traore this summer and for West Brom the forward would be comfortably more attainable than Raheem Sterling and Wilfried Zaha, who are both currently looking for work.
Adama Traore has become somewhat of a journeyman himself, but West Brom may be reluctant to add the former Wolverhampton Wanderers man to their ranks.
A return to the Hawthorns is also on the cards for goalkeeper Alex Palmer, who had left the club for Ipswich Town in 2025.
The 30-year-old lost the No 1 gloves to Christian Walton at Ipswich early last season, having started the first 10 Championship games before injury ruled him out for two months. Reports suggest Sunderland are also interested in the West Brom academy graduate.
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Hull City want to sign up to 10 new players before the summer transfer window closes, with head coach Sergej Jakirovic confirming the Premier League newcomers are still chasing a goalkeeper and centre-back with top-flight experience.
Jakirovic told The i Paper he expects five new arrivals by the end of the week, confirming that Australia international Lucas Herrington and Senegal international Nobel Mendy are undergoing medicals in Manchester.
The pair will join their new teammates in training on Thursday morning, with Jakirovic confident both can make an immediate impact given they have trained and played recently.
He also revealed that the club will “100 per cent” sign a goalkeeper after Jack Butland was ruled out for three months following an arm injury that requires surgery.
Newcastle United’s Nick Pope, who has been told he can leave St James’ Park, is understood to be one of the names under consideration.
Head coach Sergej Jakirovic has confirmed the club are targeting more experienced players this summer (Photo: Getty)
However, any deal could depend on wage demands, with Hull having to cut their cloth accordingly after a brush with financial fair play rules earlier in the summer.
The Tigers have endured a slightly chaotic few days and there is little sign of activity slowing down.
Hull ended their interest in Nice forward Mohamed-Ali Cho earlier this week, but Jakirovic admitted they could revive that move before the start of September.
The club also remain interested in Leeds United forward Joe Gelhardt, who played a key role in their promotion campaign last season.
Intriguingly, Jakirovic revealed Hull are also waiting for Premier League clubs to decide the futures of some of their promising young players, who could be made available on loan in the final days of the window.
With so much going on, it is no surprise that the 49-year-old – who has a deliciously dry sense of humour – joked that he wanted to cut our interview slot down from 20 minutes to 15 so he could get back on the phone to Hull’s recruitment team.
“I’m expecting at least five [new] players this week,” he said.
“And we need more than seven new players because we have seven players from the under-21 squad training with us, helping us in our sessions because of our [injury] problems.
“We are working a lot on recruitment [but] it’s very slow. Sometimes I’m very annoyed about that but overall I’m positive, I’m optimistic.
“The new arrivals we have signed are good players but I’m aware they will need time to get the new chemistry of the team. They have quality.”
Hull City have cooled their interest in Nice forward Mohamed-Ali Cho for now (Photo: Getty)
Hull begin their Premier League campaign against Manchester United in less than a fortnight, but Jakirovic insists the disruption is nothing new for the club.
The Tigers faced a similarly difficult situation 12 months ago while operating under a transfer embargo, yet went on to assemble a team that secured promotion at Wembley after a marathon Championship season.
“I knew it would be like this. We lost a lot of players. Because of our embargo we had a lot of loan players, they went back to their clubs and we had to sell players for financial reasons,” he said.
“It’ll be challenging, [a] difficult season, we all know that. I hope we will be good but it’s a lot of work ahead of us, especially in recruitment because we need players. In some positions we are very short.
“We are working on things but it’s not easy. Everyone thinks we have a lot of money but we have a responsibility because it’s not just about this season. We have to plan for other seasons. We have to spend our money wisely.”
Butland had been viewed as the answer to their goalkeeping issues, only for his injury to leave them needing another addition.
“Goalkeeper is a very big problem for us,” Jakirovic said.
“Jack found himself here and was very good, I was happy with him.”
“Right now we have three very good goalkeepers, but now after a medical check Jack needs surgery and the prediction is around 10-12 weeks so 100 per cent we need to take one more goalkeeper.”
Leeds United striker Joe Gelhardt might end up returning to the MKM Stadium after all (Photo: Getty)
Is Pope – who has been made available by Newcastle – an option?
“There are a few names,” he added.
“We need to decide who we will take. We will try to take a goalkeeper who has experience of the Premier League.
“We are discussing with the goalkeeper coach and will see what our decision is. It depends on money as well. It is always a problem.”
The prospect of re-signing Gelhardt is particularly appealing to Jakirovic, given the former’s familiarity with the club.
“He’s in the last year of his contract so maybe we should use this to buy him because ‘Joffy’ knows everything here,” he said.
“He knows us, we know him. He helped us a lot last season and was crucial in our season and was happy to be here. Maybe we will use this option.
“Others? We will see. All the big teams when they think about loaning out players they wait until the last week of the transfer window.”
Further defensive reinforcements are also deemed essential.
“We are chasing one more centre-back who has Premier League experience,” Jakirovic said.
“We need that, it’s very, very important. I know how big the gap is between the Championship and the Premier League. There’s a lot of examples of teams who go up and immediately go down.
“It’s difficult, there’s no easy games in the Premier League. We will see. Right now I’m looking at my team, how we can improve things and how we can be competitive in this league.”
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It was Bill Shankly who said that Jesus was the first socialist. The spirit of Anfield is, above all, the swelling chorus of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, whose words like much else associated with Liverpool came from the United States.
Jeff Bezos, who along with other billionaire chums Eduardo Saverin and Amit Bhatia are looking to buy into Anfield, is a very different kind of American to Oscar Hammerstein, a key player in the Hollywood anti-Nazi league, who wrote the words sang so passionately on the Kop. Bezos is a man who does walk alone, an alpha businessman who is now looking to buy his way into this great fortress of working-class socialism. The enemy, truly, are at the gates.
Except that the enemy own the fortress and have always owned it. Bezos will simply be the most obvious, glitzy and unapologetic of the stream of millionaires and billionaires who have wanted to be part of this extraordinary club.
During Shankly’s final two years at Anfield, the ones that produced the league title, the Uefa Cup and climaxed in the swaggering demolition of Newcastle United in the 1974 FA Cup final at Wembley, his chairman was Sir John Smith, who represented the quiet conservatism of the Merseyside business class.
There was considerable investment from the Moores family, who had made their millions with the Littlewoods football pools. Sir John Moores, who became chairman of Everton, was a Conservative councillor for Sefton, and Britain’s first billionaire. His nephew, David, became chairman of Liverpool.
An announcement confirming the deal is expected to come as early as this week (Photo: Getty)
Shankly worked in a city that was not especially socialist. Anfield stands in the Liverpool Walton constituency which in the February 1974 general election saw 31 per cent of the votes go to the Conservatives, who had held the seat when Shankly became manager in 1959.
The city was run by a Liberal-Conservative coalition council. Nobody votes Tory in Walton now – 3.5 per cent at the last election – but while the city swung to the left, the football club did not.
There was Graeme Souness appearing in Alan Bleasdale’s drama set in a city that had fallen apart, Boys from the Blackstuff. There is a film of Kevin Keegan on a private jet, turning down an invitation to join Margaret Thatcher to promote European sport because “my dad [who had been a miner] would kill me”. By then, Keegan was playing for Hamburg.
However, many of their teammates would have instinctively understood Bob Monkhouse when the comedian related his agent’s reaction after he appeared at a Conservative Party rally during the 1983 election. “Well done, Bob. You’ve just alienated half your audience.”
To become involved in party politics was poison. In any case, they mostly lived in Southport and Formby. Their horizons were the greens of Royal Birkdale golf club rather than the riots rolling down Upper Parliament Street in Toxteth, witnessed by the young Robbie Fowler, who would come out in support of the striking Liverpool dockers.
The Moores family continued to run Anfield until 2007 by which time the club’s fanbase was no longer representative of the city. Now just 21 per cent of season-ticket holders have a Liverpool postcode. For Everton it is 84.
Moores’s successors, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, were despised not because they were friends with George W Bush or because they were American or very rich, but because they were the wrong type of millionaire. The kind that loads the club with debt and uses its money to pay off their own loans. Their time was best summed up in a book by the journalist Brian Reade called An Epic Swindle.
The men who succeeded them, Fenway Sports Group, were the right kind of millionaires, who rebuilt Anfield, won titles and returned the European Cup to Merseyside. Whether Bezos and friends are the right kind of millionaire will depend on how much money they put in and how successfully it is spent.
There is no financial return that Liverpool can offer that would possibly interest Bezos. Liverpool are valued at a maximum of £4.3bn. The rise in the Amazon share price over two days in August made Bezos roughly that sum.
If he invests – and he has pulled out of two NFL deals in Seattle and Washington – it will be for what not even firing himself into space aboard a private rocket can give him. It will be for glory.
However, this is a Liverpool whose captain, Virgil van Dijk, claims are “a club in transition,” which is a footballer’s way of saying “a club on the brink”. Glory might be harder to come by than money for Bezos and, however it is funded, glory has been the only yardstick by which Liverpool has judged its millionaires.
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This Sunday, Burnley play West Ham at Turf Moor on the opening weekend of the Championship season and every home supporter who enters the ground with a spring in their step deserves an official state honour.
It is now 10 months since Turf Moor hosted a league win. You would say a lot has happened since, but it has mainly been different types of sorry defeats.
We know the Burnley dance by now: down, up, down, up, down.
Five seasons of flux and churn, buying half a new squad to compete in the Premier League and then selling half the old squad when that mission fails.
Kyle Walker says his team ‘have an obligation to put it right’ (Photo: Getty)
Last season was the most desolate by a distance. The Clarets were rotten from August to May. The misery seeped into the walls of the place and has left water damage.
“It’s something I didn’t like and it left a sour taste in my mouth,” Kyle Walker says about Burnley’s relegation.
“It’s something that I want to put right, not just for myself but for the fans who had to deal with last season and for the players who have stuck around.
“I think we have an obligation to put it right. It’s not just a responsibility – it’s our job. Things aren’t always going to go as planned.
“This season might not go as planned. It might not be as plain sailing and we all want it to be.
“But I feel with the quality, that’s what we should be doing: getting promoted and going back to the Premier League.”
Nicky Hayen is the man tasked with securing a third promotion in six years (Photo: PA)
Walker’s bullishness is unsurprising, but this has been an odd summer in Burnley.
The spine of last season’s starting XI – Maxime Esteve, Loum Tchaouna, Martin Dubravka, Lesley Ugochukwu, Florentino Luis, Jaidon Anthony – has left, but Burnley have signed only one first-team player.
The biggest saga of their summer surrounded the pursuit of Craig Bellamy, whose appointment was lined up before issues with personal terms surrounding the recruitment of other members of his Wales coaching staff.
Instead Burnley turned to Nicky Hayen, whose only experience outside of Belgian football was as manager of Haverfordwest County in the Cymru Premier in 2021-22.
After Burnley beat Notts County on penalties in the Carabao Cup first round last weekend, Hayen explained that it may take a couple of months for things to click.
A throwaway line, most likely, but one that comes laced with danger.
West Ham and Wolverhampton Wanderers are strong relegated sides – Middlesbrough and Southampton should be expected to compete at the top, too.
Owner Alan Pace has faced criticism from supporters over a lack of progress (Photo: Getty)
The problem with bouncing is that the resting place is only ever at the bottom.
The problem with Burnley’s bounce specifically? They really need to get promoted.
Supporters may have grown thoroughly sick of repeated Premier League beatings, but the money sure is better in the thinner air. And Burnley could do with the money.
This club was changed irrevocably in December 2020, when ALK Capital – led by Alan Pace – took 84 per cent of the shares. It was a debt-leveraged takeover, which meant that it was financed with borrowing secured against Burnley and its assets.
Burnley owed a lot of money overnight, were responsible for servicing the debt and that debt had interest. Think the Glazers and Manchester United. Think the thing that Premier League clubs voted to ban in 2023.
Burnley’s initial debt – and they had been entirely free of external debt before that – was £65m.
According to the latest accounts (that only cover up to the end of the 2024-25 season), that debt figure has grown to £142m.
As the excellent Swiss Ramble wrote, Burnley now have the fourth highest external debt figure in English football, behind Everton (shiny new stadium), Tottenham Hotspur (shiny new stadium) and Manchester United (again: Glazers).
External debt is manageable while the club is generating healthy revenue and achieving on the pitch – clearly the two go hand in hand.
But those same accounts revealed an annual operating loss of £75m, which was the worst in Burnley’s history by a distance.
Admittedly it covered a Championship season, when revenues are reduced, but then Burnley are back here again. It was the highest operating loss in the division.
Many fans still support their team week in, week out despite results (Photo: Getty)
And what do Burnley have to show for this growing external debt, and for these operating losses?
They were a top-half Premier League team the season before the takeover. Everything since has been an expensive struggle to achieve diminishing returns.
There are reasons to be less pessimistic, of course. Burnley have parachute payments, which give Championship clubs a significant competitive advantage.
They were also awarded £35m by an independent Premier League commission as compensation for losses suffered as a result of Everton breaking financial rules, which was a lovely bonus.
Perhaps the Burnley bounce still lives on and can be funded by the misfortune of others, just another fuzzy football take.
But as a neutral observer, you have to squint to see the causes for optimism here.
One of the most important seasons in Burnley’s history begins this weekend.
Fail to hit the ground running and the mood will turn toxic, not against players or the new manager (although they may be caught in the crossfire) but the architects of this era.
“I don’t think you have ever seen anyone like me,” Pace said when he took over at Turf Moor in 2020.
He was absolutely right – they hadn’t. Their football club has changed for ever. Fail to go up this season and they might really begin to see the results.
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