At their best, Burnley under Sean Dyche became a team of stereotypes. They were a bunch of “proper”, British footballers defending the honour of their goal.
Turf Moor was a “difficult place to go”. Sean Dyche was “gruff and spiky”, treating most opposition players, managers and referees with the same tone as you might reserve for a cat caught defecating on your lawn.
Each time a manager spoke before an away trip to Burnley, you could transcribe the quotes before they had opened their mouths.
Some of these stereotypes were a little patronising and some a little unfair; almost all contained a strand of truth.
In their first three seasons after their promotion, Burnley regularly bruised expensive noses; they beat Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham and drew three times against Manchester United.
Their transfer policy was proudly domestic – “There’s a bit of a myth that you pre-suppose every European player is better than every English player,” Dyche said in 2019. Before Maxwell Cornet signed last summer, Burnley had gone 16 years without signing a foreign flair player.
And Burnley did rely upon hard work, defensive resilience and direct football as the foundation ingredients of success. Between 2017-18 and 2019-20, they blocked almost 100 more shots and attempted over 1,000 more long balls than any other Premier League team. In that final season, when Burnley won 15 league games (more than Arsenal), they played 20 matches against bottom-half sides and kept 13 clean sheets.
For those three seasons between 2017 and 2020, Burnley were English football’s greatest overachievers. On a net transfer fee spend of under £20m they recorded an average league position of 10.7th and took four points fewer than Everton, who spent £380m on new players over the same period.
Burnley’s parsimony was heralded as a pillar of their progress – you don’t have to be cheap to work here, but it helps! Dyche had a formula and nobody could quite work out how to break it.
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The obvious diagnosis is that Burnley’s defending fell off a cliff. In 2019-20, they ranked ninth in the Premier League for shots faced and eighth for expected goals against (a measure of the quality of chances they faced). Last season, they fell to 16th and 17th in the division on those same measures and, so far this season, Burnley are allowing their opponents to take 1.7 more shots per game than any other team.
But watching Burnley recently suggests a deeper malaise of which their defensive struggles are merely a symptom. There is a lack of energy and belief that we have rarely seen in Dyche’s teams before. After the defeat at Leeds on Sunday he suggested that hunger and desire was missing from each of his players. Without that, Burnley look helpless.
There are several obvious theories. Burnley’s lack of spending has been admirable, but it may ultimately become counterproductive – how could it not in this division? They have paid fees for four first-team players since June 2020 and three of those have started five league games between them this season. They have one of the smallest squads in the league and their nine most regular starters have all been there for at least four-and-a-half years. Things can go stale.
Perhaps the takeover hasn’t helped, given that it has effectively left the club £90m worse off, with interest to pay. Maybe Dyche has lost a little interest, worrying for the first time that his reputation may be hampered, rather than enhanced, by Burnley’s form. Or perhaps the arrival of Cornet has been double-edged. Cornet has scored almost 40 per cent of Burnley’s league goals but has he made Burnley a little more expansive and thus perhaps easier to break down.
All, some or none of that may be relevant, but we must also view Burnley’s recent decline in the wider focus of life in the Premier League for a non-elite club. Without the capability to spend £50m every summer or attract high-profile names, the structure of the team becomes the whole of the law. They are less likely to wriggle out of poor performances because they lack the individual magic to do so. Cornet is the exception to a general rule.
In that context, the team only functions when every strand of it is functioning; when one strand fails – energy, desire, chance creation, finishing, your goalkeeper’s save percentage – it can taint every other element until the whole team looks weak. At clubs like Burnley, there is a natural ceiling (that they have cracked twice in recent years) but no natural floor. That is what attracted Dyche to this job, sated him during it and must be exhausting him now.
The economic mismatches within the Premier League do not bar well-run, highly functioning clubs from succeeding, even if success is now judged by whether you can finish in the top half. They also do not fully excuse Burnley’s form since the beginning of last year – Dyche would never pretend that.
But the vast – and growing – gap between haves and havenots removes the comfort blanket of sustainability. Just because Burnley were good one season does not mean that they will be good the next.
Burnley stand at a crossroads: new owners, new problems, a new fight for top-flight survival. The stereotypes have gone. Has Burnley’s raison d’etre gone with them?
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