Cruel Summer

For the most part, I try to remain cheerful where the football is concerned. I have never been attracted to the role of Jonah of IP1, nor seen the pleasure in being the first to see what's going to go wrong. Yet I have to confess I am finding myself weirdly succumbing to feelings of dread this Summer.

Which is strange because this might be the least challenging off-season we have had in years. In a sense, 2025-26, not 2024-25, is the true reward for winning promotion against the odds last year. We don’t have to do exceptional work to be amongst the front-runners next season, we just need to be competent. We have a chance, for the first time in more than in two decades, to take on the second tier as one of the big hitters. To be the club the rest of the division looks at, throws up their arms, and whines, "how can we compete with their budget?"

So where has my sunny demeanour gone? You might assume it was the nine straight home defeats and big relegation fresh in the mind. Yet we were in far worse condition in 2019 and I remember feeling pretty confident we'd bounce straight back and have a good time doing it.

At the root of it is this feeling that we've ended a dramatic arc. Of course, as Mitchell and Webb noted, the football never stops, but the trilogy where we finally emerged from our dark forest, spectacularly won promotion from League One after two decades of decline, then followed it with an improbable, cinematic promotion from the Championship, returning triumphantly to the big time, is over. Though I still hope last year was our Empire Strikes Back and the next two will be Return of the Jedi (though really we already have a too many Ewoks, it’s more Wookiees we need, especially in midfield), in reality the last few seasons will be unrepeatable. Intense football experiences are built on dramatic tension and we had 22 years of it banked. We've spent all that now.

So 2025-26 is going to be a normal season, like normal clubs have, rather than an epic. What we felt in 2024 is past, an electrical pulse in the nostalgic part of our brains. An echo when you watch a clip, a flicker when you see a photo, a warm glow when you mention a name. I miss it already.

In its stead a season heavy with expectation, grim with determination to make right what went wrong in 2025. You sense it in Kieran McKenna, seemingly unmoved by the prospect of any escape routes, perhaps a bee in his bonnet about actually failing at something for once. The big budget, the higher profile players, the target on our backs, the fear of hubris and humiliation. You know how it goes, there will be no patience for any struggles, likely muted excitement if we succeed. We're just absent-mindedly re-playing the last level of the game for another go at the unbeatable final boss.

In amongst it, there's this complicated connection to the playing squad. It was hard to fall for new players whilst we lost every week. I spent today in the club shop trying to decide who to put on my 2024-25 home shirt, thinking about whose performances had moved me and coming up blank. Conor Chaplin was the pick for legacy reasons and indeed it was the boys who came on the journey who monopolised most of our sympathy during the last nine months of punishment. Yet there's also the suspicion that the strange charisma that drove us to promotion last time won't be in play this time and success will require those new (not yet truly loved) recruits playing to their price tags.

The club’s ambitious aim is that the squad be stronger this season than it was last, despite the smaller budget and lesser status to attract new recruits. The most likely route to that outcome is surely mainly via retention and improvement, that players acquired last season find a consistent upward curve from a full pre-season together, further coaching in the McKenna way, more momentum from winning regularly and fewer injury interruptions in a less intense league. It is surely unrealistic to imagine that our recruitment as a Championship club is going to wildly out-perform what we could manage in the division above, so being able to keep the guts of last year’s team together, make them collectively and individually better, then, all being well, add more next Summer, has to be the main strategy.  

All of this leaves a dis-concerting anxiety. There’s much beloved players who were relegated to the fringes last season who are the likeliest to be surplus to requirements where the squad does need shrinking or remodelling. Massimo Luongo and Cameron Burgess are already gone and you worry that a few more of that group might have their personal assistants pen a tearful goodbye for their socials before the transfer window closes. Sam Morsy has been linked with a move to the Middle East, potentially widening the black hole that is currently our midfield. Axel Tuanzebe’s contract remains unsigned. Nathan Broadhead has had links to Wrexham and Sunderland. We slipped and we slid and we fell in love.  

Then there’s “the assets”, the players who did enough in the top tier to convince a Wolves, Brentford or Bournemouth etc. that they might merit a return journey. In an ordinary Summer as an EFL club you might have one player who was obviously destined for a Premier League career. We now seem to have at least four, not including the one who already left at a budget price. Apparently these days such players all come with a relegation release clause as standard, which becomes something else to fret about. So, in addition to being sad to see club legends go, I’m anxious about losing players we have barely seen in a winning side.  

Then there is one player who straddles all categories. Beloved star boy of the second promotion, almost an absolute certainty to have a top Premier League career and the one you’d build your 100-point Championship machine and hopefully your 40-point Premier League machine around – Omari Elijah Hutchinson-Giraud. I am desperate to see another season of him. So pained am I by the prospect of Omari leaving I physically wince at every impressive bit of play for the England Under-21s. I make rigorous searches of Transfermarkt for evidence that teams just don’t pay that sort of money for players with his record.

It calms me down to learn his reported release clause would be a transfer record for 9 of 20 Premier League teams, 17 of 20 in the Bundesliga, 17 of 20 in La Liga, 19 of 20 in Ligue Un. Manchester City managed to acquire French international Rayan Cherki for less. But then Dortmund go and pay an Omari-like price for Jobe Bellingham and it starts me off all over again. I suspect with Omari (and the rest of our prized assets) the release clause is more than suitors will want to pay but perhaps not beyond what they would pay if necessary. Meaning we’ll likely be doing this anxious dance all the way until September.

All this worry and I haven’t even talked about McKenna’s uncertain fate. Think I need to go find a beach and a margarita before I start rambling about wookiees again. Failing that, perhaps a new signing might set my Summer vibe right.