Does the Premier League beckon for Leeds? The EFL preview – Football Weekly Extra

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Hello and welcome to Guardian Football Weekly.

It's an EFL preview pod.

This bit of the pyramid get one weekend to show themselves off before we all get sidetracked by the best league in the world.

In the championship, was that it for Luton or could Rob Edwards get a yo-yo in motion at Kenilworth Road?

Is Scott Parker simultaneously a boring and good appointment at Burnley?

Am I the only person astonished to discover that Chris Wilder is still the Sheffield United manager?

And what of Leeds so close last year?

And with some gaps to fill before the window ends.

Below them, Wayne Rooney at Plymouth is perhaps the most interesting story.

In League One, Birmingham City are hosing money at players in a bid to get straight back out.

Then there's your there or thereabouts, Boltons, Barnsley's and Peterborough's.

Wrexham journey continues along with fancied Stockport.

Well, the big question is how many will Ryan Loft convert this season into League Two?

Seems pretty hard to predict.

But if anyone can, our elite panel can.

All that plus refs acting like students.

Your questions.

And that's today's Guardian Football Weekly.

On the panel today, Barry Glendenning, welcome.

Hi, yeah.

And then we have a not the top 20 takeover, sort of lazy, good but lazy booking, I would say, of Ali Maxwell.

Welcome, Ali.

Hi, Max.

Yeah, I feel like we're the

sort of youth team players that play in a couple of the preseason friendlies and catch the eye just a little bit, enough to be mentioned in a few preseason previews.

Maybe it's their time to shine.

And we'll be on loan at Bromley by the end of the month.

Hello, George Alec.

Hi, I can't believe you're calling us a good but lazy booking.

It's the equivalent of like a manager picking like a really strong starting lineup and the commenters saying, yeah, it's a bit boring.

This is kind of what we expected.

Yeah, that's it.

What I mean, it's a very strong line.

It's the lineup I want.

But like, we haven't, we haven't.

I suppose the thing is, you can overthink these things.

So, like, what we haven't done is, like, Pep, we haven't overthought it.

We've gone, who are the best people to do this?

Yes.

And it's the two of you.

So, ideally, we've been talking about this stuff non-stop for the last week, and therefore, don't need to do any research.

Just exactly.

We're well aware of the fact that you've been talking about it all week because we've been listening to what you've been saying and are going to regurgitate large tracts of it back to you in the next hour.

This is where, Barry, you can't just say, I was hearing somewhere because we were hearing on not the top 20.

Let's start then with the championship then.

Who's going up, George?

It feels to me like leads are probably going to go up.

They are the Bookies' favourites and the strong Bookies' favorites to do so.

They got a points tally last season that should have seen them promoted in most other championship campaigns automatically.

Just Kieran McKenna-Zipswich managed to spoil that party.

They've lost, you know, Crescentio Somerville is clearly, well, he was the championship player of the season last season, and he's a massive loss, having moved on to West Ham, but they still retain loads of quality.

It means that Nanto, who played kind of off the right for the most part last season, you'd think will shift over to the left-hand side.

They have got Aronson back, who spent last season out on loan, who's a player that, frankly, similar to Nanto, similar to Somerville, shouldn't really be playing football in a second tier, I'd say, in any country, really.

A couple of good additions as well.

Joe Roden joins permanently, having had a very good loan last season.

I think the key point here is when you look at the teams who have been relegated into the championship this season from the Premier League

compared to the season before.

Leeds were one of those three teams the season before last, alongside Leicester who won the league, and Southampton, who went up through the playoffs, having finished fourth.

Leeds finished third.

Compare that to Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton, who frankly two of those teams made an absolute hash of trying to stay in the Premier League.

And I would argue that Leeds and their current guys, or at least their team last season, definitely what in my mind would have fared much better than Sheffield United and Burnley at staying up and probably would have done better than Luton too.

So they remain to me the quality side of the kind of the four teams that have been in the Premier League most recently, having got a points tally that would have been enough to get them up last season.

And the manager in Daniel Farker, who has twice already

won the championship previously, the reason they didn't win automatic promotion last season was mainly because of their form in the early part of the season.

So, in terms of recency and their most recent form, after that amazing winning run at the turn of the year, they look to me to be pretty clearly the team to beat.

And

with a certain level of continuity, albeit having

lost a couple of key players, the names they're being linked to in the press right now, you know, it looks like they've missed out on a couple, but Jordan James is the latest from Birmingham who'd be an amazing signing.

It does feel like

there is still money to be spent on what is already probably the best team in the league.

Ali, how big a loss is Archie Gray?

I mean, he's obviously just a child still, but he's clearly very good.

Yeah, yeah, Gray is a phenom.

The season that he had is one of the best individual seasons from a young player that I can remember seeing.

So

he's a big loss, but he's also recouped, leads quite a big fee, fee.

And I think financially that's probably given them some wiggle room.

Now, that's not a particularly exciting part of the game, is it?

But it probably is important.

In terms of how big a loss is he to them right now starting this season, I think they've mitigated that by signing Jaden Bogle from Sheffield United.

Now, Jaden Bogle is never going to go to Tottenham Hotspur for 40 million quid, and he's probably not going to get any England caps, unlike Archie Grey.

But I think in terms of...

for the right now, he will offer probably a bit more in terms of the sort of overlapping fullback, getting to the byline, getting inside the box.

He's got quite a good goal scoring record after his time at Sheffield United.

He probably will offer a bit more in those last moments than Archie Gray, but he certainly won't be as good when it comes to the composure on the ball, the build-up, the creativity.

So they've lost a bit in terms of their quality and possession, which is where Gray is just incredible for someone of his age.

But I think they've not lost loads overall.

Somerville being the biggest loss, the bigger loss of the two, I'd say.

Yeah, it's interesting you talk about those teams coming down, Georgian.

I mean, Chef United was so bad that you wonder if a summer is enough to, and, you know, and going into a sort of lower quality division, is it if both of those things put together will make them think, actually, this is fine, or they'll just carry on being hopeless.

Maybe.

It kind of feels like we've gone, unless there are clear reasons why a club might fall apart.

I still think a team who are a poor Premier League team, the gap is now so big that even the kind of the poorest teams that come down have a really bad season.

Norwich and Watford had it a few seasons ago, still end up finishing mid-table.

I think we often see quality within, as a football team, as being fairly linear.

And I think it's becoming very, very obvious now that isn't the case when translating championship form to Premier League form.

You look at Burnley, who have and still have had and still have a squad full of technically gifted players and a manager at Vincent Company, who is clearly very adept at setting a team like that up to win when they have a clear advantage in terms of pure talent and technical ability.

But that doesn't necessarily translate into ability when you're coming up against a team better than you every week.

And that's why Luton may well have been the third best team of the teams that went up that season.

But they were the best in the Premier League because they were the happiest out of possession.

They were the best at pressing.

They were the best at being compact when they needed to be.

And they were therefore

the best equipped to nullify the threat of Premier League teams.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be the best of the three when they come back down again.

I think Burnley in particular have just too many good players at this level.

I mean, Scott Parker has a a hell of a job on his hands to kind of navigate his way through them, but there's a good enough team in there to dominate.

And I think the same can kind of be said of Sheffield United, who, you know, Chris Wilder is a manager whose stock has fallen dramatically over the last three or four years.

I think it's probably gone a little bit too far now.

You know, he's back at the club where he had such amazing success and seemingly, until their takeover goes through, has a lot of power and kind of has the final say there, which is what he always wants and where he's always flourished.

The signings they've made this summer, I'd say, are very good.

Callum O'Hare is one of the best attacking players in the league, in my mind.

Keith and Moore is as good a centre-back as you're sorry, a centre-forward as you're going to get, like a proper old-school target man.

Yesterday, they brought Harry Souter on loan from Leicester, who's another towering centre-back who can play.

So I think they'll be okay.

The key thing for them will be: when does the takeover go through?

When the takeover does go through, are they going to be looking to

instill their faith in Wild or look to make a change there?

And are the

new owners going to come and invest heavily in the playing side of things?

But right now, I think they'll probably be okay.

Looking at the list of 24 championship managers, Chris Wilder, who's only 56,

looks in manner and attitude towards people eating sandwiches in his presence.

And

I suppose just the way he comports himself, he...

looks like a comparative dinosaur to most of the rest.

Neil Harris at Millwall as well is only in his mid-40s, also looks like a bit of an old school proper football man compared to all the other managers in the championship.

Doesn't seem to be a place for the Ron manager type in that division anymore.

Would that be a fair assessment, Ali?

Certainly the demographic of managers has changed a lot in the last 10 years and sort of accelerated in the last few years.

Look at the ones that have been hired into the league this season, the likes of Johannes Hof Torup, who is a very young Danish manager that Norwich have hired off the back of a couple of good seasons, managing Njordscheland.

He's going to play, we think, very high possession-based football,

a lot of baiting the press with slow passing out the back and then speeding forward in a 3-2-5 shape.

Maybe a little reminiscent of Leicester under Maresca last season.

Mareska just got the Chelsea job.

Like, I think that's an important thing to point out: is that there seems to be an idea that managers who play a certain way are more appropriate for

impressive career progression, shall we say, than managers who play

a simpler style of football, for want of a better phrase, who play a more direct style of play.

So, you know, the teams seem to be going along with this.

This is the sort of teams that...

most championship clubs want to be now.

It doesn't necessarily translate to winning football.

That is, I believe, the case.

I don't necessarily think just playing like this is a sort of the panacea for success in the championship unless you have an incredible talent advantage like Leicester and Southampton had last season with Russell Martin.

But yeah, you're right.

It's very rare to see,

and you don't want to categorise people, but managers like Neil Harris and Chris Wilder, for example, hired by championship clubs, unless they are battling relegation.

And all of a sudden, those sorts of traits seem to become much more popular when you think you need to actually fight and grit and grind.

And I do think it is getting a little bit ridiculous, to be honest, but there's no doubt it does make for a pretty interesting division.

I mean, Tim Walter is the new Hull City manager.

He's managed a few clubs in Germany.

His style of football has been described as heart attack football.

And

Sunderland's own Reggie LeBrie, who has managed Loriant in Ligue R, who suffered relegation with Loriant from Ligue R last season, having had a good season previously.

Like, it is no longer the case that managers are being hired because of success that they have had in terms of results.

It is more the case they are being hired because of a style of play that clubs want to recruit to.

And I think we will see there will be a strong generation of British-English coaches that start coming to the fore.

We've seen that already.

The likes of Luke Williams and Liam Manning, John Mussinho are coaching in the championship this season.

But there's also a huge extent to which we are looking overseas for this sort of coaching talent as well.

So does that mean, George, that your run managers are filtering down?

Like, does John still manage every side in League Two?

Or is it the same thing, just on a

slightly less obvious level in League One and League Two as well?

There might be something in that.

I hadn't really thought of it before, but when you see Mark Hughes popping up at Bradford, as he did for a couple of seasons, Steve Cottrell, obviously, now managing in the National League.

Maybe that profile of manager is unable to get a job at these higher teams if they want to keep their career going, they have to take jobs lower down.

Possibly.

I mean, it does definitely feel like there's been a huge shift in terms of what clubs are looking for.

But then it can go the other way.

You look at Millwall, have always played a certain way, and they parted company with Gary Rowatt

in the first few months of last season.

And rather than sticking to what they normally do, which is appoint Neil Harris,

they appointed Joe Edwards from Chelsea, who is a youth team coach.

He wanted to revolutionise the style of play, and he was brought in to do that.

And it didn't work.

He wasn't given long enough to work, but at the same time, when you're a championship club, you cannot take the risk of relegation.

So they sacked him and they replaced him with Neil Harris, who got the results needed to keep them up.

So

it's one thing

ignoring

that kind of more classic football man profile, but sticking to your guns is another.

And it would be no shock to me if we see in October, November, some of those old names that go in the merry-go-round.

Maybe not John Still, but some of those old names might get another job as clubs need saving and have to bin the ideology in order to kind of adopt a more pragmatic approach.

Matt, who's making the playoffs, Ali, for you?

I think if we're talking about teams that George and I could see getting promoted, particularly if those three teams coming down from the Premier League aren't as strong as last season's trio, particularly if, for whatever reason, leads drop off without Somerville or for whatever reason that could could be.

Coventry and Middlesbrough, to me, look the best placed.

And they just sort of fit the bill of clubs that have

just made quite good decisions over a now extended period of a few years, have

good managers in place with a lot of authority.

In

Middlesbrough's case, they've got some a really impressive style of attacking play.

They should score a lot of goals, a couple of question marks over them defensively.

But with a group of players last season that probably needed a bit of bedding in,

the expectation is that as a collective they will kick on this season.

And they weren't far off the playoffs last season.

They finished like a train.

And it wouldn't be a surprise to see them start strong.

And Michael Carrick would obviously be in the headlines again because he's shown himself to be, you know, he's adapted really well to management.

And then Coventry, the team that I'm probably hottest on outside of the favourites, Mark Mark Robbins, I think, is an absolute master.

He is a manager that doesn't seem to ever have any interest from any club higher up than Coventry City, even though he has done, to our eyes, the best job of any English football manager in the English pyramid over the last five years or so in taking Coventry from League Two to the Championship playoffs two seasons ago.

They had a I mean a season of consolidation in which they reached the FA Cup semi-final and almost beat Manchester United last season, having lost two excellent players in Yerkares and Harmer.

Reinvested the money pretty well, and again, just seem well set to kick on again.

Bit more of a kind of mixed style to borrow.

I would trust Coventry to be stronger defensively and more consistent defensively, but they've got some serious firepower already in the building, and they've added to it with Ephraim Mason Clark and Brandon Thomas Asante and Jack Radoni this summer.

So those are the two that I think are definitely worth a mention.

So that hopefully by the time we review this in May, three of those six have gone up.

Why do you think it is that Mark Robbins never gets any interest from clubs higher up the pyramid?

Because it baffles me.

Do we know that he hasn't?

Would be my reply to that.

I mean, he's not aggressively linked to jobs.

With Mark Robbins, he was commentary manager during a very successful time for the club, but also a very turbulent time for the club under Sisu, their previous owners, where for a while they had to ground share with Birmingham.

The relationship between the owners and the fans was not a very good one.

They now have Doug King, a local businessman,

a very wealthy one at that, who has

bought the club and

things are much happier there.

And I kind of think for Mark Robbins, having navigated Coventry from League Two up to the brink of the Premier League in very choppy waters, he probably feels like he's in a brilliant position for his own job.

And I would assume, and I don't know this, but I would assume that I'm sure the question has been asked once or twice either to him or his agent over the last couple of years and has been met with a firm.

I'm happy where I am.

Thank you.

Sorry, just one other Coventry-related question.

Callum O'Hare is gone to Sheffield United.

I don't know if they sold him or if that was a free or my understanding was that he was a seriously, seriously hot prospect.

And I was a bit surprised he didn't go somewhere better in Inverted Commas.

Particularly given that he was a free agent.

I think it it wasn't out the realms of possibility that he might have attracted Premier League interest.

In the end, that doesn't seem to have happened.

And

guessing why that would would be, I mean, he is quite short and he is not the most like explosive and athletic.

And he has suffered two significant injuries in the last three years or so.

So I think that in terms of the Premier League now, I mean,

it's just a different sport in terms of the general physical level of every single player.

And I don't think many Premier League teams even consider players with the physical profile of Calamo Hare, which I think is a shame because I love diminutive attacky midfielders who buzz around.

And, you know, that's not to say he can't move.

He is one of the best pressers in his position in the championship.

He's really hardworking.

He's very, very tenacious.

But I guess that would be from a sort of scouting point of view, how I would see it.

I think for him, it was probably the case of having understood how tough it can be with injuries and probably having had, you know, having worked really hard to get to this point.

I think if you're not going to land with a Premier League team, while there'll be Coventry fans saying, why don't you just stay with us?

Actually, getting a pretty decent wage and a long-term deal at a club with parachute payments is,

from a business point of view, probably not the worst thing to do.

Yeah, you made it sound like he's just a little man with a pot belly just running around the championship.

That's my image I'll have.

But if he played in the Premier League, it would be very obvious that he is not of the same physical profile as 99% of the players around him.

Burnley pursued him very hard for about two, about 18 months ago, and it never happened.

And the fact that they haven't come back in for him this summer would suggest to me that that second series knee injury has probably just put a few, even though he was very good when he came back last season, has probably put a few people off, just in case.

You know, you never know if it might happen again.

Can I ask you, George, about Wayne Rooney at Plymouth?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, I just want to know what you think.

I sort of admire the, you know, the decisions that Wayne Rooney has made.

You know, know there are you know from the he could have easily chosen the comfort of the TV studio and he has decided against it.

Yeah, I mean it does feel like he's just absolutely desperate to

be in football and that isn't in a studio that is being on the grass and you know he's he's clearly someone whose absolute adoration of the game hasn't diminished at all in the decades that he's been a player and a coach.

It's an appointment that has

attracted ridicule for the most part, I would say.

I think a lot of that is quite baked into some recency bias where he took over a Birmingham side in the playoff positions, albeit early in the campaign, and left them struggling for relegation.

And they did end up getting relegated.

It's impossible to defend the job that he did.

It was obviously very poor.

I would mitigate it a little bit by saying that he was basically brought in to a side that had been built for John Eustace style of football, which is very, very defensive first.

Like he's someone who's good at building a defense, and that is the platform for them to pick up points and win games.

And the ownership group came in and said, you know, he's going to play no fear football.

This is going to be a completely change in the style of play.

And I would challenge any manager to come into a club halfway through or midway through a season with no transfer window in sight, be given a group of players who've been drilled over the summer to play a certain way, who are performing well.

and probably outperforming where they really should be, which is difficult in itself, and told you have to change the style of play immediately and win points.

Like, it's a very hard thing to do.

Obviously, at Derby, he did a relatively good job.

There are detractors from that job as well, because Liam Rosinio was his number two, who's obviously gone on to prove himself at Hull as being a very, very capable head coach as well.

But, you know, from Plymouth Argyll's point of view, the appointment of Ian Foster last season was a disaster.

Like, on and off the pitch, he was,

according to basically all reports, very unpopular within the club and the playing staff.

He came into

a group that had won promotion the season before.

There was a continuity there with Stephen Schumacher having taken over from Ryan Lowe, having been assistant manager.

And sometimes managers come in, and rather than looking to continue the good work, they want to tear things up and do it a different way.

And that's seemingly what Foster tried to do.

Given that the coaching staff pretty much remains from the Schumacher days, given that Neil Dusnip, the sporting director, is still there as well, who had to basically appoint himself caretaker manager to keep Argyle up.

My hump is that they see Rooney as someone who can come in and inspire a generation of players who has that certain amount of kind of star quality, but also probably enables them to go back to

the blueprint for success beforehand, which is much of which is in terms of playing staff and non-playing staff is still there.

So it will be interesting to see what they do.

I mean, this is the fourth time that Neil Dusnip has appointed a manager from the Liverpool area.

And owner Simon Hallett said in an interview afterwards, when questions about this, why wouldn't you appoint a manager from Liverpool?

It's the hotbed of English football, which is one way to look at things.

But, you know, this is going to be a really interesting appointment.

And I think, you know, Argyle are rightly perceived, and Simon Hallett is rightly seen as being one of the best owners and one of the best run clubs in the country.

And so for us all at home sitting and laughing at their decision-making,

I'd say the weight of evidence suggests that they're normally right.

Perry, how are you feeling about Sunderland?

I'm not sure how to feel, to be honest.

I mean, last season was an unmitigated disaster.

They sacked Tony Mowbray,

brought in Michael Beale.

That was a shambles.

And then when they sacked him, they more or less downed tools for the rest of the season and gave up and treaded water for several from February till May and didn't.

They had enough points in the bank not to go down or not to have any serious concerns about going down.

So now they've brought in Regis LeBris.

He's definitely a linebacker for the Buffalo Bills.

Wasn't their first choice.

I don't know what choice he was because I don't know how long they've been actively looking for a replacement for Michael Beale.

The lads have already pointed out that he had mixed results with Lorion.

I think he had a top ten finish in Ligon and then relegated them.

But he is, according to Philippe, renowned for

bringing through young players, which is sort of Sunderland's M.O.

Sunderland still don't have a striker.

They haven't had a striker since Ross Stewart last played for them about 18 months ago.

They have a couple of young lads who don't really have any pedigree or experience.

They've signed Ian Paveda,

Alan Brown from Preston,

Simon Moore, a quite experienced goalkeeper from Coventry who won't be first choice.

So they seem like decent signings.

There's questions,

will they keep Jack Clark?

Will they keep Joe Bellingham?

That's huge.

If they can keep either or both of them, that would be massive.

They have some very good players, and they're desperately short in other areas.

So I have no idea how they're going to get on.

I think the lads had them 11th in their season preview, and

I take that.

They might do better, and they could be an awful lot worse.

Yeah, they definitely felt like one of the more volatile in terms of how good they could be.

And And, you know,

if that appointment is an unmitigated disaster with such a young squad, you would be worried about

compounding the issues from last season.

I think that

the one thing that I have been reminding myself is that their finishing position of 16th was exacerbated by the fact that, as Barry said, they just sacked it off.

Like, I can't believe a club would operate like that for basically half a season, just say, oh, this has been difficult.

Let's just avoid the issue and just sort of peter out.

And, you know, without wanting to be over dramatic, with such a young group of players that

you have built specifically so that you can bring them on and sell off at a big profit and hopefully benefit from their star quality as they get better.

I do wonder what impact that would have on a group of young players, basically just to be left flapping in the wind for like five months.

It's probably going to be the case that they've now got a manager, they've had a summer to get over it all, and they might start very well and he might do well.

But I find them a fascinating team.

And in terms of an individual to flag up, Chris Rigg is someone who I'm pretty confident will play for England.

He is a 17-year-old who played quite a lot of minutes last season.

He might even still be 16.

And he was

before he signed his first scholarship this summer when he became eligible to do so.

He was

going to be poached by Manchester United or Newcastle, perhaps.

But he's stayed with Sunderland.

There must be a commitment there for him to get a lot of minutes this season.

In style, he's kind of Cole Palmer-esque, left-footed, attacking midfield player who kind of drifts around, but he's got tenacity as well as serious quality for someone of his age.

And

there's been a lot of focus on Job Bellingham at Sunderland over the last 12 months because of the amount he played last season and the qualities that he showed and his very famous brother.

But I think Chris Rigg, for me, right now, I would have as

the more exciting exciting prospect long term.

And I presume Chris Rigg has more of a rig than a pot belly, which should increase his chances of getting into the Premier League.

All right, that'll do for part one.

Apologies if we didn't mention your team.

We didn't even find out who the Watford manager is.

So look, we couldn't do it.

Tom Cleverly, Max.

Sorry,

we didn't ask the lads who they were sending down.

And I was quite interested in at least two of their selections.

Yeah, our relegator three and our one to twenty-fours.

It's a bit of a shame to do the spoiler, but um Watford we we had Bottom, who I'm really worried for.

You're now going to find out that Tom Cleverly is their manager.

You know, the Potsos obviously on Udnacy and Watford, Udnacy are going on a massive spending spree this summer, and Watford fans are looking on, wondering where the support is for them, because they've lost key players.

They're going to lose more key players.

It looks like Yasra Spreer will be moving on, following Konay out the door, following Wesley Hoot, possibly out the door as well.

And they're not really bringing in anyone of the requisite quality to replace them.

Musa Susoko returns to the club age 34.

Whether that's a good signing or not, I think we can only guess.

They were, you know, cleverly came in the back end of last season and did okay from a points perspective.

The underlying numbers were pretty concerning.

And at the moment, it looks to me like a really poor squad in a league where there aren't that many teams that don't really look up to it.

Our other two were Millwall and Derby.

Millwall, for reasons I've kind of previously mentioned, they've been circling the drain a little bit in recent seasons.

Neil Harris came in at at the back end of last season and kept them up.

But

personally,

they've made some changes in their backroom staff where they've fired their, or they've sat their sporting director.

And it seems like the kind of the keys are being handed to Neil.

And in this day and age in modern day football, I'm not entirely sure that that is the best way to go about things.

And with Derby, you know, they were very good at last season under Paul Warren, but the recruitment hasn't looked great thus far.

Max Bird, an influential central midfielder, has moved to Bristol City.

Connor Harrowan, who played alongside him, has also done so.

They're still massively in need of a striker.

So they're the three, but there are a lot of teams down there.

Oxford, the team I support, are clearly the most people's favourites.

The only difference I would say between Oxford and most of the teams we have down towards the bottom is that they have moved quickly to recruit very well.

A lot of their business, a lot of our business, I should say, done very early.

Getting hold of players like Idris Al Mazzuni and Jack Curry and Peter Kiyoso, players who've kind of in their early twenties, who at League One and League Two level have really suggested that they're ready for the step up.

And I think that's

should set them in good stead with des buckingham um a manager who according to evidence at the back end of last season should be uh able to set this oxford team up to maybe surprise a few people all right that'll do for part one league one in part two

hi pod fans of america max here barry's here too hello football weekly is supported by the remarkable paper pro now if you're a regular listener to this show you'll have heard us talk before about the remarkable paper pro we already know that remarkable is the leader in the paper tablet category digital notebooks that give you everything you love about paper but with the power of modern technology but there's something new and exciting the remarkable paper pro move remarkable a brand name and an adjective man yeah it's their most portable paper tablet yet it holds all your notes to-dos and documents but it's smaller than a paperback and an incredible 0.26 inches thin so it slips easily into a bag or jacket pocket perfect for working professionals whose jobs take them out of the office like maybe a football journalist barry Although not like you.

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Welcome to part two of the Guardian Football Weekly.

We're on the internet, on Instagram and TikTok.

Just search Football Weekly for Barry's Dancing.

George, you wanted to mention something that you're doing on the internet too.

We are doing stuff on the internet.

We're not just the podcast.

If you go to ntt20.com, which is our website, you can find there.

We have loads of decent, well, we think good EFL written content.

But we're also doing something which we did for January as well, Absolute Gluttons for Punishment, where we are covering every single transfer in the EFL for the whole summer.

So if your team signs a random player from a far-flung country and division and you want to learn about them beyond just Wikipedia, you can find a little verdict and write-up from us and the team up there.

So we know that people love transfers and we are delivering by covering every single one.

Deadline Day is going to be a nightmare.

Very impressive.

That is very impressive.

It just saves me just who do I know who supports QPR?

I I can text them about this person.

So then speaking of spending money, Birmingham Alley

has spent a lot of money for a League One side.

It sort of seems

around £15 million already.

Yeah,

it is crazy and it's unprecedented at League One level.

And even among those who have come down from the championship and tried to, for one of a better

phrase, spend their way out of it, they've taken a different approach entirely.

Most of the clubs that have come down in the last 10 years that I can think of have signed names that you recognise from the championship,

probably on their way down, probably not as motivated as they once were, and probably quite comfortable getting a lovely wage to play for a big club in League One.

And generally, that approach has been quite awkward for clubs.

They have either not gone up straight away and then radically changed approach, or in some cases, taken two or three seasons to go up.

So the way that Birmingham are doing it is to sign a few players that seem like sure things proven at the level.

Alfie May, probably being the standout, having scored 20-plus goals in the last three seasons in this division for Cheltenham and then for Charlton.

They've also signed Mark Leonard, who was a young midfielder.

They've bought from Brighton, but he spent the last two seasons excelling for Northampton Town on loan.

But they've also done some really funky recruitment from Europe.

Christophe Clara, Emil Hanson, and Willem Tor Willemson are really exciting for George and I because there's not a lot of League One clubs that shop overseas.

We are both children of championship manager and early football manager days.

And the most exciting thing for me when managing a club was signing wonder kids from overseas.

So they've done a bit of everything, Burmia.

Oh, yeah, nothing, nothing like is keen to join on championship managers.

Unbelievable.

You're like, wow.

Exactly.

I think everyone's pretty keen to join Burmia at the moment because they are flexing their muscles financially, but also because there is a real sense that they could be at the start of an exciting journey.

They seem to be building a squad that, if all goes well, could fly straight up towards the top half of the championship.

Now, there's a huge amount of work to happen between this moment and anything ip-switchy, but you have to say that looks like the approach that they're taking.

Having hired Chris Davies, who's

a coach, really a career coach, and one that's held in very high regard.

He's worked at Tottenham for a long time, gets his first shot at senior management.

They're hoping that he has a similar impact to Kieran McKenna, and they're giving him the most absurd toolkit with which to sort of find promotion because the squad that they have is an absolute joke for the level.

And yeah, I think heading into Friday night kickoff, Birmingham City are the most that's what I'm anticipating most about the new season.

Basically, the simple question, how good will they be?

I think is the most interesting question in the EFL at the moment.

Is there a chance then being Birmingham and not necessarily the best run club in the world that it could be awful?

I don't think so.

And I think, you know, that the current owners, a group that call themselves Nighthead, who came in about this time last year, I wouldn't be willing to say that they will run the club as poorly as it has been run for the last decade or so.

What's crazy in my eyes is that Birmingham finished just above relegation for like eight seasons in a row, truly circling the drain.

And then that was under really poor ownership, poor decision makers who let the club and particularly the stadium and the facilities really become quite shabby and run down.

And it was in really poor shape.

The new ownership group have changed everything off the field, have made some unbelievable improvements to everything non-football related that has really pleased and energized the fan base.

Of course, they then oversaw the relegation that their predecessors, you know, didn't.

So it's kind of a confusing one where I still think the fans are forgiving of what was a completely botched sacking of John Eustace and appointment of Wayne Rooney, which ended up being the key factor in their relegation ultimately.

They are still quite pleased, I think, that if they're going to get relegated at all, it's with this lot in charge rather than the last lot because these guys seem very ambitious and very rich.

And Rotherham and Bolton are among the favourites to get promoted as well.

Rotherham are the daddy of all yo-yo clubs going from league one to championship and back again year after year.

And Bolton have been knocking on the door for the last couple of seasons.

How do you rate their chances?

Both pretty well, I think.

But Bolton have this quite intriguing record of improving year on year under Ian Evett.

The only issue for them is that the last two years that has looked like beaten playoff semi-finalists, then beaten playoff finalists.

But if they go on better again, then they have to get promoted.

Everts are a manager who I think deserves a lot of respect.

You know, he's managed to take Bolton out of league two and very quickly made them one of the best teams in League One.

They were very, very poor at Wembley, it has to be said.

And, you know, there'll be frustration from his part that, you know, having gone into that game, his massive favourites to go and go up, they weren't able to take advantage of that.

But in Aaron Collins, they've got a player who season before last was player of the season in League One for Bristol Rovers, came in in January last season and hit form very quickly.

I'll be very surprised if they weren't competitive.

And then in Rotherham, it's all change in League One for Rotherham because Paul Warne isn't their manager anymore.

In fact, this is the third manager who's managed Rotherham since Paul Warne left, with Matt Taylor and then Liam Richardson really struggling in the championship.

But Steve Evans comes in.

Steve Evans has already won two promotions with Rotherham in the past, taking him from League Two up to up to the championship.

Rotherham fans know what to expect from Evans, which I think is an important thing because I think there are some clubs who wouldn't really buy into the style of football necessarily.

But he does what he's done what he does, does, Evans, and that he's brought in a load of players very early on in the window.

Quite impressive signings.

Two players from

Pompey defenders and Rafty and Raggett, who won promotion or won the league last season with Pompey.

Johnson Clark Harris comes in from Peterborough, who's played for Rotherham before under Steve Evans, who's been top scorer in this league previously, having spent a season basically sitting out his contract at posh.

He's building a team in my mind ready to challenge again.

And on final day last season, when they won their game on final day, Evans said, if I get us promoted, we will not get relegated again.

And it wouldn't surprise me whatsoever, especially considering the incredible job he's just done at Stevenage, which shows that Evans's methods, you know, it feels like other managers with similar ideologies within football have kind of been found out in the last 10 years or so.

Not the case with Evans, still very, very effective in terms of what he does.

I would argue that the job he's done at Stevenage over the last two seasons or three seasons is probably as impressive as what any manager has done in the EFL in that time.

So

I would say both Bolton and Rotherham would probably be the two teams alongside Huddersfield that I would say look best set to challenge or most likely to challenge.

I know producer Joel's probably wondering when we're going to talk about Charlton now.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, Ali, could you rattle through other possible promotion playoff contenders?

Yeah, good news is we did have Charlton making the playoffs.

They finished 16th last season.

It's very difficult to imagine them getting any lower than that.

And finishing any lower than that would be pretty embarrassing given the size of the club and the size of the budget at this level.

I think that that is sort of rock bottom.

And I think that Nathan Jones is an incredible manager for them to have in league one and the perfect person to kind of turn things around and get them right to the other end of the spectrum.

I think that although the fan base feel like they've been sort of

hurt so many times before,

hoped so many times before and been let down that they are, you know, a little bit nervous about sort of fully buying in.

I think if they start the season well, that they could build some serious momentum.

And it's kind of a weird one.

They've lost Alfie May, who was the top goalscorer in the league last season, even though they finished 16th.

They've lost George Dobson, who's been a good player for them over the years.

And they've added some quality as well.

The squad just looks very Nathan Jonesy.

He seems much calmer and much more in control than he was at Southampton, for example, where he really struggled.

And I think that bodes pretty well for Charlton.

So I think

they could easily be challenging right up there.

But I think everyone's just a little bit burned by the last couple of years and how poor they were overall last season.

And then Stockport is the other one that we should mention.

They won League Two last season.

Georgian, I think they could fly right up to the top of League One and make the playoffs.

They are such an impressive club

in that they have lots of money.

They've been sort of in the shadow of Wrexham over the last 12 months because Wrexham cast a very long shadow and have famously a lot of cash.

But Stockport have deep pockets as well for League Two level, and that should translate pretty well to the League One budgets table as well.

The difference being that

a lot of clubs have money and seem to lose creativity with it.

They seem to just take the obvious options, the short-term options.

And I'm not sure that's always the right thing for a club.

Stockport have this really creative recruitment team, really creative decision makers off the pitch that have,

to my eyes, started to build something that even though they've reached League One, which is the highest they've been for ages, they're actually well set to keep moving up.

And I expect them to be a championship team over the next few seasons.

So we are big fans of Stockport County and wouldn't be surprised at all if they're towards the top end of League One.

And Kevin Francis will always get you goals.

That is the truth of it, isn't it?

A generic Wrexham question for you, George.

Is that the question?

Well, the question I'd have would be less generic.

There does seem to be an inevitability about their eventual ascent to the top flight.

Is this a season too soon for them to get out of League One?

Yeah, I think it probably is.

I mean, covering the leagues as we do and having certain ideas of how we think football clubs should be run, I mean, there's no denying that in terms of of the work that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McAlhani have done at Wrexham, in terms of bringing a club kind of off its knees and back to the, not only back to the community, but also to a wider public, is incredible.

However, I think there's only so far spending massive money on players who are,

you know, late in their 20s, early in their 30s, who are proven quality at the level can really take you because they're getting to a level now where if they want to continue doing that, those players cost absolute fortunes and are not going to be value for money.

So it does look a little bit like they've tailored their approach a bit this season where I was kind of in doing our research for the 1 to 24s.

I went into the research thinking this is going to be, you know, I'm expecting not to really like what they've done here.

But you look at the players they brought in, they brought in some, you know, loan players such as Lewis Blunt and Sebra Van, who've done really well in loan spells previously.

They're actually not on in loan.

They're on permanent transfers at a kind of 23 and 21.

Arthur Aquonquo, their loan player from Arsenal last season, who was the best keeper in league two, who probably shouldn't be playing in league one this season, should be playing at least in the championship.

They've managed to sign him on a permanent transfer.

George Dobson, a combative midfielder who's been a big success at Charlton over the last couple of seasons.

So, I think they've kind of grasped that and they've realised that actually going out and signing the likes of Paul Mullen and Ollie Palmer and Elliot Lee and these players who they're only going to get a couple of years out of, and they're able to recruit them by offering them kind of a big final payday

isn't really going to cut it anymore.

My big question mark is: when does that apply to the manager?

You know, Phil Parkinson's done an amazing job to take this group of players and take them into League One, but whether he's the right person to build a successful side out of a group of young players who haven't necessarily proven they've done it at the level before, but have the talent to do so, is yet to be seen.

So I think Wrexham will be fine.

I think mid-table at the very least.

And it wouldn't be a massive shock if they're able to push up again this season.

Ali, you appear to have relegated Cambridge United again

from League One, which I think might be the third year running.

So, you know,

when are you going to learn?

No comment on Cambridge actually, Max.

I'm fully rattled by

our relationship with them for some time now.

It's not just the fact that we've had them in the bottom four in the last three seasons since they've been in League One, but the year that you guys won promotion from League Two, I actually can't remember where we placed you, but it would have been something like 16th.

So consistently get your magnificent, unique football club wrong,

probably for reasons of incredible team spirit and civic pride that we just don't understand.

It's really hard to stay up in League One

when you're at a club of Cambridge's size and when you don't have...

It is actually, it's really interesting when you look at the sides are in it.

When you look at the sides who are in League One this year, you go, actually, where are we getting our point?

Where the hell are we getting our points from?

Yeah, the teams that come up from League Two generally do pretty well.

I think three of the four stayed up last season, as Cambridge did when they came up, obviously.

This season, we've got Wrexham and Stockport coming up, who we think will be in the top half.

So, again, you're gaining some quite strong sides.

Mansfield were an excellent League Two team as well.

So, it just gets harder and harder to keep your head above water when you don't have Rob McAlenny and Ryan Reynolds buying you players like Paul Mullen from two leagues above.

So,

I'm not a massive believer in Gary Monk being the guy to fully inspire this squad of players, which I don't think is particularly strong for the level,

to overachievement.

And overachievement would be finishing 20th.

So yeah, I think I used the phrase, which I kind of regretted because it's pretty clinical and not very nice.

But in league one, there's what I call gravity relegations because there's four relegation spots.

So one sixth of the league goes down.

And there are certain clubs that seem to find it very, very difficult difficult to avoid after a couple of seasons.

And I think that might be Cambridge United, I'm afraid.

Yeah, yeah, we did sign Gary Gardner, who scored for England under 21s about 15 years ago.

And I was like, this is very exciting.

Who else?

Just give me the teams, George, very briefly, who's going down before we go to League Two.

Yeah, we've got Crawley going down after their heroic promotion last season.

Like an incredible season for them to get promoted at Wembley in the way they did, having been written off by everybody as likely to go to non-league and finish 24th.

But, you know, it's going to be a tall order for them to do it again.

And I do think Scott Lindsay, their manager, I'll be very surprised if he's there at the end of next season.

I think he'll be high on the wish list of many League One clubs when second season comes.

Shrewsbury Town, next up, who

have Paul Hurst as their manager, but the scored list still looks relatively bleak.

They've lost Daniel Udo, who's their main striker,

amongst other players who've moved on, and hard to see much quality coming in.

A big reliance, I think, on Hurst and his ability to turn an underachieving group into something a bit better if they're going to stay up.

And finally, Stevenage, who have had such an amazing ascent from the bottom of League Two up

towards the League One playoffs.

But the departure of Steve Evans is massive.

Alex Revelle comes in, who has had a period managing them before and didn't really look up to it in League Two level.

We often see it similar with Mike Duff and Cheltenham, where when you can...

take a look at a team's promotion and good run and you can really attribute it to a manager and their impact when that manager moves on on.

Normally, a reversion to the mean follows pretty quickly after, and I think that might be the case with Stevenage.

All right, that'll do for part two.

We'll do league two in part three.

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Max here.

Barry's here, too.

Hello.

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Welcome to part three of the Guardian Football Weekly.

League two alley looks sort of harder to predict, I think.

League two is always harder.

At the end of every season, we do an episode where we look back at our one-to-one 24 predictions and we work out how far off we were.

And if you add up all the places away from your predictions, League Two is always by miles the one that you get most wrong because it's kind of the beauty of it, right?

It's that the difference between the top budgets and the bottom budgets is significantly smaller.

The quality of player is more variable and the quality of consistency of player is much more variable.

Recruitment is,

there's more of it.

There's shorter contracts, so there's more player churn every year.

We've written about significantly more League Two transfers than championship transfers on NTT20.com.

So yeah, it's much more volatile.

And that's to its...

you know to its strength.

This is why we love covering this league.

Crawley were the consensus 24th placed pick this time last year and they're now in League One rather than the National League.

So it's absolutely brilliant.

And yeah,

it's likely that what we predict will be wrong, but we had a good go at it.

And we had Doncaster winning the league,

who

came on incredibly strong in the second half of last season.

Suddenly everything clicked.

They've got a manager in Grant McCann that I think we rate as being kind of better than League Two level.

And they went and won 10, 11 games in a row to finish the season before falling.

quite surprisingly in the playoff semi-final on penalties.

We think that they ended up being the best team outside of the three, the four rather, that have gone up.

And so we have them kind of going again.

They've done some decent recruitment.

And then we had MK Dons, who similarly came on very strong second half of last season after hiring former Premier League centre-back Mike Williamson, who is a pretty incredible manager who plays really possession-based technical style of play.

Really exciting young manager at this level.

We've got them in second.

And then

a team perennially picked to win promotion who have been failing to do it for many years is Bradford City.

We are believers in Bradford City this year.

We have been in the past and we have been wrong.

But Graham Alexander, a strong, sturdy manager for this club, I think.

They've made a good addition off the field.

David Sharp is now heading up their kind of football operations.

And it's an area of the club, I think, that where they've really needed someone smart and savvy and just who kind of knows how to support a manager and knows how to build squads.

And so, yeah, that's the three that we have going up automatically from League Two.

But there's loads of other sort of clubs who have designs on automatic promotion, like Chesterfield, who won the National League last season, like Port Vale and Carlisle and Fleetwood, who have come down from League One last season.

It's yeah, it's an absolute, as fourth tiers go, clearly the greatest in the whole world.

What's happening with Salford, George?

Gary Neville's bought out Peter Lim.

Is that a good, feels like a good thing?

I don't know.

I don't know, really.

I mean, in terms of the running of that football club, it's very hard to understand what exactly is going on.

Peter Lim's obviously someone with very deep pockets, so him moving on,

whether or not that's going to affect the day-to-day running of the club, we're not entirely sure.

Carl Robinson is their manager, who came in midway through last season and did pretty well in terms of keeping them up.

He's someone who, you know, having managed my team, Oxford, for a long time, I know very well.

And I'd be surprised if they were as abject as they were for the first half of last season under Neil Wood.

Having said that, they've lost Matt Smith, who is probably the reason why they weren't in more trouble last season in terms of relegation.

So it's easy to forget after one poor season that Salford remained one of the big fish, I would say, in League Two.

Certainly when you consider the likes of Neville and his mates who are involved,

the ambition, I think, is still there for them to rise the leagues and do so pretty quickly.

And I think the money is there for them to do that as well.

And it was only two seasons ago they were beaten on penalties by Stockport in the Pal semi-final.

So,

yeah, I think we might see Salford return to some kind of form.

Um, but it definitely does feel like they're, you know, they were kind of wrexham light, wrexham mank in a way, um, before the wrexham story happened, and their journey towards the top does seem to have been halted somewhat.

Bromley, a new team in League Two, Ali, and interestingly, the only team that are in a conservative constituency.

How will the massive Tories of Bromley do?

In the 92,

they're the only one in the 92 that are Tories.

How will they get on?

I think they will be fine.

I can't remember the last team that was promoted from the National League that went straight back down.

I'm not sure it's ever happened.

And

they generally come up and either nestle nicely in sort of 8th to 15th range, or as is expected in the case of Chesterfield and as we saw with Wrexham last season, sometimes they can be in the top seven.

So

look, this is the team that we know least about because we haven't been studying them for many years.

But I think that they have

a manager in Andy Woodman, who was best man at Gareth Southgate's wedding.

So I reckon we can expect Southgate to be down at Bromley this season.

He's done an incredible job to take a club that has been a non-league club for its history into the EFL.

And generally, there is just a club like that who keeps their core, who keeps their style of play, who doesn't make too many changes, changes, generally translates pretty well to League Two football because they've got that sort of winning habit, winning mentality.

So, yeah, really looking forward to adding Bromley to the pod this year.

Yeah, hard to do a best man speech for Gareth Southgate.

You know, it's just a nice, nice guy, isn't he?

You know, unless you sort of hand him a handbrake and tell her to make changes, start yelling at him 60 minutes into the wedding, going, change something, forget Carl Palmer into this wedding.

Who's going to struggle, George?

Do you reckon?

Cheltenham Town are one we're really worried about.

They're only relegated last season from League One, but they were, you know, they didn't score a goal until mid-October.

Daryl Clark came in and nearly pulled off one of the greatest escapes we've ever seen,

nearly at the expense of Cambridge.

I think we can see you having PTSD as we talk about it, Max.

But it's...

you know, Clark has moved on.

He's got the job at Barnsley.

Again, it's a huge turnover

of

playing staff with basically most of the the team from last season moving on.

The new director of football is Gary Johnson.

The new manager is Michael Flynn.

So all changed there.

Flynn is someone who did such an incredible job at Newport and took them to the brink of league one losing the playoff final a few years ago.

But since then he's had disappointing reigns at Walsall and at Swindon Town where both times

as soon as things turned and things started going poorly, he was really unable to arrest that slide and given how poor their squad looks to us

I'm not entirely sure it's an appointment that makes a great deal of sense.

Um, so pretty worried about them.

We also had Accrington Stanley going down, another team recently down from League One, who struggled for the most part last season.

Their recent success can be basically put down to John Coleman.

Uh, Coleman left the club last season under a bit of a cloud after you know, him and Andy Holt seemingly, well, it was a quite a public falling out from one side with Andy Holt taking to Twitter a fair amount

to talk about the issues.

You know, Holt's someone who's his transparency and his ownership of Accrington Stanley, I think has been laudable because he is very open about the struggles of trying to keep a club afloat and having to try and the amount of money you have to basically input in order to

compete on a level playing field or even to try and compete on a level playing field and why an independent regulator is so important in order to address that balance.

However, it kind of feels like maybe

they're starting to wave the white flag a little bit and accept that

a return back to the National League

might be imminent because you look at the squad at the moment and without Coleman there too, they look a bit short.

Just away from the EFL, finally,

Barry, you alerted me to this story.

The Polish FA is investigating reports of improper behaviour following a late change of VAR officials for Rangers Champions League third-round qualifying tie against Dynamo Kiev.

It was a one-all draw last night, actually, a late equaliser for Rangers.

Bartos Frankowski and Thomas Musiel were replaced by UEFA before the match in Lublin, Poland.

They were scheduled to act as VAR and assistant VAR for the game, but Polish media has reported that Lublin police caught them carrying a stolen road sign at 2 a.m.

which, frankly, I think is absolutely sensational.

A real student.

Traffic cone on the head, I presume.

Big road sign.

Take it back to their student house.

In many ways, back shows that referees are human too.

In many ways, I think it's a positive for officialdom, this story.

I'm not sure it is, Matt.

That's the kind of behaviour you really need to be getting out of your system around about the age of 18, 19.

I think.

I think I had in my house for a while a big sign that said, Caution, lorry's turning.

God, I thought I was funny.

Those are the days.

My apologies to whoever needed that sign.

I really hope someone didn't get seriously hurt by a lorry that turned into their path unexpectedly because

you'd misappropriated the warning sign.

Or possibly like lorry loads of stuff in the Cambridge area just never turned, did they?

They just carried on going in a straight line.

There was no sign for them to turn around.

Oh, the 90s, great times.

Anyway, thank you, gents.

I feel ready now for the weekend.

Stockport away, massive start for us.

Come on, Ryan Loft.

Thank you, Ali.

Thanks, Max.

Cheers, Barry.

Thank you, George.

Thank you very much, Max.

Please listen to Not the Top 20.

It is an excellent podcast.

Barry, thank you.

Thanks.

Football Weekly is produced by Joel Grove.

Our executive producer is Danielle Stevens.

We'll be back after the first weekend of the EFL on Monday.

This is The Guardian.