The final part of our annual Championship season preview focuses on the bookies’ favourites for the drop where there’s a couple of standard Championship ownership meltdowns, a couple of low-budget teams recently up from League One, and a manager who wants to blow his squad to smithereens.

Listen to the debate with @AnalyticsQPR and the oppo interviews that went into this preview over on our Patreon - Part One - Bottom Half and Part Two - Top Half are both live now.

Sheff Wed 1/3 (relegation odds)

Last Season: 12th (we said 12th, -) Not only called in exactly the right position but in lieu of an actual round up of how last season went at Hillsborough, allow me to present a tale from our notes on them a year ago and what we said at the time…

“There is, for the first time in a long time, a lot of love in the pre-season air for Sheff Wed. An absolute world away from 12 months ago when they were universally tipped to finish last.

“The success or failure of this season in S6 will depend on one thing – who’s steering the boat? Potentially the division’s best manager? Or Little Lord Cuntleroy upstairs?”

Ins >>> N/A

Outs >>> Djeidi Gassama, 21, LW, Rangers, £2m >>> Akin Famewo, 26, CB, Hull, Free >>> Josh Windass, 31, AM, Wrexham, Free >>> Callum Paterson, 30, CF, MK Dons, Free >>> Mallik Wilks, 26, RW, Pendikspor, Free >>> Pol Valentin, 28, RB, Preston, Free >>> Michael Smith, 33, CF, Preston, Free >>> Michael Ihiekwe, 32, CB, Blackpool, Free >>> Anthony Musaba, 24, RW, Samsunspor, Undisclosed >>> Stuart Armstrong, 33, CM, Released >>> Ryo Hatsuse, 27, LB, Released >>> Marvin Johnson, 34, LM, released >>> Ben Hamer, 37, GK, Released

This Season: Sure enough, about two seconds after a very creditable midtable season came to a close, the Derek Chansiri faecal hurricane began to blow through the streets of Sheffield S6.

The club ceased paying its players and staff at the end of the season, and that remains the case for July’s payroll. This, along with unpaid fees to other clubs for transfers going back as far as three years, and the standard unpaid HMRC bills, means Wednesday have incurred three separate transfer embargoes this summer. Not that they matter, Derek has clearly run out of money so there would be no incomings here anyway.

What a sport awash with money really needs to get itself into a position to do is have a pot of money in reserve somewhere to take the keys off egotistical fucklords like this and run the club as an ‘operator of last resort’, appointing an independent and experienced football CEO to act as an administrator with the task of running the club on a skeleton staff and finding a buyer. Failure to pay your players/staff, and/or failing to pay HMRC would be perfect triggers for this. You want to come and play football club? You want to wave your micropenis around and have some meatheads sing your name for a bit? Fine. But you fail to make pay roll, or pay HMRC, and we’re taking the keys back off you. We cannot keep having these Morecambe and Sheff Wed situations occur while we all stand by helplessly. Sky Sports News, meanwhile, is running hourly updates Alexander Isak’s movements.

The unpaid wages means players are free to walk away, and Wednesday have been bleeding talent all summer. They did at least get £2m for Djeidi Gassama from Glasgow Rangers, but three goals in three European games already suggests that was a pants down deal. A dozen other players have left for nothing including Josh Windass, Callum Paterson, Michael Ihiekwe, Pol Valentin, Anthony Musaba, Michael Smith… Wednesday’s team also had key loan players last year like Shea Charles and James Beadle who are, needless to say, long gone. Barry Bannan remains, because of course, but he doesn’t have a contract and there has been no kind of pre-season. The odd behind closed doors match with Mansfield, with the club’s radio silence meaning supporters are not even allowed to know the score. A planned final run out against Burnley was cancelled when the remaining “squad” refused to play – totally understandably. They start the season away at Leicester and are booking their own accommodation like some jumped up Sunday league outfit.

Rohl, rather surprisingly, has not got any of the other jobs around Europe he’d fluttering his eyelashes at. With Wednesday refusing to budge from their compensation of between £4m and £5m the German actually returned to take training for a bit having said his goodbyes at the end of last year and been replaced. Unbelievably, there is a corner of Wednesday online discourse saying they didn’t want him back and getting the snake emojis out. I’m sorry, is this a piece of your brain? I’d be surprised if he wasn’t lifting his skirt at the bastard Hillsborough Co-op for a job at this point, never mind Southampton. Fuck about. Anyway, sure enough, he left about ten minutes later along with all of his coaching staff apart from Henrik Pedersen who is sticking around because he’s a “viking” or some such horseshit.

The stadium, which any away fan can tell you has been decaying for years, is now half shut. The giant North Stand to the left of the away end, home to several thousand season ticket holders, has been deemed at risk of structural failure by Sheffield City Council who say they have been serving repeated notices against the club to fix the issues since 2022 only for them to come back and inspect again and find the assurances they were given about work being carried out were, in fact, lies. Where those season ticket holders go, who knows? Whether they’ll be able to extract a refund from a club where, very obviously, the tank is empty, even less certain. Amongst it all, Derek has found some money to install facial recognition technology at the turnstiles which are open, so he can keep a very close eye on all the Sheffield people who’ve been saying jolly nasty things about him. There’s small dick energy, and then there’s this eunuch.

Their chances rest on a takeover, and they’ve appointed an intermediary to oversee this because apparently Uncle Knobhead is impossible to deal with. But this weapon has taken out so many millions in loans secured against his ownership of the club that just to buy the worst team in the Championship, with 14 senior players left, and an ancient stadium the council think might topple over imminently, will likely cost you a sum so ridiculous you’d have to be legitimately insane to do the deal. Derek is apparently looking for anything in the £100m-150m region, which for comparison is what the Pozzo family is currently selling Udinese for. It means that anybody buying this shower is to be treated with suspicion as well. And, oh look, right on cue, here comes John Textor.

This is another really easy rule change. You should not be allowed to leverage debt against a football club. You want to spend lots of money on all the footballers? Fine. But it’s your money. You don’t leverage it against the ground or the club, you don’t use the club and its stadium to prop up your poxy tuna canning business (this happened at West Brom as well recently), you convert the debt to equity and we come kneecapping you if it all goes to shit, not Sheffield Wednesday or Bury or Macclesfield or whoever it is next. You’re on the hook fish boy, not the football club.

It makes them the surest tip on the coupon, obviously. I can’t ever remember a team a 1/3 for relegation before a season has begun before. But that ship has long sailed. This isn’t about how they get on at Leicester, or where they finish on the league table, this is about whether Sheff Wed even get a team to the King Power Stadium this Sunday, whether this lot can even complete a Championship season, and if a Sheffield Wednesday still exists in any form when we come to write this preview next year. Respect and love to the people who support this great club, and those working the everyday jobs there with mortgages to pay and bills to meet. Our sport has to do better than this.

Anyway, after the break, we’re live from the Liverpool training ground with the very latest on that Alexander Isak deal.

Cunts. Everywhere.

Manager: Henrik Pedersen Good luck, Art.

Pray for – Lovely Jon (@j_ho9) “Where do you start? Finished last season 12th. All fine and dandy, happy with that, nice season of consolidation. Sign a couple of players, something to build on. To be fair there were already rumours around at that stage. The whole clusterfuck has basically come about because… well, he hasn’t got any money anymore, has he? Can’t pay the players, can’t pay the taxman, can’t pay other clubs what we owe them for past transfers. Three payrolls missed, HMRC bill missed, three separate transfer embargoes, now banned from paying money for a player until summer 2027. A complete and utter mess. Catastrophic mismanagement.

“Who knows any more? Who are we? It’s been zero coms from the club from the start of all this. I’ve got good news for those clubs at the bottom playing ‘find three worse teams than us’. You’ve found one. It’s us.”

Listen to the full interview with Jon on our Patreon season preview show.

Prediction – 24th (@AnalyticsQPR 24th) The most important aspect of this is for me is… this has been coming for YEARS. From the moment Derek overspent to get to the Premier League and lost the play-off final to Hull they have been taking on water. That Wembley final was in 2016 (!!!). We’ve written the same thing about them in this preview ever since, summer after summer, year after year. The chairman here is a tumour. This festering bellend will kill this football club. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, or the week after that. Maybe they’ll live with this dicksplat for years. Bounce up and down the leagues, have a few good times. But sooner or later, he will kill them. It was the same at Reading, West Brom have had a near brush, Hull are starting to show signs. Stop mincing words and coming out with this corporate bullshit about “dialogue”. There has to be a mechanism. There has to be an emergency stop button. There has to be a way of removing malignant pricks like this. This cannot keep happening. It’s a disgrace to the sport in this country, the people that run it, and the media which cover it. The vast, vast majority of us don’t give a shiny shite about Alexander Isak. We care about our football club still being there next Saturday for us to be able to watch, support, shout at, bond over, despair of. Solidarity with the Sheff Wed faithful.

Oxford 5/2

Last Season: 17th (we said 24th, +7) “Follow the money” we said in tipping Oxford and Plymouth as our bottom two last year as they’d almost certainly have the league’s lowest wage bills. Argyle obviously also hamstrung by having a hairy potato sleeping off the after effects of another long night in the student union bar in lieu of a manager. Oxford on the other hand didn’t exactly fly, but can be really pleased with a first season back at this level since 1998/99.

They surprised early on, beating Norwich, Preston and Stoke in their first three home games to lay a nice platform. There’s no such thing as a must win game in August, obviously, but it doesn’t half make a difference if you get a few results like that on the board early as opposed to winning two of your first 17 games as we have over the past few years.

Things did go awry after that. It predictably took until New Year’s Day for them to get an away win, and if you watched them lose 2-0 at Loftus Road in one of the worst games of football ever staged on that ground it wasn’t hard to see why. I Tweeted words to the effect of I couldn’t see them winning a single away game playing like that. It was a performance and result that rang up a run of one win in 14 and six losses in eight games which was enough for the owners to ditch local hero Des Buckingham despite his enduring popularity with the supporters and achievements in League One the year before.

To save their skins they went for ultimate Championship stodge and pragmatism in Gary Rowett. No frills, straight talking, shrewd bastard – as highlighted by his decision to use his first game away at champions elect Leeds as a watching brief and get to work the following week instead. Good luck at Elland Road lads, I’ll see you bright and early Monday we’ll get cracking then. Lost 4-0. Next two games Cardiff and Plymouth at home. I see you, Gary.

Victories against Cardiff and Plymouth duly secured, they then won away for the first time at Rowett’s former club Millwall which I’m sure he enjoyed, and from there they were up and running. There was only one more away win to come, at Sheff Wed, they were rarely impressive, and another nine-game winless streak awaited, but they did just enough at just the right times to keep their chin above the tideline. Only nine defeats since Rowett took over as well. A home win against Sheff Utd certainly the most impressive result, but a really good knack of capitalising and stamping down on the throats of teams having a bad moment – seven points from Luton, Blackburn and Stoke in January, a point from Derby before Eustace got going and another at Norwich as they unravelled before a home win against beach-bound Watford, a draw with Cardiff as they circled the drain and a win against Sunderland reserves as they prepped for the play-offs. I’m sure they’d deny this, but you can imagine a fixture list on the wall of Rowett’s office with stars next to games they really wanted to attack and take advantage of. That Sheff Utd game was the only time they won when they really shouldn’t have.

In between those two wins against the Sheffield clubs, QPR went to the Kassam and won 3-1. An important result for Marti Cifuentes’ team in the context of our own unravelling season at that point. To look at Oxford that night, as in the corresponding fixture at ours, you’d never believe they’d stay up. But stay up they did, by five places and four points as well. A job really well done.

Ins >>> Brian De Keersmaecker, 25, CM, Heracles, Undisclosed >>> Brodie Spencer, 21, RB, Huddersfield, Undisclosed >>> Will Lankshear, 20, CF, Spurs, Loan >>> Nic Prelec, 24, CF, Cagliari, Loan >>> Luke Harris, 20, AM, Fulham, Loan

Outs >>> Josh McEachran, 32, CM, Bristol Rovers, Free >>> Idris El Mizouni, 24, CM, Orient, Undisclosed >>> Ruben Rodrigues, 28, AM, Vitoria, Undisclosed >>> Stuart Findlay, 29, CB, Hearts, Loan >>> Will Goodwin, 23, CF, Colchester, Loan >>> Jordan Thorniley, 28, CB, Northampton, Loan >>> Max Woltman, 21, CF, Released >>> Joe Bennett, 35, LB, Released

This Season: I wonder how much those two games between our sides colour QPR’s perception of the U’s. They were, with the arguable exception of Cardiff and Hull away, the worst team we played last season twice. The Oxford fan I play football with on a Monday is pretty adamant that their two worst performances of last season were QPR home and away. Not complaining – take those six points off our total and it would have been 10p 50p bumhole on the last day at Sunderland.

Nevertheless, I have got them lower this year and perhaps the only reason I haven’t put them in my bottom three again is because of a couple of meltdowns elsewhere and I’m burned by sticking them dead last 12 months ago. I didn’t want to put Preston third bottom because I think it means they’ll beat us on Saturday, and Oxford were next up on my list to slot in there. Not The Top 20, whose Oxford-supporting co-host George Elek has regularly made other pundits look silly by being positive about the U’s prospects, has placed them in their bottom three predictions this summer.

While we’re borrowing/stealing stuff from other season previews, a belting Gab Sutton stat on this: “From 2013 to 2023, 23 of the 30 teams (77%) promoted to this level at least survived in their first season up, whereas only 15 of the 23 (65%) survived again the following season (we included Ipswich), which suggests these campaigns throw up fresh challenges.” He also points out that Rowett has never lost three games in a row as a manager and has conceded one goal or fewer in 299 of his 370 games as a manager (68%). Please do go and read Gab’s preview here, his is a level of research to which the rest of us can only aspire.

My worries are much the same as a year ago. They did a huge amount of business last summer to ready themselves for the Championship, but a mixture of experienced heads like Matt Phillips and Will Vaulks together with lower division Louie Sibley, Jack Currie types the podcasters get all amorous for, did not yield many success stories. Ultimately, they’re bringing a toothpick to a war in which even Swansea and Millwall are launching £5m missiles this summer. Oxford will, again, likely be the lowest wage bill in this league. This lot need to escape their three-sided rented stadium and build their own gaff to start generating some income – planning permission is sought and desperately needed.

The second is I don’t see where goals come from in this team. Mark Harris, bless him, not a Championship centre forward. Luckily for us clothes horse Ole Romenij scored as many goals in the wrong net as he did in the right one after a January arrival. Will Lankshear is a highly rated Spurs youth prospect, but got through four starts and seven sub appearances at West Brom last year without troubling the scorers. Nic Prelec arrives from Cagliari on the eve of the season after scoring 14 goals in 63 appearances in two years on loan at Austria Vienna. A Slovenian striker? What can possibly go wrong with that.

Where are the goals? And, therefore, where are the away wins? Just two last year. You can only rely on that bowling alley distracting Championship teams for so long. Their actual numbers weren’t great, their underlying numbers were appalling (xG of “one every now and again”).

The pre-season rings alarm bells as well. Gary Rowett and his lads spending the summer being carried around Indonesia as demi-gods on elephant back sounds like the sort of nonsense we endured when Tony Fernandes first bought our club – a season that started with a 5-0 home defeat to Swansea and went downhill from there.

There are positives, of course. Rowett is central among them. We discount his time at Stoke because Stoke gonna Stoke (recurring theme of this year’s preview) and look at the very steady jobs he did, often in trying circumstances, frequently with no money at all, at Burton, Birmingham and Millwall. He’s a really safe, steady pair of hands this guy. Not going to win any extra points for aesthetics, and there are a few mumbles and grumbles already about his style of play even with last year’s fantastic outcome, but every preview I’ve read that places Oxford outside the relegation zone cites him as the reason.

We like Tyler Goodrham. We really like Cameron Brannagan. To that midfield Belgian Brian De Keersmaecker is being billed as a club record signing. And Michael Helik is still an outstanding centre half in both boxes at this level. He’ll be up for the fight.

Much of the attention goalkeeper wise went the way of Burnley’s James Trafford, Sheff Utd’s Michael Cooper and Stoke’s Viktor Johansson last season, and with good reason. All three were outstanding. What you rarely heard mention of was the other two keepers who posted similar stats – Watford’s mid-season signing Egil Selvik and Oxford’s own Jamie Cumming who was the outstanding goalkeeper in League Two and One previously and has more than carried that on in this division. Second most saves in the division (143 v Johansson’s 152), 12.3 goals prevented which is .2 off Trafford’s and again only behind Johansson’s 15.8. You’ll be hearing more about this kid soon.

If you’ve got a big bastard centre back and a death-defying goalkeeper to keep you in games long enough, you’ll nick plenty of results that way. It’s the Rowett way.

Will it be enough? I don’t think so, honestly. But I said that last year.

Manager: Gary Rowett One of those Derby, Charlton types where the manager is the best thing about them.

Oppo View – Adam England “Last season wasn’t about glory. From day one it was about getting to 50 points. Driven by a refusal to be written off as a one-season wonder and to prove to our critics we were not the easy pick for relegation they thought Oxford would be. It was a season of extremes — wild swings in form that took us from brilliance to bafflement in the space of a week. One moment we were unplayable, the next... unrecognisable. We won games we had no right to, we lost games we should have won comfortably.

“Expectations for the season feel unusually polarised. This squad — as currently built — looks capable of creeping into the top half if things click early and injuries are kind. But by the same token, if we’re slow out of the blocks or lose key players, it’s not hard to imagine us being in serious trouble by Christmas. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. The margins in the Championship are razor-thin, and with a relatively lean squad, Oxford could just as easily defy expectations as fall victim to them. Much will depend on whether we can add the necessary depth in the final weeks of the window — and whether Rowett can continue to extract consistency from a group still gelling in parts.”

Prediction – 21st (@AnalyticsQPR 19th) Hull get their chaos sorted, Preston not as bad as we reckon = this lot in trouble.

Hull 3/1

Last Season: 21st (we said 7th, -14) Hull looked a piss poor side to me when QPR won there 2-1 in late January. Much like our win at Cardiff before Christmas, victory over an appalling football team in decline played out in a half empty stadium in an atmosphere akin to a paedo’s funeral. That defeat one of ten on their own patch last season, no Championship side lost more at home, and with just five wins on Humberside all year they were easily the division’s worst home record. I was astonished they stayed up from there.

We got this lot wrong by 14 places so it’s a bit rich to sit here now with hindsight and say this stuff wasn’t entirely unforeseeable, but we’re going to do it anyway.

The decision to part company with Liam Rosenior at the end of 23/24 for the heinous crime of missing the play-offs by one place was obviously ludicrous, as everybody with two brain cells to scratch together recognised at the time. Rosenior has since slipped very nicely into the big seat at Strasbourg while Hull have bombed.

The solution to Rosenior’s perceived boring product was to appoint Tim Walter who specialised in “heart attack football” and whose Hamburg side would score and concede goals at a rate of two or three a minute. His early tactic of putting every outfielder in the penalty box for attacking corner produced a series of farcical length-of-field counter attacks, most notably at home to Sheff Utd, because it created a situation where if you won the first defensive header at a Hull corner you were automatically effectively through one on one with the keeper at the other end.

What wins they did get came against Stoke, Cardiff and QPR (because of course) which was really telling about the level they were at. Even those were only secured with some frankly ridiculous form from goalkeeper Ivor Pandur. Walter, at war with dissenting fans from very early in the season, was sacked not long after which is just as well because Beavis must have been starting to wonder where he’d got to.

By December 14 the Tigers had lost seven of eight games, won only three of their first 22, and were effectively dead in the water. Well, if you’re looking for a life raft in that situation you could do worse than the bloke who’s spent the previous few years dealing with a similar catastrofuck at Reading. Ruben Selles, slowly but surely, and not in any kind of grand manner, started to pick up results. They won at Blackburn and Millwall, and then really surprisingly at Sheff Utd and Sunderland. Fair play though, the Blades were down “t’bare bones” that night with only Vini Souza, Jesuran Rak-Sakyi, Tyrese Campbell and Rhian Brewster to bring off the bench bless ‘em.

Six pointers against Plymouth, Oxford and Preston were all won at home (they won just two of their first 17 league games on that ground) but Luton won there 1-0 which felt pivotal. What the Hatters couldn’t do was follow that up with the other results they needed and so although Hull finished with a defeat at home to Derby and 1-1 draw at Portsmouth they did indeed come through a nervous final 30 minutes at Fratton Park still a Championship club. They survived on goal difference despite scoring a league-low 44.

How they did it, I’m still not sure. They were dreadful, throughout.

Ins >>> Gustavo Puerta, 21, CM, Leverkusen, £3m >>> Reda Laalaoui, 20, CM, FUS Rabat, £200k >>> Enis Destan, 23, CF, Trabzonspor, Free >>> Semi Ajayi, 31, CB, West Brom, Free >>> Akin Famewo, 26, CB, Sheff Wed, Free >>> Dillon Phillips, 30, GK, Rotherham, Free >>> Joel Ndala, 19, LW, Man City, Loan >>> John Lundstram, 31, DM, Trabzonspor, Loan >>> Roddy McScotsman, 29, CF, Las Palmas, Free

Outs >>> Steven Alzate, 26, CM, Atlanta, £1.5m >>> Sean McLoughlin, 28, CB, Blackburn, £500k >>> Marvin Mehlem, 27, AM< Bielefeld, £500k >>> Xavier Simons, 22, DM, Bolton, £250k >>> Joao Pedro, 33, CF, San Luis, Free >>> Dogukan Sinik, 26, LW, Antalyaspor, Free >>> Brandon Fleming, 25, LB, Derry City, Free >>> Nordin Ambrabat, 38, RW, Wydad AC, Free >>> Callum Jones, 24, CM, Dundee, Free >>> Alfie Jones, 27, CB, Middlesbrough, Undisclosed >>> Anthony Racioppi, 26, GK, FC Sion, Undisclosed >>> Andy Smith, 23, CB, Gillingham, Undisclosed >>> Abdulkadir Omur, 26, AM, Antalyaspor, Loan >>> Mason Burstow, 21, CF, Bolton, Loan >>> Timothee Lo-Tutala, 22, GK, Doncaster, Loan >>> Matty Jacob, 24, LB, Reading, Loan

This Season: And the reason it was foreseeable went back to that ridiculous Rosenior sacking. With what we know now it feels like owner Acun Ilıcalı really did his money on that promotion push and has been bleeding out ever since. You remember the Tigers lineup that took us apart 3-0 the season before last – Carvalho, Philogene, Serri, Tufan, Omur, Morton, Greaves. That team was expensive. Here we are talking about what Rosenior was building and how everything was fine, but that was the last boat off the island. Hull had to be on it. Ilıcalı is Dennis Nedry frantically driving around pleading for 15 minutes, just gimme the 15 minutes.

There have been some big player sales here which usually means headroom and money to spend – Greaves went to Ipswich for £20m, Philogene to Ipswich via Villa for not far off that. But earlier this summer transfer embargoes started to be handed down for failure to pay debts to other clubs, and when you look at what those debts are you realise why they’re in quite as much shit as they are. Hull owed Aston Villa £1m just to loan Louie Barry, a promising player no doubt but somebody with no Championship experience who injury restricted to just four appearances. This is a club that’s been chucking good money after bad. Mason Burstow, a £2m buy from Chelsea just 12 months ago, is now on loan at Bolton.

The EFL has forbidden them from paying another fee for a transfer or loan until January 2027. Hull have signed a couple anyway this summer, as you can see from the list above, but those deals are yet to be ratified with a week to go until the season starts. There has been a mass exodus of players – 16 out permanently or on loan and counting.

Three days prior to the transfer embargoes being announced, Ilıcalı had confidently told a fan forum held at the stadium that the club had no financial problems whatsoever. This was in response to a question about why he was making noises pitching for outside investment. Rumours have been doing the rounds in the city for sometime that local businesses and creditors were going unpaid.

The Athletic, for whom former Hull Daily Mail sports journo Phil Buckingham is now on staff, revealed that as of the end of May the club still owed £21.8m in outstanding transfer payments to other clubs (the highest such total in the league outside parachute payment clubs) and £3m to the prior owners The Allams who were themselves so despised that Ilıcalı was welcomed open arms and no questions asked – beware Sheff Wed. The wage bill has climbed from £8.6m in 2021/22 to £27.9m at the last set of accounts and is still soaring. It now far outstrips the club’s income. Anybody wishing to buy the club off him must settle a £60m debt owed by Hull to Ilıcalı’s Acun Medya. Stop me if you’ve heard this shit before.

Ilıcalı, as you’d expect of a media entrepreneur, is all about the messaging. A group of Hull fans are still treated to a holiday in Turkey on him each summer. These transfer embargoes are mistakes. This is all a misunderstanding. Legal appeals have been filed (results due imminently). Everybody is out to get them. Hull are being unfairly persecuted. Cash flow and money is not a problem. Sunlit uplands still await. And weaving between embargoes money continues to be shelled out on a 31-year-old John Lundstrum, and the artist formerly known as Oli McBurnie. Remember that time Reading emerged from one of their insolvency hearings with the league and an hour later announced they’d signed Andy Carroll?

Unbelievably, Selles’ reward for rescuing this basket case from relegation last year was, like Rosenior before him, the sack. Ilıcalı, as with Tim Walter, as with Shota Arveladze, thinks he’s seen better out in Eastern Europe. Step forward Sergej Jakirovic, a Bosnian who won domestic stuff with Dinamo Zagreb, as you really should do with Dinamo Zagreb. He does still have Charlie Hughes here, a 21 year old defender signed from Wigan who looks the real deal.

We got them badly wrong last year because the year before we’d been caught out by a late trolley dash around the transfer market which transformed their bottom half squad into a play off competitor. I just expected they’d do much the same last August, so stuck them seventh again. All is not lost this summer. Win the appeal, get the embargoes lifted, strengthen the team, there’s some drek at the bottom of that league that it’s easy to finish above. Joe Gelhardt is the latest to be linked and they’ve stormed through pre-season with five wins from five, including one against Sunderland.

But there are red flags all over the place here and they’re not blessed with good luck either - star winger Liam Miller one of three ACL ruptures in quick succession last season - so that’s a lot of ifs to be staking a prediction on.

Manager: Sergej Jakirovic A serial winner so far, won the Bosnian top flight with Zrinjski Mostar and the Croatian league with Dinamo Zagreb. Was unaware of the financial issues when he arrived earlier this summer – WELCOME TO HULL!

Oppo View – Nathaniel Whittingham (@NathanielWhitto) “Last season was close to a catastrophic disaster. Tim Walter turned out to be a highly unpopular and damaging appointment. We were bailed out by a significant if not huge uptick by Ruben Selles' much less glamourous football, some astute January signings and worse form from other clubs. We overspent on players who were not good enough and now we are literally paying the price. Our home form was shocking and we only won consecutive games once. Selles was sacked for keeping us up despite being bottom when he took over and here we are.

“Can we stay up? Certainly, no question. Will? It's based on so many ifs buts and maybes. Our back five is very solid and our midfield looks ok. Matt Crooks, Regan Slater, John Lundstram etc can do a job. The question is really goals. We have lost our top scorer Pedro and second top scorer Gelhardt from the lowest scorers in the league. We will need some people to chip in. We will end the season stronger as we have triple ACL injuries to come back. That's midfielder Eliot Matazo and wingers Liam Millar and Mo Belloumi. If we can be average and get even get one ok striker in the door we will be safe. Jakirovic seems to have got the team more enthused and that goes a long way. There's definitely a ceiling to our season but we're not in anywhere near as dire a situation as Sheffield Wednesday. Obviously, come deadline day if we do not bring in a forward we will certainly struggle until January.”

Prediction – 23rd (@AnalyticsQPR 23rd) At this point it’s giving big Reading vibes.

Charlton 3/1

Last Season: 4th in League One After five years away, and with eight of the last nine years spent down there, Charlton took advantage of a poor-quality League One to win promotion back to the Championship for the first time since 2019/20. A great old-school London stadium back on our calendar, and an afternoon drinking by the river, in exchange for Luton Town. Lovely job. Good to have you back, guys.

Naturally the same welcome will not be extended by the QPR faithful to Nathan Jones, a man with very strong opinions about how other people conduct and enjoy themselves, but who spent stoppage time of the Addicks’ play-off semi-final victory against Wycombe rolling around on the floor of his technical area offering up dramatic prayers to the heavens for his team to see through their 1-0 aggregate win (only once he’d checked the Sky camera was on him, mind). Walloper.

None of that really looked on approaching Christmas. Charlton won their first three league games of the season but then only three of the next 16 and at that point it looked like Jones would just join a list of really quite reasonable managers who’ve had success elsewhere but been unable to awaken this former Premier League side from its slumber – Karl Robinson, Johnnie Jackson, Nigel Adkins, Dean Holden and Michael Appleton have all passed through here without much success.

A 5-0 away win at Northampton just before Christmas seemed to spark something. Three consecutive victories through the festive period kickstarted the season. Three more awaited on the other side of FA Cup weekend. Charlton’s second half of the season was pretty astonishing. They won 16 of 22 games, losing only three, to canter up the table and gatecrash a play-off picture in which none of the other teams involved really seemed bothered about chasing down runaway leaders Birmingham and Wrexham.

Very much the form team in the knockouts then, but if you were able to sit through all three of Charlton’s play-off games as a neutral then you’re a braver man than I. The Addicks built that second half of the season on their defence and goalkeeper. They kept ten clean sheets in those 22 games, and conceded a single goal in seven of the others. To be fair, they put four through Huddersfield and Wycombe on the run in, but otherwise goals weren’t really their thing – Stockport, Wycombe and Orient all scored in the 70s while Charlton made the six with a total of 67.

They went through all three play-off games without conceding. A borderline unwatchable semi-final with Wycombe was settled by a late goal in the home leg from veteran Matty Godden, a shrewd summer pick up from Coventry. They repeated the dose at Wembley against a tired looking Orient side, scoring after half an hour and straight batting the rest of the game out. Orient not helped by a ten-minute stoppage to fix the referee’s communication equipment – whistle, flags, get on with it you wet wipe.

And, so, back they come. Nathan Jones another proving once again that failure as a manager at Stoke really doesn’t count.

Ins >>> Charlie Kelman, 23, CF, QPR, £3m >>> Rob Apter, 22, RW, Blackpool, £2m >>> Harvey Knibbs, 26, AM, Reading, £2m >>> Tanto Olaofe, 25, CF, Stockport, £1.5m >>> Thomas Kaminski, 32, GK, Luton, £1m >>> Joe Rankin-Costello, 25, RB, Blackburn, £800k >>> Amari’I Bell, 31, LB, Luton, Free >>> Sonny Carey, 24, CM, Blackpool, Free >>> Reece Burke, 28, CB, Luton, Undisclosed

Outs >>> Thierry Small, 20, LB, Preston, Free >>> Dean Bouzanis, 34, GK, Brisbane Roar, Free >>> Aaron Henry, 21, DM, Boreham Wood, Free >>> Nathan Asiimwe, 20, RV, Wimbledon, Loan >>> Tennai Watson, 28, RB, Released >>> Chuks Aneke, 31, CF, Released >>> Danny Hylton, 36, CF, Retired

This Season: After perhaps underestimating and underinvesting in their last Championship tilt in 2019/20, Charlton have not been hanging around this summer. After years of disastrous boardroom situations and Matt Southall-type chancers milking the place for Land Rovers, the new owners have steadied the ship and are spending on the team. They’ve chucked north of £10m on a dozen new faces this window - equal parts ‘best of League One’ and ‘whoever Jones has in his address book from Luton’.

Charlie Kelman is obviously the headline capture among these for a fee being reported around £3m (but let’s wait and see what clears into our accounts in 18 months). This is one that will be judged in hindsight over time at QPR. On the one hand, there were only two strikers who scored more than 20 goals in the whole EFL last season and his breakout season of 21 in the league and 26 overall means one of them was a contracted QPR player. Frustrating enough that this was going on while we were watching Michi Frey play one game in four and Zan Celar persistently fail to find his own arse with both hands, but doubly so that having sent a player out on a development loan in which he developed that we don’t now get to reap any rewards from that. The club’s deliberate muddying of the waters over contracts plays into its hands here because it’s been generally accepted by QPR fans that Kelman only had a year left and wouldn’t sign for another so we had no choice, but we spoke to a journalist recently adamant there was another year beyond that by way of a club option making the situation less pressing than it might have seemed (tell me again how you’re not bothered about the club not releasing this info publicly any more). On the other hand, Kelman apparently didn’t want to be here regardless and had shown little sign of ever being this player beforehand - even the renewal of his deal in the first place felt like a tacit admission we expected to be in League One ourselves pretty shortly. Getting all excited over a mediocre striker on a hot streak is a mistake we’ve made plenty of times before (Sheron, Washington) so perhaps we’ve done that rare, sensible thing of cashing in on a player at the peak of his powers/value. It won’t feel like that if he’s banging the winner in at the School End the week after next while we’re watching our current crop of strikers falling over their own feet again, but like I say this is one that’ll be judged with a lot of hindsight.

In the ‘best of League One’ category they’ve brought in Harvey Knibbs who was sought after at Reading and should serve as a quality provider for Kelman who, wherever you are on his situation, needs chances created for him if he’s to score. Matty Godden had a great Indian summer last season scoring 22 goals in all comps – you’d think, at 34, those goals will need replacing back in the higher division. Rob Apter who didn’t really fulfil his promise at Blackpool, his Tangerine teammate Sonny Carey and Stockport’s Tanto Olaofe also come with the Addicks from the third tier. I don’t know, enough Championship quality here? Joe Rankin-Costello always played well against QPR for Blackburn, but has hamstrings made of twigs.

The ‘getting the band back together’ stuff has focused mainly on the defence. Reece Burke in the middle, Amari’I Bell to the right, Thomas Kaminski in goal. Fair enough, they were unfortunate to be losing talented left back Thierry Small on a free transfer, and I’m really surprised he’s gone to Preston (great pick up by North End), but I’m a little unsure why you’d do major surgery on the best part of the team last season just to bring in a load of Jones’ old mates from a relegated Luton side. Kaminski is a decent keeper, Burke is functional on the rare occasions he’s fit, but that back three of Kayne Ramsay, Lloyd Jones and Macaulay Gillesphey in front of Will Mannion were the best thing about them last year with Small bombing on from wing back. Mannion kept 15 clean sheets in 34 appearances. Did that need changing to this extent? Are the incomers good enough to justify that? I have my doubts.

It’ll be close, particularly if Hull get their act together as everybody currently has them nailed down in the bottom three, but I’m not sure I see Charlton going down. Annoyingly, that’s mainly because of their manager.

Manager: Nathan Jones I feel physically sick, literally sick, I could be sick.

Oppo View – Louis Mendez @louismend @CharltonLive “Nathan Jones worked his magic. It took a while for everything to gel but Charlton were almost unbeatable in the second-half of the season and flew into the play-offs in excellent form. He worked tirelessly on addressing Charlton’s issues at the back from the previous year and used that as a base to start from. They were well organised – albeit lacking a little pizazz at times. But once they’d ridden a difficult spell in the autumn, there was no looking back.

“There’s always uncertainty for any side embarking on their first season a level up after promotion but I’d say it’s even more prevalent for the Addicks after so much transfer business this summer. You have no idea how the raft of new arrivals will gel – who will be a hit and who will struggle to make the step up. But with Jones’ knack of getting the most out of his squad I hope Charlton will be able to steer clear of any serious relegation worries and finish comfortably in lower mid-table. I’d be more than happy with that.”

Prediction – 20th (@AnalyticsQPR 21st)

Preston 9/2

Last Season: 20th (we said 16th, -4) Preston are certainly no strangers to heading off to Mykonos early and leaving an increasingly downtrodden support base to suffer a lousy end to a season.

North End lost their last five games of 23/24 without scoring a goal (the season had started with six straight wins in an unbeaten run of nine). The year before they lost four of the last five, drawing the other, and conceded 14 goals in the process including two separate hauls of four goals against.

So, it wasn’t altogether unexpected that, once a decent run to the FA Cup quarter finals had been brought to an end by Premier League Aston Villa, there would be a certain element of ‘on the beach’ to a team that had been so poor to start with the manager resigned after one game and the caretaker after two. Still, even in this context, North End’s 2025 has so far been abysmal. They won only one of their final 15 games, at home to travelsick Portsmouth. The Villa loss sparked a run of six losses and three draws from the final nine.

By the time QPR arrived there, themselves in lousy form, over Easter the ground was half empty and those who were in attendance were seriously grumpy with their players. Leading 1-0 against Marti Cifuentes’ checked-out side, the Lilywhites contrived to lose 2-1 to two late goals. The winner, scored in stoppage time by Lucas Andersen, was assisted by Mads Frokjaer who, instead of just playing the ball away down the line to see out a draw, turned back inside and passed it straight to his fellow Dane on the edge of the box. You could hear the boos from space.

After the game manager Paul Heckingbottom pulled no punches. “I’ve just been having a conversation with Peter Ridsdale. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to calm down. Why would I want to do that? It’s obvious what needs to happen. Change or be changed. That’s it. How much is possible won’t be determined by me. Right now, how I feel, I’d throw a bomb under the lot and start again.

“That’s what I’d do but I don’t think I’ll be able to do that, so it’s going to be hard work. Players playing out of position and going off track costs you. Giving the ball away puts you under pressure, but you have to find better players. I’m not going to criticise people for getting on the ball and making mistakes but you’ve got to put a value on the ball. It’s got to matter, keeping the ball.”

Ins >>> Odeluga Offiah, 22, RB, Brighton, £1.5m >>> Daniel Iversen, 27, GK, Leicester, Free >>> Thierry Small, 20, LB, Charlton, Free >>> Jordan Thompson, 28, CM, Stoke, Free >>> Andrija Vukcevic, 28, LB, Juarez, Free >>> Pol Valentin, 28, RB, Sheff Wed, Free >>> Michael Smith, 33, CF, Sheff Wed, Free >>> Jack Walton, 27, GK, Luton, Undisclosed >>> Daniel Jebbison, 21, CF, Bournemouth, Loan

Outs >>> Emil Riis, 27, CF, Bristol City, Free >>> Freddie Woodman, 28, GK, Liverpool, Free >>> Ryan Ledson, 27, CM, Huddersfield, Free >>> Kian Best, 19, LB, Chelsea, Free >>> Kian Taylor, 20, CM, Morton, Free >>> Ched Evans, 36, CF, Fleetwood, Free >>> Jack Whatmough, 28, CB, Huddersfield, Undisclosed >>> Layton Stewart, 22, CF, FC Thun, Undisclosed >>> Kaedyn Kamara, 19, CM, Cork, Loan >>> Patrick Bauer, 32, CB, Released

This Season: The big question therefore has to be, does that list of ins and outs represent enough of a ‘bomb’ to make sure things are different this time? To make sure they’re not going into the last day nervously awaiting updates from West Brom v Luton? To make sure the players do commit to a full 46-game season and not put the cue on the rack in mid-March?

PNE have had issues at full back for years and Odeluga Offiah looks a fun if overdue attempt at addressing that. Comes with the added benefit of pissing off local rivals Blackpool where he had a successful loan last year. Still, beware Brighton being willing to offload young talent cheap – cough, Taylor Richards. Analytics trendies’ favourite Thierry Small was impressive on the opposite side for Charlton last year and was a free transfer I’d have liked to see us involved with when replacing Kenneth Paal. Daniel Iversen is a good keeper at this level who’s done well here before and should be an upgrade on Freddie Woodman who’d really lost his way and has chosen to surrender his career to go and do bibs, balls and cones for the actual goalkeepers at Liverpool. Plymouth’s Lewis Gibson looks worth the money paid.

The problems here are threefold.

First, like us, this is a club of ten years standing at this level. They have neither the parachute payment nor owner backing to significantly improve their team beyond lower midtable so that it might challenge for promotion any time soon. They have mismanaged several contracts and haven’t secured a significant sale of a player really since Callum Robinson went to Sheff Utd in 2019/20 and don’t appear to have fetched north of a million for anybody since Ben Davies went to Liverpool four years ago. There is no significant academy or youth set up here producing anything of any real note. To manage and recruit here is just to shuffle around free transfers and six-figure Championship and lower league players, or shop in Scotland, Ireland and corners of Europe. To be fair in Frokjaer, Ali McCann, Emil Riis, Ben Whiteman, Miluten Osmajic (not a particularly nice boy) and Stefan Thordarson they have had reasonable success doing this. But it’s not play-offs is it? Or even top half.

Second, this situation has become increasingly frustrating for what is not a bad calibre of manager to have worked their way through Deepdale. Simon Grayson, Alex Neil, Ryan Lowe and now Paul Heckingbottom – no mugs, steady enough. Two left for bigger, better jobs. Lowe became prickly and spiteful in his interviews, firing barbs at players and fans alike, which never ends well. Which brings us back to Heckingbottom’s outburst. It’s all well and good in the heat of a moment after a bad defeat talking about how bad the squad is, how you’ve already had a word with the chairman, naming players you should have substituted, saying it’s all going to be different next year if you get your way but… if you promise to throw a bomb, you’ve got to throw one. More than a dozen first teamers remain. Players won’t stick with you long once you’ve thrown them under the bus. Is Michael Smith from Sheff Wed, Jordan Thompson from Stoke, Pol Valentin from Sheff Wed, a bomb? Emil Riis, decent striker, goes on a free to Bristol City. Daniel Jebbison, nightmare stint at Watford, in as replacement. Jack Whatmough, starting centre back, out to Huddersfield (lock up your podcast hosts). Kaine Kesler Hayden, last year’s POTY, is now at Coventry. Again, very little money incoming to do anything about this.

And third, it’s trending in the wrong direction. The fans have really done their best to improve the atmosphere at Deepdale, to get the flags and the pre-match going behind the goal, to shift tickets. Spud Brothers as kit sponsors is a nice story. But as their team slides from tenth to 20th and moves into an 11th consecutive season of Championship football in a stadium that remains steadfastly unfinished down one side, it feels like belief, patience and understanding might be in short supply. Not as short supply as the goals from that squad as it stands on paper right now, mind.

The good news is they start away at Queens Park Rangers. Rangers lost 3-1 at home to West Brom on the opening day of last year, 4-0 at Watford day one the year before, 1-0 at Blackburn in 2022, 1-1 at home to Millwall in 2021, 3-2 at Plymouth in 2020 (albeit a cup game) and 1-0 at Preston in 2018. Mark Warburton’s 2-1 success at Stoke in 2019 is the only success among our recent first ‘efforts’. Sure, if you want to discount that rogue Covid season when we started with a League Cup tie then we did win the first league match at home to Forest, but having sat here and sucked my teeth over just how bad Preston might be this season the one thing you can absolutely guarantee is they’ll come to Loftus Road on Saturday and win 2-0.

They probably need to because it’s Ipswich and Leicester at home and then Portsmouth away up next.

Manager: Paul Heckingbottom Bomb squad unite.

Oppo View – Josh McLoughlin (@DeepdaleDigest) “We probably deserved to go down last season and after Ryan Lowe walked following the opening game it shouldn’t have been a surprise. We’ve gradually got worse over the last couple of seasons and been too reliant on loan players. Kaine Kesler Hayden was the pick of the bunch last time. Paul Heckingbottom steadied the ship at first but the football was dreadful and our usual capitulation around the end of the season was worse than ever. One win in 15 for a team whose confidence was rock bottom.

“This season will be a big struggle. Sheffield Wednesday looks certs for relegation which ties up one spot. Hull City are doing their best to follow suit but could still battle to safety. It’s then tough to find another team weaker than ourselves. Oxford United may seem the likely candidate but Gary Rowett is an astute manager at this level. We’ve got a very tough start on paper, with Leicester City and Ipswich Town the first two visitors to Deepdale after our first game with Queens Park Rangers, before a trip to Portsmouth. This could be the year we fall through the trap door. There’s only so long you can keep on treading water at this level before you sink. We’ve been regressing for years. Hopefully other teams have a shocker though and we’ll finish 21st.”

Prediction – 22nd (@AnalyticsQPR 22nd) Been looking for reasons to place them outside the bottom three so as not to induce another opening day defeat in W12 and the only one I can come up with is I don’t want to induce another opening day defeat in W12.

Blackburn 5/1

Last Season: 7th (we said 22nd, +15) Not since 90 Minutes tipped Norwich as an outside bet for the Premier League in 1994/95 and they got relegated has there been quite such an awful call as our “the smartest club in the country just got parachute payments, be afraid” tip of Luton Town to finish third in last season’s Championship. The Hatters were, hysterically, relegated instead but our Blackburn call was almost as bad – out by 15 positions. Not the first time we’ve had our Rovers call out by half a league table or more.

The mitigation is twofold. At the point we wrote and recorded our preview material last summer there had been zero incomings at Ewood Park. Almost as soon as we hit publish they signed half a dozen players including Japanese forward Yuki Ohashi whose eye for goal translated well from the J-League into ten goals from 27 starts, a very creditable return and another nice case study for this influx of Far Eastern players into the Championship thanks to the post-Brexit rules and greater reliance on data and analytics in recruitment. He was a fun watch, and is clearly a classy player.

We also very obviously underestimated how good a manager John Eustace clearly is, adept at getting squad’s together in challenging circumstances and achieving enormous buy-in from his players, and we won’t be making that mistake again when we come to review Derby in this piece.

Secondly, though, we get Blackburn badly wrong every year, and the main reason for that is they just don’t make sense.

The ownership situation is an ongoing farce, with the Venky’s still mired in tax trouble back in India and both funding for the club and input into its running is minimal. They are almost entirely absent, and the money dried up a long time ago. Why they maintain ownership and don’t just sell the thing is a total mystery. That’s usually a huge red flag when we put things like this together. There have been some big player sales – Sammie Szmodics, Adam Armstrong, Adam Wharton – to fund transfer activities, but when you see a club going on a mad trolley dash for players from the J League in Japan and the Jupiler League in Belgium five days before the season starts that tends to set alarm bells ringing as well.

Eustace, like another talented manager Jon Dahl Tomasson before him, became so frustrated by the running of the club and financing of his team that he upped and left mid-season, swapping play-off chasing Blackburn for apparently relegation-bound Derby. Valerian Ismael wheeled his cannon into the building and immediately lost six and drew two of eight games. A fanbase declining in number and escalating in agg finally flipped out and the protests against ownership and execs started in earnest. CEO Steve Waggott left after seven years. Funding for the women’s team was withdrawn, forcing its demotion. The team began plummeting down the league table, as it always seems to do after Christmas.

And then, for no logical reason at all, it won four in a row going into the last day of the season and for 11 glorious minutes was leading at Bramall Lane in the final game and was in the play-off positions.

There is a talent drain here from a team that can ill-afford one. There is no money to spend here. The recruitment is all over the map, literally and figuratively. There is an alarming churn of managers, many of whom leave not because they’re fired but because they’re fed up. The owners are barmy. The fans are openly protesting at matches, or boycotting entirely. The atmosphere is toxic, and half the ground is empty. For the visit of clubs like Leeds or the Sheffields there are often as many away fans as home. The team’s underlying numbers are frequently dreadful.

Everything we usually look at to make calls in this season preview points to Blackburn being a basket case, bang in trouble, and start looking up the way to Port Vale. And then they win ten of the first 15 games every season and go into the last game with a shout of the play offs. Four of the last seven seasons they’ve finished top half (though they were in the relegation zone for a portion of the last game of the season in 2023/24).

Ins >>> Sidnei Tavares, 23, CM, Moreinse, £1.5m >>> Lewis Miller, 24, RB, Hibs, £800k >>> Axel Henriksson, 23, AM, GAIS (Sweden), £800k >>> Dion De Neve, 24, LM, Kortrijk, £500k >>> Ryan Alebiosu, 23, RB, Kortrijk, £500k >>> Sean McLoughlin, 28, CB, Hull, £500k

Outs >>> Joe Rankin-Costello, 25, RB, Charlton, £800k >>> Callum Brittain, 27, RB, Boro, Undisclosed >>> Tyrhys Dolan, 23, RW, Espanyol, Free >>> Andreas Weimann, 33, AM, Derby, Free >>> Dilan Markanday, 23, RW, Chesterfield, Free >>> Danny Batth, 34, CB, Derby, Free >>> Jordan Eastham, 23, GK, Ashton United, Free >>> Connor O’Riordan, 21, CB, Doncaster, Loan >>> Jack Vale, 24, CF, Released >>> Jalil Saadi, 23, DM, Released

This Season: Guess what? We think Blackburn are in the shit again. Start planning your trip to Wembley, Rovers fans.

There is a talent drain here from a team that can ill-afford one. Tyrhys Dolan, frequent tormenter of QPR, is now with Espanyol. Joe Rankin-Costello, another who plays well against us, has gone to Charlton. Andi Weimann and Danny Batth have followed Eustace to Derby. Callum Brittain is going to Middlesbrough. If star player Lewis Travis, linked with Wrexham and others, follows suit it’s difficult to see where this team goes from there.

There is no money to spend here – half a dozen outgoings have so far raised £800k. This is offset by a productive academy – watch out for 17-year-old Igor Tyjon.

The recruitment is all over the map, literally and figuratively. Sidnei Tavares from Portuguese giants Moreirense, Dion De Neve and Ryan Alebiosu from Belgium’s KV Kortrijk, Axel Henriksson furthering a Championship trend for signings from Sweden, a full back from Hibs… These are quite physical, athletic players, as per Ismael’s preferred style, but they also feel a bit like our incomings last year where in theory Nicolas Madsen is a 6ft 4ins tall goalscoring midfielder built for the Championship but in reality his pick up pays scant/no regard for the relentlessness of this league and it’s three-game weeks. Only Sean McLoughlin, a jobbing 28-year-old centre back from Hull, arrives with EFL experience. To be fair though a lot of their international recruitment has gone well in the past, and Norwegian Sonder Tronstad was a great signing.

Waggott was unpopular, but experienced, and that knowhow has not been replaced at exec level. Director of football Rudy Gestede, who once downed tools to force his own move out of Ewood as a player, divides his time between scouting the Belgian second division and making barbed comments at the supporters. Valerian Ismael remains, and the run at the end of last season won many fans over, but he plays unwatchable football and I’d give you long odds on him being the boss come May. The owners are still barmy. The fans are still openly protesting at matches, or boycotting entirely. The atmosphere is still toxic, and half the ground is empty. For the visit of Birmingham at the first home game the visitors are well on course to sell out the whole 7,500 away end.

This could go pop. This could really blow. If they start badly, if they’re down the bottom of the league end of September, this is a support base at the end of its tether and an ownership fast running out of road.

But, then, we say that every year. Every year they do a tonne of late window business and are absolutely fine. Next week they sign five or six players, win four of their first five games, soar off into the play-off picture again and make us look stupid. Every year we say it’s not a case of ‘if’ this football club fails and plummets down into League One and potentially beyond, but ‘when’. Very much like Derek Chansiri’s Sheff Wed, it surely has to catch up with the Venky’s eventually, this cannot continue to just be fine. And every year we turn out to be wrong.

Manager: Valerian Ismael Shares in neck brace manufacturers were up in early trading today.

Oppo View – Ian Herbert, BRFCS Podcast “We have to divide the season into three parts.

“Too many warning signs. Turmoil at the club, not spending money, huge squad churn, it places enormous burden on the manager to produce an alchemy to get us safe. I’ll stick with my prediction last year of 15th/16th and I’d shake hands on that right now if offered it. If Sonde Tronstad were to get injured, if we lost Dom Hyam, if we lost Ohashi, then all bets are off we don’t have the squad depth to cope with that. But then I said all this last year, and we finished seventh.”

Listen to the full interview with Ian on our Patreon season preview show.

Prediction – 19th (@AnalyticsQPR 18th) Putting Preston in the bottom three immediately guarantees we’ll be beaten by them on the opening day so we’ve been looking for reasons not to do it. This lot might be one those reasons. (Postscript – Blackburn finish seventh, narrowly missing out on the play-offs on the final day at home to Leicester. QPR lose 1-0 at Ewood Park in November.).

Portsmouth 5/1

Last Season: 16th (we said 19th, +3) Here’s one we basically got bang on a year ago, and for exactly the right reason too – introducing Fratton Park FC.

I know it’s fashionable to pretend the league table is basically an irrelevant nonsense and you can make yourself appear infinitely more knowledgeable to the gaggling masses by putting on an earnest voice and telling your subscribers the team that topped League One with 97 points weren’t the best team in the division and that, in fact, was some Peterborough/Lincoln type whose “model” you liked a lot better, but even in that climate the sniffiness towards Portsmouth’s promotion was noticeable.

Yes, a lot of single goal victories. Fine, not terrific underlying numbers. But it is still, thankfully, just about, a sport where the final score determines this shit, and Pompey got a promotion over the line despite their treatment room looking like Emergency Ward 6 through most of the second half of the campaign.

Some of those players would obviously become available again, and transfer business was brisk – this lot signed or loaned 23 different players over the course of last season. Most eye-catching amongst them was pinching League One’s outstanding player from the year before, Josh Murphy, on a free transfer from Oxford and he certainly didn’t disappoint at the higher level.

Still, not a lot of love for this lot in the summer previews, question marks over John Mousinho in his first managerial role and first ever Championship season, and talismanic centre forward Colby Bishop going down with a heart defect in pre-season hardly helped the mood music. Incredibly unlucky not to win at eventual champions Leeds on day one, when they led deep into stoppage time and had to settle for a 3-3 thriller, Pompey subsequently didn’t win any of their first nine games and only broke that duck because Morgan Fox took it upon himself to play for them instead of us in the tenth game at Loftus Road. In the four games immediately after that they lost to Cardiff, Plymouth and Sheff Wed and drew with Hull. Hmmm.

But, look, we’ve very aggressively pointed out throughout this preview where our predictions last summer were complete horseshit so please allow us a little two-minute public wank here (doesn’t usually take even that long to be fair).

What happened thereafter is exactly what we said would happen. Bishop returned and led the line like some rampaging trojan, smashing the living shit out of anybody and anything standing between him and the goal. A couple of canny loan signings were made – Rob Atkinson, allowed to leave by Bristol City thanks to a personality clash despite in my view being their best defender, and Isaac Hayden, who is now available for free and continues to be a hugely underrated option for teams in this league. The team settled down, calmed down, became comfortable in its style and identity, and started to bully opponents. Preston were beaten at Fratton Park, then Bristol City, then Coventry, then Swansea – Pompey scored three, three, four and four doing that.

This run would eventually stretch to nine wins from ten home games. Millwall were the only side to resist and that’s almost as instructive as our 2-1 loss there amidst the chaos. Portsmouth were unashamedly direct – Austrian goalkeeper Nicolas Schmid can kick the ball to the Isle of Wight from a standing start. Bishop, in the home games at least, is a monster, borderline unplayable. Their press is so aggressively high at times it feels like they’re going to come and join you in the away end behind the goal - heard about your goal kick routine, you’ll need more than that tonight. Off the back of that Murphy started to sing and dance in the space created. Leeds lost here 1-0, Burnley were lucky to escape with a goalless draw (the Scott Parker special). The chimes rang out across two defeats from the final 17 home games. Plymouth, randomly, the other loss – they are still Portsmouth at heart, capable of moments of great brilliance and enormous calamity often within very short spaces of time.

A job very, very well done. Football doesn’t have to be played one way. You be you, stay true to yourself. If even Andre Dozzell is buying in and looking like a Championship midfielder you’ve got a good thing going.

Ins >>> Mark Kosznovsky, 23, CM, MTK Budapest, £1m >>> John Swift, 30, AM, West Brom, Free >>> Luke Le Roux, 25, CM, Varanmo (Sweden), Undisclosed >>> Adrian Segecic, 21, RW, Sydney FC, Undisclosed >>> Florian Bianchini, 25, RW, Swansea, Loan

Outs >>> Yusini Yengi, 26, CF, Aberdeen, Free >>> Cohen Bramall, 29, LB, Luton, Free >>> Tom Lowery, 27, CM, Kilmarnock, Free >>> Anthony Scully, 26, LW, Shrewsbury, Free >>> Paddy Lane, 24, RW, Reading, Undisclosed >>> Ryley Towler, 23, CB, Lincoln, Undisclosed >>> Christian Saydee, 23, CF, Wigan, Undisclosed >>> Toby Steward, 20, GK, St Johnstone, Loan >>> Alexander Milosevic, 33, CB, Released

This Season: After that enormous intake last season you’d expect things to be more settled and circumspect this year, and they have been. Mark Kosznovsky arrives from the third best team in Budapest at a club that, like ourselves, quite fancies itself as a smart wheeler dealer in this post Brexit world and therefore signs lots of Scandis, Eastern Europeans and Australians. The only one that’s really made an impact on the first team so far is the goalkeeper.

There may need to be further additions. Hayden and Atkinson were key figures in their recovery from a lousy start last season and neither have returned so far. John Swift is another eye-catching addition. Only 30, but presumably after a summer spent in the PFA free transfer team he’s on vastly less than the ridiculous contract West Brom gave him. At press time, our former loanee Yang Min-Hyeok is due on loan from Spurs to a ground where he got kicked off the park last year. From the U18s, Harry Clout. I don’t care if he’s any good with a name like that frankly.

The potential for progress this year is obvious. You wouldn’t think they’d win one of their first 17 games again, and boy do we know how that places you behind the eight ball for the winter ahead. Bishop is fit from the start of the season and stupidly effective in this system. Murphy is arguably one of the best players in his position in the league outside the parachute payment clubs. This team is more settled, comfortable in its skin, and with a year of Championship under its belt – Mousinho is the only manager still in the job he had a year ago of the teams who were in this division 12 months back.

The drawbacks are strength in depth. The manager has been ridiculously adept at dealing with multiple absentees, sticking Marlon Pack at centre back and carrying on regardless, but what if Bishop is absent again? Or Murphy? Big ask for Segecic to come from the A League and fit into this ferocious press in season one as cover for those two, regardless of an 18-goal A-League haul last year. Home form may well regress – because however annoying that cowbell is you’d do well to win nine out of ten and lose two out of 17 again. Away form must improve – just three away wins, one of which we gifted them, another at imploding Norwich towards the end (admittedly a spectacular 5-3, but still), and 15 defeats on the road (this a team that contrived to lose 6-1 at Stoke and 4-0 at Derby).

I think these are the reasons we’re cool on them – although the Championship season previewers seem to have flipped around entirely on this lot this year.

It’s a success story so far. The next question is how you progress further from here, because the conventional wisdom is you don’t develop players other teams want to buy playing this style of football, and without significant sales your ceiling is somewhere around 14/15/16th in the Championship. Pompey aren’t big on conventional wisdom though. Hostile home ground, massive bastard up front, kick anything that moves, get on the front foot and let’s see which one of theirs doesn’t fancy this.

Balls to brewery, don’t need a brewery. Bottles and cans.

Manager: John Mousinho The Championship’s only surviving manager from this time last year.

Oppo View - Jonny Barrett (@PompeyJonny) “Fucking stressful season. A disastrous start meant that we didn’t win a league game until mid October- nice one for that by the way- and for a long time it looked like horrendous away form would bury us. Ultimately staying up with two games to spare was frankly a miracle given how much of the season we spent in the bottom three and all you can be is happy. But on the back of more than a decade in League One and Two where we’re usually, if not promotion chasing, at least top half you really do forget how much fucking losing is involved in battling relegation.

“Play up Pompey.”

Prediction – 16th (@AnalyticsQPR 17th) Never going to move too far from there without sorting the away form and Morgan Fox doesn't play in this league any more.

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Pictures - Reuters Connect

MrSheen added 12:18 - Aug 7 Sorry to pick nits after such a massive magnum opus, but17th AND 18th missing? Schroedinger’s Wednesday? My Blackburn supporting brother-in-law is very gloomy. He has renewed, but three of his five mates who’ve been sat together for years haven’t. On the subject of away fans, he said Leeds, Sunderland and Burnley brought over 20,000 combined last year.
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Northernr added 13:42 - Aug 7 17th is Stoke, in yesterday's write up. 18th is us, in tomorrow's write up.
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HastingsRanger added 10:32 - Aug 9 I wait all summer for these! Excellent research and contributions. Indebted as always. Thanks
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gigiisourgod added 19:18 - Aug 10 Brilliant, thank you
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