More mid-table malaise? Looking ahead to 2025/26
No summer signings make visions of a European push a distant dream for Marco Silva's impressive yet stagnant team.
Time flies like an arrow, and despite last season seemingly ending yesterday, the Premier League will be back in full force in a week’s time. I should be used to it by now; August has long been ambushed by the prompt return of the top flight, and the Championship - home to Fulham for a few too many years over the last decade - starts a week earlier. Yet here we are again, a world of possibility waiting for England’s finest sides, the dawn of the new campaign a matter of days away. There’s a quiet excitement to the look of a pre-season Premier League table: fresh, untouched, itching for results to breathe new life onto its columns.
You’ll find Fulham lodged in 10th on this blank canvas, and the alphabet may well be offering a salient prediction of our fate for the 2025/26 season. “Aspirational mid-table club” is a niche we have adhered to in each of the three campaigns Marco Silva has led since our promotion in 2022. You can make a convincing narrative from it all - 10th, 13th and 11th-place finishes paint a picture of a club that plays nice football, and gets through a few rounds in the cups, but lacks the pieces to bridge the gap to the Newcastles, Aston Villas and even Brightons that have broken apart the “big six” and claimed European spots for themselves.
It’s become a familiar - frustrating, even - feeling around the club. At several points in our last few campaigns we’ve been on the cusp of something special, be it in sixth or seventh and battling for a ticket to the continent, or a round or two from a final at Wembley and a chance at our first major trophy… yet within a few weeks it unravels; the team lose their rhythm, we’re swept out of the cups and we stumble down the table into the bitter comforts of the upper-bottom half.
It’s not a death sentence - I feel successive years of all three promotees being relegated have made some onlookers forget how wretched relegation battles are, particularly when they’re hopeless and unsuccessful. And across the country many fans would dream of life as Fulham, with pretty tactics and a brand new stand and a place in the world’s most-watched football division.
Would we be fans if we didn’t want more, though? Or at least for our team to aim for more? The margins are thin - you’d only have to swap a few goals around for the Fulham story to tell a different tale, pinching a few more points and maybe to have crept into the Conference League via England’s abundance of extra European slots. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible - and 12 years, three promotions and one stadium renovation into the Khan’s ownership it isn’t outrageous to ask why the opportunities we’ve created haven’t been realised. We’ve built a good squad and we’ve beaten some of the league’s best sides in recent years, but repeated stagnation in the season’s closing months point to an obvious solution - improve the club’s quality and depth by buying players for Marco Silva to work his magic.
It’s quite disappointing, then, to see that the club have signed one first-team player this window - Benjamin Lecomte, a decent Ligue 1 keeper but very much a back-up to Bernd Leno and hardly a game-changer for Fulham. Zoom out further and Lecomte is one of two signings we’ve made in a year (an aged Willian, who has since left). Pre-season is almost over, our Portugal tour has been and gone, and at present it looks as though no significant change will have been made to the squad Marco Silva takes to Brighton next weekend. Put this lack of investment alongside supposed transfer targets staying put or going elsewhere, mid-table rivals improving their own squads and our skyrocketing season tickets - the most expensive in the league - and something starts to gall.
Maybe the signings are on their way? Late spending sprees are not unheard of, and circumstances with transfers may just have stung Fulham summer activity thus far - and indeed, patience is a virtue. Perhaps the unpleasant whispers of Silva’s dissatisfaction, and potential departure, are but cruel rumours conjured on social media. It’s not a good feeling right now though, and for all the gloss of a full season with our new stand, the club have left a lot for Silva and last year’s squad to pick up for the new campaign.
Are there some silver linings? The dearth of transfer activity has swung both ways - we’ve had the rare treat of a summer without our best players being clamoured over and snatched away by loftier sides. Barring disaster, Antonee Robinson will be back in white, operated on and playing himself into his devastating best for the US’s upcoming home World Cup. Rodrigo Muniz is probably the other sought-after player at the club but thus far a transfer away has been little more than gossip. We’ve got a settled group of players at the club, happy with where they are and who they’re playing with, and with a string of victories in pre-season it is hardly as though the club has the air of disaster.
Much of this is because of the work Silva has committed to with the squad over the last few years. Our 4-2-3-1 is flexible and dynamic, capable of dominating the ball against the league’s heavyweights and relegation candidates with the same confidence. This lets us craft chances through eloquent build-up passages once thought to be the domain of the elite sides, stringing clever passing sequences through the team to build pressure, overlapping the full-backs to burst into opposing territory, and penning our opponents into their final third to maximise the time we spend generating chances. Silva’s in-game pragmatism and positive philosophy delivers success, and is the reason Fulham are given more respect by opponents across the division.
The squad is strong too. In Bernd Leno, we have a reliable shot-stopper worth several points across a campaign alone. Calvin Bassey excels with the physicality of the division and Joachim Andersen is an experienced top-flight centre back to pair him with. Obviously Robinson is amongst the league’s best left-backs, and with a warrior like Kenny Tete on the other flank they complete a good backline. Sasa Lukic and Sander Berge bonded last year to make a solid midfield pairing, Emile Smith-Rowe has a season under his belt to let his dynamic abilities shine as our 10, and Muniz is surely ready to star as our leading man after several years of encouraging development.
There’s more to weave around the team - the versatile Alex Iwobi, the blistering pace of Adama Traore, electric maestros like Harry Wilson and Ryan Sessegnon, gifted technicians in Andreas Pereira and Raul Jimenez, young prospects like Martial Godo and the ever impressive Josh King. More than a few of them will back themselves to stake a place in Silva’s regular starting XI. And with captain Tom Cairney’s priceless leadership with us for another year, Fulham have enough across the team for a comfortable season.
However, comfort can breed complacency, and the ghosts of 2013/14 should warn anyone at Fulham of what can happen with a side left unchanged for too long. It circles back around to squad depth. A sensible transfer policy might have been to offer an alternative for Robinson at left-back (Sess, eager as he is, is an attacker), a central midfielder to do the same for the centre (it is brave to leave our cover to Cairney and Harrison Reed) and wingers with both pace and an eye for goal.
Fulham have addressed none of this, and we risk facing a similar late-season decline to the ones plaguing our recent campaigns. Of course, anyone we do sign at this point will come amidst the start of the new season, and will have to adjust to their new side on their feet; with our first three league fixtures reading Brighton, Man United and Chelsea, it would hardly be the easiest way to enter the team.
The true currency of football is not transfer speculation, though - it is football. While we have Marco Silva, even an irritated, transfer-deprived one, we have an exciting, pragmatic manager that has successfully established us as a competent Premier League outfit and produced our highest ever points total in the league last year. It is this that I will try to occupy my mind with as the season begins, and I am confident that, whatever shape the squad is in, Silva will take us to more good places than bad.
Followed from Guardian comments - Leeds fan but your comment was excellently written.