Burnley are in need of therapy. They’re the married couple who’ve lost their spark after a whirlwind romance that was winning the EFL Championship in 2022/23, England’s second division, by a landslide 101 points. They’re the nostalgia-laden searcher of purpose, wondering what is the point of all this?
If they were on the figurative couch, they might need more of a Frasier Crane than Jennifer Melfi to help work through classic psychodynamic defense mechanisms of repression, denial and rationalization. After all, it’s the same coach and players who trapezed the club to great heights last season. How do you confront something so diametrically opposed as their current malaise of being bottom of the Premier League table, behind a team that just picked up a 10-point deduction?
After a season-long coronation, Burnley are rooted at the foot of the table. They’ve picked up four points from a possible 36. They’ve scored nine goals all season, the weakest return in the league.
The Premier League is the be-all, end-all, we’re told. Being in the league with the big boys is supposed to be about more than sport, particularly for provincial English towns. Supporters can go on the same journey as shareholders and money people, but only to a point.
“When I first arrived at the Club, I spoke about growing the Burnley brand and bringing the Clarets to a worldwide audience,” Chairman Alan Pace wrote to supporters before the start of the season.
To supporters, moods will always be shaped by results – regardless of the wider context. Brand Burnley means little if the team is shipping in goals. England’s top tier can financially sustain and set up clubs for years to come, but where to find solace when you’ve yet to register a single point on home soil, and what does that do to the mood of a supporter?
“The general mood is that The Championship is much better a league to play in than the Premier League,” says Natalie Bromley, who hosts the No Nay Never Burnley podcast. Bromley first went to watch the club aged 11 with her dad, and has made it a regular feature of her life since.
“Being in the Premier League, it makes me question everything I thought I knew and loved about football,” she says.
“The Premier League has become a technically perfect televised sport for a global audience. It doesn’t care about or market itself to the longstanding football fan. It doesn’t care about the experience on the ground, watching the game live. It just cares about technical perception and producing enough material for television producers to keep [pushing] content out. The power the top six to eight clubs have in terms of influence, financial clout, decision-making — it’s not a level playing field. It’s just a really frustrating and horrible place to play football.”
So far, Burnley’s return to England’s top tier has been a horror show. They have lost all six of their Premier League home games this season – the only team in English top-flight history to do so, and the third team in overall English league history after Newport County, (70/71 fourth tier) and Watford in 90/91 (second tier) to do so. They have lost eight Premier League home games in a row dating back to 21/22 – the first time in their history. No team has lost more points from winning positions than Burnley this season (11). They’ve conceded 13 first-half goals and scored the least amount of goals (9) across the league.
The mood music is increasingly morose with each loss, with manager Vincent Kompany describing a defeat to Crystal Palace as a “tough one to take” after seeing his side cede four shots on goal and two hit the net. Burnley finished the game with 17 attempts and zero goals.
Turf Moor is one of England’s most claustrophobic stadiums. It arrives upon you, suddenly greeting you with an overarching floodlight or corrugated iron hoarding in a low-lit dale town. It has never been a fun place to play for opponents. Last season, its narrow enclaves seemed to close tighter, breathing down the opposition’s neck with each passing victory.
This season is a different story. A silence has sprung the club’s US owners ALK Capital, who took charge in December 2020, into action. In an attempt to raise the atmosphere, the club announced plans in October to introduce flags, banners, safe standing and playlists. An accompanying statement referenced that the atmosphere had “fell flat” this season. Supporters were also asked to complete a survey with proposals to “enhance the atmosphere and get behind the team for the full 90 minutes.”
It feels like a desperate response in a season yet to hit its stride. Which raises the question of what were the club was expecting out of a return to the top flight?
“All of the talk of Burnley finishing in the top-ten [in the final Premier League standings] and doing really well in the first season back was nonsense,” says Bromley. “I don’t know if I believe we’ll survive. I think if Burnley survive it will be by the skin of their teeth in seventeenth, but the reality is we’ll probably go down.”
This feeling seems accepted across the club. Chairman Alan Pace has been quick to brief that the club remain two to three years ahead of schedule. “This was not our plan,” Pace said after securing promotion. “We gave ourselves two to three years, was the plan.”
Sure, but being ahead means adapting and changing tact, right? There was frustration at the lack of transfer activity last summer – with many laying this at the door of the team’s current problems.
The club needed goals, but instead chose to recruit goalkeeper James Trafford from Manchester City in a deal rumored to be worth up to $23m. Pragmatic Norwegian midfielder Sander Berge was also brought in from promotion rivals Sheffield United for a fee in the region of $14m. But it was a lack of contingency around not signing players like left-back Ian Maatsen, who’d spent the previous year on loan from Chelsea and was close to joining again, that has hindered Kompany’s options.
Burnley’s most publicized deal of the offseason was an investment from YouTubers Dude Perfect. “The relationship demonstrates our continued ambition to bring the Burnley brand to younger audiences across the globe,” said Pace. 1-0 to the brand; no worry that there’s no one to actually put the ball in the net.
after newsletter promotion
There will be no quick, in-season fix for the team’s struggles. Statsbomb’s attacking radar has Burnley in the zero percentile for counterattacking shots created with an average of 0.36 per 90 minutes. They also register in just the fourth percentile for expected goals (xG) per shot with 0.08 and two percentile for clear shots 1.72. Their statistical woes aren’t just confined to attacking, they are in the ninth percentile for shots conceded, coughing up 15.09 a game.
Admirably, Kompany still remains Burnley’s man. His intense character coupled with a philosophy honed from the Pep Guardiola School of building play took everyone by surprise last season. Burnley built in a 3-2-5 shape, with suffocating final-third attacking patterns. It was a stark departure for the club from what went before. Where once Burnley were considered old school, now they were at the vanguard of tactical innovation.
Kompany was appointed for the start of the 2022/23 season after Burnley parted with long-serving manager Sean Dyche, now at Everton. The two couldn’t contrast more stylistically. For years, Dyche created a conservative brand of soccer based on hearts, legs and minds. When Kompany came in, he created an explosive brand of intoxicating football that blew away any scent of Dyche’s blueprint.
Kompany has, in the main, stuck to his philosophy, but is finding the Premier League to be a more unforgiving beast. Still, there would be shock and disappointment among many if he was relieved by of his role, not least after what the chairman said about his manager back in March 2023: “It’s like dating the most beautiful girl in town and knowing there’s zero chance she’ll marry you. But everyone else wants to marry her. So how long can you date, how long can you stay together? I hope it’s for a very long time. But it’s up to her.”
(Seriously, what is it with Premier League stakeholders and odd comparisons to marrying women?)
All of this begs the question of whether the Premier League is the holy grail it is perceived to be from the outside. To Pace and the board of executives, sure. It’s guaranteed TV revenues and parachute payments if the increasingly inevitable threat of relegation becomes reality. But to a football club, manager, team and supporters it’s not as easy to live in such ignorance.
A spectator sport in its primary, soccer has become a global entertainment product, one that caters to influential refereeing decisions for nine months and transfer market chaos for three. You can throw in the odd wonder goal into the mix, but it’s becoming low on the list of talking points.
Moving down a division can remind fans of the Before Times. Before the razzmatazz. Before Brand Burnley. Before VAR. Back when the game was about the game. “Having a season back in The Championship reminded me of what football should be like from a supporter’s perspective,” says Bromley.
There is no Video Assistant Referee system in the Football League, or any of its unending controversies. “Football fans, particularly those who watch live games detest VAR,” says Bromley. “It is the worst initiative to bring in, in terms of a live sporting experience. As great as it is being able to watch some of the world’s elite players play every week, the Premier League as a brand is not a particularly enjoyable place to play football.”
Things may get worse before it gets better; Burnley will host an in-form West Ham on Saturday. Even a win would not be enough to lift them out of the relegation zone.
Sometimes you need to rekindle the romance, for home to feel like home. For Burnley, returning to the Premier League has brought with it more questions than answers – and little time to process it all.