At the risk of reducing a complex argument down to a simplistic either/or, here’s a complex argument reduced to a simplistic either/or. When considering the difficult season lying ahead of them, and considering just what on earth they have to do to survive, teams newly-promoted to the Premier League have two choices: to stick, or to twist.
Have the new Premier League teams done enough to stay up?
We take a look at how the Premier League’s newest sides, Bournemouth, Norwich City and Watford, have reinforced over the summer, and what their prospects are for the coming season.
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Both make a certain amount of intuitive sense. Of course you should stick with the players and manager who got you here. Not only have they earned their crack at the Premier League -- and if football starts ignoring its moral obligations, who knows where the game might go -- but they have done so on the back of a successful season. They won the league! Or at least finished runners-up! Or maybe charged their way through the playoffs! Whatever: They’ve been good, they’ve been good as a team, and they’ve been good as a team under the guidance of their current manager. Sporting alchemy is a rare and delicate thing. Don’t mess about with it.
But contrariwise: Of course you should change as much as you possibly can. It would be nice if this were a game that could give chances to those that deserve them, but this isn’t about being nice. This is about survival. Being a strong team in one league is a profoundly different question from being a weak team in another; the latter requires a team that can scrap and can shrug off the regular and inevitable defeats, and therefore needs a manager capable of organizing the former and inspiring the latter. Not some milquetoast collection of good-for-the-Championship chancers.
The practicalities of actually running a football club tend to preclude either a complete overhaul or complete fidelity. Transfers always happen, but that many transfers hardly ever do. And it's by no means obvious which is the best approach, if indeed there is such a thing. QPR and Burnley took radically different approaches to last season: The former kept faith with Shaun Dyche and made just a few tweaks to the side that came up; the latter spent a fortune, bought half a new team, and got Glenn Hoddle in to teach the side a new way of playing. Both went down without ever looking likely not to.
With all that in mind, then, and with a mere eight days until the first match of the season, how are this year’s crop of newbies approaching the problem? And is that approach going to help them stay up? Let’s have a look ...
At first glance, you might assume that Norwich were sticking with what they had. And you might assume they had good reason: Over the second half of last season, there was hardly a better team in the country. Alex Neil took over at the beginning of January, and the Canaries won 17 games out of 25, charging from 10th in the table to the playoffs, then disposing of Ipswich and Middlesbrough. Why would you want to disrupt that kind of winning machine?
That would be one explanation as to why they've made only the lightest of additions to their first-team squad. Graham Dorrans, on loan from West Brom last season, has made that move permanent, and has been joined by fellow former Baggie Youssouf Mulumbu. Robbie Brady joined from newly relegated Hull. A loan move for Liverpool fullback Andre "Norman" Wisdom has been made. And ... that's it.
The idea that Norwich might be resolutely sticking with what they have is punctured slightly by Neil's admitted frustration at not being able to get more players in. Certainly, the squad looks light both in defense and attack, and if Norwich continue to find business frustrating, then a lot is resting on the creative talents of Nathan Redmond and the inspirational moxie of Neil. Sticking with what you have because you think it will work is one thing; sticking with what you have because you can't get anything else is much less hopeful.
“Twicking” sounds unwholesomely twee, and “stisting” queasily biological, but nevertheless, this is what Bournemouth are apparently trying to do. Of last season’s Championship storming entertainers, only one regular has departed -- Brett Pitman, off to Ipswich -- and they’ve kept faith with their highly-regarded young manager Eddie Howe.
But while the core of that promoted side will likely make up most of the Premier League team, Bournemouth have reinforced in a few key positions, and in the process have added two things that are generally assumed to be vital in the Premier League: experience and pace. The former comes in the shape of Artur Boruc, whose loan has been made permanent, and Sylvain Distin, aged 35 and 4,627 respectively, and the plan there is obvious. A bit of nous, a bit of wisdom, a bit of knowhow, and as if by magic, a reinforced defense.
The pace is more interesting, and Bournemouth weren't exactly slow to start with. Christian Atsu and Josh King have come in from Chelsea (on loan) and Blackburn Rovers, respectively, and while neither has yet quite made any serious impression in the Premier League, both are plenty quick. So, too, is Tyrone Mings, whose arrival from Ipswich represents something of a coup, given that he's been linked with nearly every team in the top flight over the last two years.
Both Atsu and Mings have other appealing attributes, of course: Atsu's a tricky dribbler, and Mings is 6'5 and a widely admired young defender. But taken as a group, it does rather suggest that there's a plan. That Howe, whose success last season was built around possession and an attacking approach, is constructing a team to counter-attack, on the not reasonable assumption that better opposition will mean his own players see less of the ball. Now, plans don't always work. But generally speaking, some plan is better than none, and if one or two of the sides above them struggle this season -- Leicester City, say, or Sunderland -- then it might be enough.
Compared to the other two, Watford have spent their summer twisting like Chubby Checker falling down a spiral staircase. But where conventional thinking would suggest that Premier League experience would be the desired results, Watford, as befits a club owned by Giampaolo Pozzo, have been shopping all over the place. Of the 10 new arrivals at Vicarage Road, eight have never played in England before: Etienne Capoue spent last season on the edge of the Tottenham first team, and Valon Behrami spent three largely undistinguished seasons at West Ham.
The others have come from leagues all over Europe, some from clubs competing at the top end of their respective leagues. But if this suggests that Watford might be able to call on more quality than their fellow newcomers, then the corollary is that they’ll need to adjust quickly, both to the league and to each other. So will their manager: Over the summer the club have jettisoned the man who brought them up, Slavisa Jokanovic, and installed Quique Sanchez Flores. Who, rather like many of his new squad, has plenty of experience and even a bit of success on his CV, but none of it in England.
Watford, you sense, will either finish, say, 13th with ease, or finished twentieth in a blizzard of sackings and January signings. And much will depend on the form of three players who were with the club last season. 57 of Watford's 91 Championship goals came from Troy Deeney, Matej Vydra and Odion Igalho; if they can maintain anything like that sort of form, then the process of integrating nearly a whole new team behind them will be made that much easier. That said, Charlie Austin scored 18 goals for QPR last season, and they were useless.
So have these teams done enough? Well, we just don’t know yet. There’s certainly promise for all three sides -- the boom-or-bust approach Watford seem to be taking, the talented young core of Norwich, the solid tactics and pacy attack of Bournemouth -- but promise only lasts until that first five-match winless run sets in. Then promise becomes desperation, and once desperation sets in, all bets are off. That’s when the mettle of all these new signings and hirings and adaptations will truly be tested, and when we’ll get our answers for a certainty. In the meantime, though, all three clubs appear to have done enough to give their fans hope, and at this early stage, hope is all for which they can ask.
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