Learn from the past, with an eye on what comes next. Two summers ago, Ipswich Town found themselves facing an almost impossible sporting challenge: the jump from Football League One to the Premier League in successive seasons. For much of the first half of the campaign they even gave the survival fight some shape, before fading badly and finishing second-bottom, still to the applause of their supporters. Their stay in the Championship was brief. Under Kieran McKenna – three promotions in four years, chapeau – they finished runners-up again and went straight back to the top flight. This time, the Blues’ directors insist, they know what they are getting into. The transfer window has been ambitious, but measured with survival in mind. The first change is in the dugout. McKenna, hugely popular with the supporters, left as a winner and was replaced by Gary O’Neil – just as young, coming off a good end to the season at Strasbourg after the Rosenior affair, and previously responsible for two Premier League survivals, with Bournemouth and Wolverhampton. Until now, Ipswich had built their recent sides around a distinctly home-grown pool of players, with the Irish Sea at its centre. Under the new regime, the horizons have widened. The American investment fund that owns a majority stake in the club – Ed Sheeran is even among the minority shareholders – has a clear objective and intends to learn from the inexperience of two seasons ago. Above all by looking at some of the more successful promoted sides of recent years: Sunderland and Leeds. Neither has exactly been shy in the transfer market.
For Town, then, this has become a summer of firsts. The first Brazilian in the club’s history – Emersonn, the forward arriving from Toulouse – as well as the first Japanese player, national-team star Daizen Maeda, and the first Serbian, former Torino man Sasa Lukic. As the BBC points out, of the ten new signings made so far, only one is British – Chuba Akpom, arriving from Ajax with an obligation to buy. A clean break, in other words, from the unhappy version of 2024. Look at the total spending, though, and the difference is not quite so striking: Ipswich have spent £106.6 million so far this summer, compared with £100.5 million two seasons ago. Those are the fourth- and eighth-highest totals ever recorded by a newly promoted Premier League side.
The difference is that those earlier investments paid off over time, laying the foundations for the promotion achieved this season and strengthening the structure of a club that was inevitably still raw – from 2019 to 2023 they had been in League One, with only one season in the top flight. Ipswich Town are now more experienced, more aware of the level they are returning to, and operating with a completely different spending philosophy. On paper, the material is there. The task now is for the manager to turn a collection of good international players into a squad capable of staying up. It will not be easy. Nor should it be. Ipswich’s last happy ending in the Premier League came way back in 2001: a fine fifth-place finish, also as a newly promoted side. That would do nicely.