Former boss weighs in on Burnley’s Championship chances

Sean Dyche has suggested his former side Burnley find themselves at something of a crossroads as they look to end the recent yo-yoing between the top two divisions.

The Clarets find themselves back in the Championship this coming season after another Premier League campaign, which saw them finish 19th on just 22 points.

That came two years after a similarly dismal display under Vincent Kompany, where Burnley went down with 24 points to their name.

It’s been a totally different story in the second tier, however, achieving promotions with 101 and 100 points in their last two seasons in the Championship - and losing just five of their last 115 games at that level.

But given the ongoing uncertainty at Turf Moor, which sees Burnley managerless two months on from Scott Parker’s departure, doubts are being raised whether that level of performance is sustainable.

When asked how he thinks Burnley will fare this coming season, Dyche told talkSPORT: “I don’t know.

“Their model hasn’t worked, has it? Actually, that’s wrong because the model worked to get them up. But they spent a fortune and came straight back down. Then I assume they thought they were going to sell everyone for £100m but they didn’t, but then they went back up again after Scotty Parker did a brilliant job - an amazing job actually - and then they went down again.

“So it sort of has worked and it sort of hasn’t worked, but I don’t know. I don’t know which way they go with it now.

“Do they do that again? Do they re-invest quite heavily in the Championship to get them back up? Do they invest again in the Premier League, should they get there, on youngsters like they have done? But then they might go back down again, so I don’t know.”

When asked about the difficulties of being a yo-yo club, Dyche added: “We just planned to stay up.

“After we qualified for Europe, the board said: ‘just keep us in the Premier League’. That was it and that’s amazing for a manager, that’s brilliant clarity. Not going: ‘oh we finished 7th so we should be thinking 5th’.

“They knew I had the drive, they knew I wasn’t just happy with staying up, I had the natural drive. They didn’t need to tell me to be driven or stimulated to do better. They knew naturally they had a manager and staff who were pushing to do well and that was an amazing thing for me as a manager.

“As much as they didn’t have a load of money, or they did, they just didn’t give it to me as the manager, they were brilliant at staying true to the truth of the club.

“We are Burnley Football Club, we’re not giants, keep us up in the Premier League…for that area, it was amazing.

“The board backed me with a lot of stuff by the way, but the best bit about it was not changing the goalposts all the time. Keep us in the Premier League, that was the challenge.

“It didn’t matter how we did it, keep us in the Premier League.”