Vincent Kompany explains why Burnley overhauled their squad following Championship title win

Josh Brownhill was the only player to start for the Claters against Arsenal last week that was part of the club’s title-winning side.

Meanwhile the likes of Arijanet Muric, Hjalmar Ekdal, Ameen Al-Dakhil, Jack Cork, Josh Cullen, Manuel Benson, Anass Zaroury and Jay Rodriguez have struggled for game time despite starring last season.

The club brought in 15 new players during the summer, with the likes of James Trafford, Dara O’Shea, Sander Berge, Luca Koleosho and Zeki Amdouni all making the move to Turf Moor.

But Kompany’s men have found it hard going in the top flight, winning just three of their 25 games to leave them 19th in the table and seven points adrift of safety.

It’s led to supporters asking if overhauling the squad following such a successful campaign was the right strategy to take – and whether the core of last season’s side could have performed better.

In response to those questions, Kompany said: “The question you ask, it’s part of a much bigger question about the gap between the Championship and the Premier League and the different strategies you can find to close that gap.

“I don’t think the question is as simple as that, every team is different in how it’s composed when it comes up and when it goes down.

“The example of some of the teams that went down to the Championship with a lot of Premier League players playing in the Championship. You can be fairly confident if they come back up…

“But in our case, because it’s a bigger question, we built a team in the Championship that was built to be good in the Championship. But when you come up you’re facing a totally different level.

“It’s probably not the right time to reflect on it, but just to set the context because these are things we openly discuss every time.

“But part of the things you have to take into consideration is we went down with a very small squad. I had what, nine or 10 players in training when I signed? It wasn’t 30 players and I had to trim it down, I had no players and those few players we had to sell them to rebuild an entire Championship squad really out of nothing.

“That was quite successful in the Championship, it was quite a remarkable season and eventually in the future people will appreciate the magnitude of the task we had that year.

“But to say that team was ready to go from the Championship to the Premier League just like this [while clicking his fingers], there was just as little experience in the Premier League as there was in the Championship team we had last season.

“It is what it is, it’s a reality. But meanwhile, we’ve got 25 games in the Premier League so we’ve built our own experience into the squad a little bit.”