Despite a horrendous end to the season, with only 4 points from the last 4 games, Worcester City will host Champion’s League football next season, after finishing in fourth place, one point ahead of Arsenal languishing in fifth. The top three separated themselves from 4th and 5th, all finishing on 82+ points.
A remarkable season got off to a great start, with us not conceding a goal until the fifth game, and handing out 6-0 spankings to both Everton and Chelsea. Such a dream start would obviously be difficult to match, but City continued to dominate the poorer sides despite their struggles against Utd, Citeh and Arsenal, meaning that we were frequently racking up defeatless streaks of 6+ games.
A season that also gave us our first ever England international (unless you count David Bentley who gave us a decent year of service in his twighlight,) as a remarkable saw a weirdly named plucked from Arsenal’s reserves at 21 line up for his country, a proud day for manager and player alike.
Disappointing cup runs won’t take the sheen off a remarkable achievement, and an added bonus is that I’ve got about £100k/week of unsaleable shite out of contract this summer. Well, the annoying thing is, it’s not unsaleable – it’s exactly the kind of player that I’d buy in the Championship or as a first season PL club, but I’ve literally been unable to give them away.
The game’s becoming much more enjoyable now that I’m keeping players for more than 2 summers – striker Muhammet Hasaniglou has been with us for 4 seasons now, scoring about 80 league goals, we’ve got a couple of midfielders with 150+ appearances now too – and these players are all still only 23.
We’ll have wages free to spend in the summer, as we’re only spending £580k of a £700k budget, losing £100k in crap, already have at least two years on every contract, and we’ll surely get some decent wedge for Champions League qualification.
The problem is attracting players is still ridiculously difficult – though CL may change that. In January, there wasn’t a player worth more than £5m interested in joining us, and we were second! It’s been a club built on cast offs from big clubs, and young guns from smaller leagues – great fun though.
Given our record against the bigger clubs, I can’t see us doing the Champion’s League too much damage, but hopefully we can just get to the group stage for the money.
When I was struggling to get out of League One, I really thought I'd not be able to get WOrcester to Champion's League victory, but now that I'm stable in the Premier League I feel it's only a matter of time, because this is my comfort zone - taking small clubs and surviving, finishing mid table, finishing top half, finishing in Europe, then winning major titles. I've done it in previous games with Wolves, Leeds, MK Dons , Sheffield Wednesday, and famously, with Rotherham United.
I am Del Woppio, it is what I do.