Lincoln City are favourites with pretty much everybody to go down this season, and I understand why.
We have come up from League One, lost the manager who took us up, lost Jack Moylan and walked into a division full of clubs with bigger budgets, bigger squads and far more Championship experience. On the face of it, you can see why people stick us in 24th without thinking too deeply about it.
I do not agree, though. I think we have enough to stay up, and that is not me getting carried away because we beat Derby County in the cup. What Derby did was show us things that were already there last season, and those are the things I think matter. That’s where I’ll start this (warning) long read on our survival prospects.
Why we beat Derby, and not Grimsby
I do not think pre-season told us very much about whether we are equipped for the Championship. A huge part of what City do is about preparing for the opposition, understanding how they build, where they want to hurt us and how we stop it. In a friendly, you often do not know what you are facing. A side might use trialists, make a stack of changes or try something they will never use again, which matters when so much of our own approach is designed around what the opposition are trying to do.
That is why Derby was more useful, even if I still would not go overboard about it. They are still building their squad and the game had a slightly odd feel to it, somewhere between pre-season and the real thing, but it was competitive, and there was an opposition to prepare properly for. City could look at Derby, work out what they were likely to do and build a plan around it.
Just as we did last season, we saw the running, the tackling, the aggression and the willingness to work for each other, but those things are not really the reason I think we will stay up. Any team can run hard for one afternoon. Any non-league side can have a cup game where eleven players throw themselves into tackles, chase everything and make life horrible for better footballers. Running, jumping, tackling and competing are the minimum. They matter, but they are not the special bit.
Coaching matters
The special bit, for me, is how well coached and how well prepared we are, and that starts with Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw. There has been plenty of noise around the fact that we have lost Michael Skubala and gone into the Championship with joint head coaches, and I know dual management raises eyebrows because football has plenty of examples where it has not worked. I just do not think what we have done is as radical as it looks from the outside. Chris and Tom were already heavily involved last season, probably far more heavily than people gave them credit for.
There was a lot of talk when Bristol City came knocking about Michael being the figurehead while the coaching team around him had major input into how we prepared and played, and at the time plenty of people probably wondered whether that was just club rhetoric.
From what I have seen, I do not think it was. Chris will often be up in the gantry with Mason and the analysis team, Tom would be down on the touchline with Michael, and the whole thing felt much more collective than the old-fashioned idea of one manager deciding everything. Michael obviously had a massive part in it, and he was very good at the public-facing side of the role, but it was not simply Michael’s game plan being passed down to everybody else.
That matters because people look at us and say we have come up and lost our manager, which technically we have, but that does not necessarily mean we have ripped out the brains of the operation and started again. In reality, two of the people already heavily involved have stepped forward, while much of the structure around them has remained in place. I have talked before about the Brentford model, and perhaps after a tough pre-season, some of us, me included, lost sight of that a little because the headline over the summer was Michael leaving.
The principle is simple enough: if a club has a way of working that exists beyond one individual, losing that individual should not mean starting again.
Chris and Tom make sense
Chris and Tom also make sense as a pair. Chris was an elite footballer and spent years at Nottingham Forest, while Tom had a different type of career, runs deeper in terms of his Lincoln history, and has always struck me as somebody who understands football at an incredibly detailed level. They have different experiences, but both are highly knowledgeable, and their different backgrounds blended with excellent skills make for a diverse and well-equipped pairing.
Their relationship also goes back well before this summer. When Tom had the caretaker role, Chris came in to help him before Michael was appointed, so this is not some strange arranged marriage put together because the club suddenly lost a manager. They know each other, they know the players, they know the system, and they know how City prepare.
That is why simply saying “they have changed manager” and believing we’re at a disadvantage is too simplistic. Chris and Tom have more pressure and more decisions to make than they did before, but they know the players, the system and the work that was already being done. That continuity gives us a much better chance than people outside the club realise.
Prepared and ready
Then you pan out and look at the wider staff, because this is not simply about Chris and Tom either. We talk about David Preece and Paul McShane because they are recognisable names, but even behind them there is a team of analysts, medical staff, a performance chef and loads more feeding into what happens on a Saturday. I have been fortunate enough over the years to see little bits of that process, whether that is presentations around match day minus and how the week is structured. I am not pretending I know everything that happens behind the scenes, because I do not, but I have seen enough to understand that the preparation is deliberate and detailed.
That is where our edge comes from. We are not going to have better players than everybody in the Championship, and we are not going to have more money than everybody in the Championship, so we have to find advantages elsewhere. Preparation is one of them, organisation is another, and making games awkward and uncomfortable is another. I think some teams in this division are going to absolutely hate playing against us.
Malo Gusto‘s comments after Chelsea played us have value, because he basically said he had never been involved in a football match quite like it. That is what we need to recreate. We do not need to become a Championship version of somebody else. We need to make Championship teams deal with Lincoln City, with the intensity, the lack of space, the second balls, the physical pressure and the structure. If we can recreate that sort of game 36 times and get absolutely spanked in the other ten, I still think we will give ourselves a chance of staying up.
There are going to be matches where we simply have to hold our hands up and say the opposition were better. West Ham, Southampton or Wolves might just have too much quality, and that is fine because survival does not require us to be better than those clubs. It requires us to get enough points from enough of the other games, and sometimes people look at the Championship as one big terrifying block rather than breaking down what the task actually is.
What is the requirement for safety?
Let’s break it down into chunks. Our cohort is probably Portsmouth, Charlton, Blackburn, Cardiff, Bolton and Preston (maybe not Preston, maybe Watford, West Brom or another struggler, but you’d imagine our cohort is another six teams). If you somehow took four points from each pair of games against those six, that is 24 points from 12 matches. Suddenly the task looks very different, because you do not need to be competitive with every team in the division; assuming we then took just a point a game against the other teams we played, we’d have 58 points and be safe.
We might find that our points come from less likely places, such as Wolves, Southampton and Middlesbrough, rather than the teams in our cohort. Wimbledon, for instance, proved a more stubborn opponent last season than Cardiff, because they did what we do, and many Championship clubs will not. West Ham fans won’t accept their side sitting in a low block against Lincoln, they have to come and beat us.
I’m not sure any Championship club can shut up shop against ‘teams like Lincoln’. We’re going to be the underdog in every game, which could suit us. The old cliché is whether somebody can do it on a wet and windy night at Stoke, but I am far more interested in whether Stoke can do it on a wet and windy night at Sincil Bank.
Survival hints can be found in last season, and I think it is easy to forget just how good we actually were. We won the league with 103 points, and there were very few games where I came away thinking we had been properly second best. Leyton Orient and Rotherham are probably the two that stand out. Wimbledon was complicated by going down to ten men, Exeter hit us with a sucker punch in one of our best performances of the season, and at Wycombe we fought back from 2-0 down before getting caught late.
I genuinely believe the City side that won League One last season would have had enough to stay in the Championship as it was then. This season is different because there is not an obvious basket case like Sheffield Wednesday, giving everybody else a head start, but there are still questions around plenty of teams. Somebody will underperform, somebody will change manager, and somebody who looks comfortable in August will be dragged into it by Christmas.
That is why I am not overly interested in the idea that every side in this division is automatically a level above us, perpetuated by the experts on YouTube doing their 1-24s. They are not. Some have better players, some have more depth, and some have more money, but a football team is not just the names on the back of the shirts. It is coaching, preparation, fitness, confidence, recruitment, atmosphere, injuries and a hundred other things layered together, and last season City proved they were very good at bringing all of that together.
The Lincoln City squad
Then you come to the players, which is where people will naturally have the biggest question. Are they actually good enough for the Championship? I think the language around promoted players can become a bit ridiculous because people talk as though somebody who was playing in League One in May has suddenly wandered into a completely different sport in August. These are elite professional footballers, fitter than we could ever imagine, and they know what they’re doing when they put on a shirt.
The question is whether they can process things slightly faster, deal with players who punish mistakes more regularly and find another five or ten per cent in their own performance. Some will manage it and some probably will not, but we are not throwing eleven complete unknowns into the Championship and hoping for the best.
We have added quality as well. Andrei Coubis came through AC Milan’s system, Callum Elder brings proven Championship experience, Mason Melia is an exciting young striker, and Tanto Olaofe adds pace and physicality in an area where we needed both. Josh Honohan should feel almost like a new signing because of how little we saw of him last season, while James Collins will come back and deepen the squad. Deji Elerewe looks to be stepping up magnificently, albeit on the evidence of a single game, and there is more to come.
Sure, we have lost Jack Moylan, which is a genuine blow, and the loan players from last season had to be replaced in some form, but we are not rebuilding from scratch. Most of the title-winning team is still here, so every addition now is being layered onto something that already works. We might finish the window with another midfielder to help the double sixes and perhaps another attacking option, and if that happens, we will go into the Championship with more depth than we had in League One.
Would a neutral look at the squad and say that is obviously a Championship side? Probably not. It will still look predominantly like the team that won League One, with a handful of additions, but I am comfortable with that because promoted teams do not have to replace half their starting eleven just to prove they are ambitious.
Cardiff are a useful barometer because we played them twice last season and beat them twice, and their squad already had plenty of Championship-level ability in it. They have strengthened since and so have we, but we are both essentially taking steps forward rather than transforming ourselves completely. If Cardiff can reasonably believe they can compete at this level, I do not see why City should be treated as though we are entering an entirely different world.
What are the threats to Lincoln City?
If everything stayed exactly as it is right now, I would probably be more comfortable saying 17th or 18th rather than the 21st place I have actually predicted (spoiler for my video). The reason I think we’ll be a little lower is that the Championship changes quickly. Managers get sacked, takeovers happen, clubs suddenly find money, loan players arrive late in the window and teams that look weak in August can look completely different by October. The position today will not be the position in May, and that makes it almost impossible to know exactly which clubs will form the bottom six once everything settles down.
There are threats to City, obviously. Injuries are probably the biggest one because even if we finish the window with 20 or 22 players capable of playing at this level, there are certain positions where losing two at once could really hurt us. The double six is the obvious example. If Ivan Varfolomeev and Conor McGrandles were both unavailable, even with another midfielder coming in, you are suddenly asking somebody else to perform a role that is not necessarily natural to them.
Goals are another concern. We got two against Derby, and I think our style will create opportunities on the break, but I do not yet know whether there are enough goals in the squad if one or two players lose form. Last season one of our superpowers was little and often from everyone in terms of goals. It’s probably encouraging that Dom Jefferies (two last season) and Ben House (nine) have already got off the mark.
The other possibility is simply that we get overwhelmed. The Championship might be quicker and stronger every single week to the point where the structure does not compensate enough, and we could find ourselves being overrun by very good sides on a regular basis. I do not think the early evidence points that way, but nobody can know for certain yet.
The crowd at Sincil Bank will matter as well because, at its best, the ground can be one of the reasons we survive, but if we lose three or four in a row and the mood turns, that could become difficult for a squad that is going to need patience. Last season I remember pleading for patience after we lost 3-0 at Rotherham, just hoping fans stayed on board, but the mood was turning. I hope this season, if we get a few 3-0 thumpings, fans stay with the players and staff.
One thing I do not worry about
The thing I do not worry about is Chris and Tom. I genuinely do not think there is a chance of them being sacked unless the season becomes an absolute catastrophe, and even if we were relegated bravely, I suspect the club would still see them as part of the longer-term plan. Before anyone says anything about me being a mouthpiece for the club, that is not because I blindly back every manager who comes through the door. I did not blindly back Mark Kennedy, while I backed Michael Skubala because I could see what he was trying to build, and ultimately he proved that faith justified.
So this is not about deciding Chris and Tom must be right just because they are the Lincoln City coaches. It is about what I have seen of the process around them, what I have seen from the football and what I know about how the club prepares. I have seen no evidence yet that suggests the structure is fundamentally wrong. We operated with the 17th biggest budget in League One and finished top with 103 points, which means somewhere along the line we found an edge over clubs with more money than us. You do not accidentally do that across 46 matches, and while Michael Skubala has gone, Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw were two points of the same triangle.
Conclusion
There will be better players than ours in the Championship, and there will be richer clubs than ours, but survival is not about having the best squad in the division. It is about collecting more points than at least three teams over 46 games. I think we are capable of doing that because what made us successful last season was not one manager, one player or one purple patch.
It was the whole thing working together, and if Chris and Tom maintain the standards that were already in place, if the staff keep finding those small edges, if the players can step up enough and if Sincil Bank stays with them through the difficult spells, I think there will be at least three Championship clubs who finish below Lincoln City.
My gut feeling is bold. I suspect we might not automatically be in a relegation battle all season. I suspect if we maintain our levels, 100% every week, as we did from December onwards, then we might surprise a few. Ben Fletcher on talkSPORT tipped us to be outsiders for the top eight, and while that is probably beyond even the most optimistic of fans, an upper bottom half finish might not be.
All we need is for things to be pretty much the same as last season, with a slightly deeper squad, and we’re going to give ourselves a great chance. That is why I think Lincoln City will stay in the Championship in 2026/27.
Comments Welcome!