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Saturday’s defeat at home to Brentford means Wolves have taken just two points for 17 games. No side in the entire history of English league football, in any division, has ever made a worse start than that. To reach 11 points, the record low for a Premier League season set by Derby County in 2007-08, would require a significant improvement.
How can this have happened? Wolves finished 16th last season, recovering after a dismal start. When Vitor Pereira took over on 19 December last year, they were second bottom on nine points from 16 games. They picked up 23 points from the final 22 games of the season and effectively ended any prospect of relegation with a run of six successive victories in the spring. How can a team go from averaging near enough a point a game to a tenth of that? The drop-off is extraordinary.
There were departures in the summer, with Matheus Cunha joining Manchester United, Rayan Aït-Nouri going to Manchester City, Fábio Silva sold to Borussia Dortmund, Gonçalo Guedes gone to Real Sociedad and Pablo Sarabia and Nelson Semedo – 115 league starts between them last season – leaving on frees. But that in itself shouldn’t have been enough to send Wolves into freefall.
Last summer, though, was not a one-off. Wolves have been selling off talent and not really replacing it for a couple of years now. Pedro Neto, Maximilian Kilman and Mario Lemina left the previous season. Matheus Nunes, Rúben Neves and Nathan Collins went the season before that. A team can endure a certain level of downgrade for a while, but there comes a point at which a critical mass is reached. It’s less to do with the quality of the squad per se, although that clearly plays a role, than with the perception of decline.
Matt Doherty, seeming distraught after Saturday’s game, made the point that it was time for players to decide whether history would regard them as cowards. The implication was clear. At least some of his team-mates are considering a January exit. Others perhaps have just mentally given up. Far easier to accept what now appears an inevitable relegation if a player can tell himself he wasn’t really trying by the end and neither was anybody else. It’s a way of deflecting blame: how could we perform in that environment? Doherty doesn’t have to be wrong for those players to have a point. Wolves has become an impossible place to play.
It never starts out too badly. They caused Manchester City some problems on the opening day before losing 4-0. They lost the following three league games by a single goal. A 3-1 home defeat to Leeds perhaps began to raise serious concerns, but Wolves followed that up by beating Everton in the League Cup and then drawing against Tottenham and Brighton in the league. With two of the promoted clubs in the following two games there seemed a realistic possibility they could drag themselves towards respectability. But they were physically overwhelmed at Sunderland, losing 2-0, and then let in a 95th-minute winner after coming from 2-0 down to level against Bournemouth. And with that, Wolves’ season fell apart. They’ve scored just twice in eight league games since. No side has really outplayed them, but the fight has left them, something embodied by Jørgen Strand Larsen’s limp penalty miss on Saturday.
After Pereira left, Rob Edwards came in, having walked out on a Middlesbrough side who looked well-placed for promotion from the Championship. Although he had done something similar in leaving Forest Green to take over at Watford earlier in his career, this move seemed motivated by a desire to try to save Wolves, the club he supports and for whom he played 100 league games. He may have been born in Christmas Day, but so far it seems unlikely he will enact a miracle. Having taken Luton down, his reputation may never recover.
The chairman, Jeff Shi, unexpectedly stood down on Saturday after almost a decade in the role, although he remans as chairman and CEO of Fosun, which owns Wolves. His reasons for quitting are unclear, although there had been consistent fan protests against his reign. He has been replaced, pending a full-time appointment, by Nathan Shi, who is no relation. Whoever comes in will face a fanbase furious with how the club has been run over the past three years.
Perhaps Wolves thought that even after weakening their squad with sales they would still be good enough to finished above the three promoted sides. Certainly the struggles of the three teams coming up helped them over the previous two seasons. But with Sunderland and Leeds both starting the season well, Wolves have been cast adrift. They are 16 points from safety. Survival already seems a forlorn hope. All that remains is to try to surpass Derby’s record low.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
