Kieran McKenna has revealed why much of Ipswich Town’s recruitment has come from the Championship.
The Blues added 12 new players over the summer after sealing promotion to the Premier League, with seven coming from the division below. Others, like Omari Hutchinson and Liam Delap, have only really proved themselves in the second tier and will be looking to make the step up.
Of course, that’ll be seen as a risk to many, but McKenna believes that it’s a good market for Town to recruit from given the stature of their Premier League rivals, with many talented Championship players going on to reach the very top of the game.
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“There’s a lot of good players in the Championship, a lot of players capable of making the step up,” the manager explained. “It’s also the reality of the position that we’re in.
“Ipswich Town is a newly promoted team. We’re not going to be in the market for too many established Premier League players in the peak of their careers, so we have to do things a bit differently, whether that’s looking at younger players or more senior players, or players from the Championship who we think have got the capability to make a step up.
“We’ve tried to identify quite a few of those. The benefit of that is that we’ve built a really hungry group, lots of players who haven’t fully established themselves at Premier League level in terms of playing consecutive seasons there. We’ve got a lot of players who are really keen to do that.
“It makes for a really hungry group. There’s a really good spirit in the group and everyone’s going into the season with a lot of determination.
“That’s the big benefit. Of course, it means that we don’t have a group that’s completely established in the Premier League, but that’s not the reality for where we’re coming from. I’m really happy with how we’ve built the group.”
The situation is different for some players, such as Arijanet Muric, Dara O’Shea and Chiedozie Ogbene.
Muric and O’Shea arrived from Burnley while Ogbene was signed from Luton Town. They all helped their respective sides win promotion from the Championship in 2022/23, but both teams, alongside Sheffield United, were relegated from the top flight just 12 months later.
As a player, having a relegation on your CV can be a deterrent for some clubs, but McKenna sees it as an opportunity to bring in quality players with Premier League experience for a lower fee.
“In our position and reality, that’s a pretty good market for us because you’re looking at players who are at that level of proving they’re certainly at the top end of the Championship,” he argued.
“They’ve then had experience in the Premier League. They would’ve learned and gained a lot from that experience, they would’ve improved over the course of that season.
“Most players who drop out of the Premier League are pretty determined to get back there and make sure that, if they get another opportunity at it, they want to stay and impact it.
“That’s a pretty logical and pretty good market for us. We’ve looked to make use of that.”
The 27-man squad is now set for the first half of the season and McKenna is more than happy with it. In pre-season, the Northern Irishman said that he wanted two natural players in every position, which he now has.
On top of that, the options at his disposal means that he can change things tactically for different games, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents. That, he believes, could make the difference, just like it did when they secured back-to-back promotions.
“We’ve always looked to do that over the last couple of years, to have a balance of profiles within our squad, to have different profiles for different positions so that, in certain games, one player’s strengths might be more pertinent than another player’s strengths,” he said. “We’ve done that pretty well.
“We’ve also looked at each level, whether it’s League One, the Championship or the Premier League, and identified what the key attributes are that will be most important for the team at that level. That’s changed a little bit from what was most important ago two years ago to last year to this season.
“Those things have an impact on your decisions. You try and bring in as many of those right qualities into the group and into the playing squad as you can. From there, we’ll adapt the system as we always do to try and get the best out of the players.
“That’s how we’ve always built our team and that’s how we’ll do it this year in general. We’ll try and get our players in the slots that they’re most comfortable in where it allows them to do the things that they like to do most more often, and we’ll always try to limit their exposure to the things that they’re not so comfortable with.
“We feel like we’ve got a lot of different qualities in the squad now, different profiles. That’ll give us good adaptability over the course of the season. Adaptability is something that we’ve spoken about, it’ll be really important for us.”
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