Burnley have confirmed their return to the English Premier League with victory over Sheffield United on Monday night.
South African football fans will be salivating at the prospect of seeing star striker Lyle Foster competing in the elite league again. The Bafana Bafana ace, who is currently injured, played a key part in Burnley’s record-breaking Championship run. He has scored two goals and registered five assists so far in the second tier.
They are set to reach the 100-point mark, matching the achievement of the Burnley side that won promotion under Vincent Kompany in 2023.
Foster was also one of the Burnley standouts in that campaign, scoring five times in their brief stay in England’s top flight. But while that Burnley team swept all before them in the second tier with a dominant possession-based style of football, Scott Parker’s side is known more for its defensive solidity.
The Clarets are set to become the best defence in Championship history, having conceded just 15 goals this season.
They have also kept 29 clean sheets, with 12 goalless draws and 15 of their 26 wins coming by a one-goal margin. Even captain Josh Brownhill had joked that Burnley had “bored our way to the Premier League”.
“I’m speechless. All that hard work this season,” the 29-year-old told Sky Sports after Monday’s victory.
“We’ve been written off so many times, people calling us boring. We’ve bored our way to the Premier League.”
But there is a lesson to be drawn from the recent struggles of promoted teams, and that is that “boring” may just be the only way to survive in the top flight.
All three teams who were promoted last season dropped straight back down. This season, two of the three – Southampton and Leicester – have already been relegated, with Ipswich set to join them.
The one common thread running through most of those teams is a persistence with the free-flowing, possession-based style of football that saw them dominate the Championship, in the elite league.
It has bordered on suicidal for the likes of Southampton, and it was no surprise that they were the first to get the axe this season.
Kompany’s Burnley adopted a similar gung-ho approach upon reaching the Premier League. They learnt the folly of that approach a little too late to stay up. It was a case of lesson learnt for Parker’s side. And they will need to carry that more pragmatic approach into next season if they are to stand a chance of bucking the current trend.
It is worth comparing their situation to that of table toppers Leeds United, who also secured a quick return to the big time with third-placed Sheffield United’s defeat. Leeds and Burnley currently have 94 points.
Leeds’ more attacking brand of football has yielded almost 90 goals so far, compared to Burnley’s 61. But they have also conceded almost double the amount of goals (29).
They are a big club, and with their previous top-flight experience, they could get away with an insistence on ‘playing their way’ in England’s increasingly competitive top flight. However, recent history suggests that Burnley have a better chance of ‘boring their way to survival’.
