12 reasons the 22/23 season went badly wrong for Huddersfield Town

In an old job I used to work on big cross-departmental projects and at the end of them we’d have these “lessons learned” meetings, where (in theory) we’d all get together and discuss what we could do better next time. In reality, these meetings were massive finger pointing exercises, where everybody came along to blame the other department for making a massive mess of the project and it would usually descend into bitter name calling. 

So, in the spirit of those “lessons learned” meetings, I’m going to write an article about all the things that went wrong for Huddersfield Town last season. Or are we still calling it this season? I’m not sure when one ends and the other starts, but I’m talking about the 22/23 season we’ve just experienced, where Danny Schofield and Mark Fotheringham steered the club directly towards League One and Neil Warnock miraculously turned it all around.

I apologise in advance that this post is going to be pretty negative, there’s no way to avoid that. I will try to write a more positive post about all the things we got right to turn our season around in a few days time, to restore some balance. But for now, here are my thoughts on why it all went wrong for Town in the season season just finished…

Not backing Carlos 

It’s tricky to start playing “what if” but I have spent time wondering if the money we spent trying to correct the mistakes we made last season had been spent up front, could we have put ourselves in a much better position? Carlos Corberan’s reason for leaving is probably only truly known by Carlos himself, but the version most people accept is that he jumped ship because he didn’t get the backing he wanted after our playoff final defeat to Nottingham Forest. 

Whether this is truly the reason Carlos left or not, it is fair to say that we didn’t show an abundance of ambition after coming so close to the Premier League. We sold our two best players, saw another great loanee return to their parent club and replaced them with a crop of project players and free agents that weren’t as good as the players they came in to replace (more on them later).

So, back to my original point, if we had just shown a little bit more ambition with Carlos and kept hold of him we could probably have saved the money we ended up having to pay on things like all the loan fees in January (Knockaert and Lowton were a failures but most likely not a cheap ones), sacking Fotheringham and Schofield will have cost a fair bit and Neil Warnock will no doubt have negotiated an eye-watering survival bonus out of Dean Hoyle. 

So the cost of not backing Carlos may actually have been more than just giving him what he wanted in the first place. Then who knows where we might be now. He achieved remarkable things with a limited squad in the 21/22 season, so with another season and some money to spend he might have gone one better and taken us to the Premier League.

Carlos left us in the lurch

Having been nice about Carlos and his coaching ability in the above section, I have to now say that the timing of his exit was quite unprofessional and he left us in the lurch. If he had walked out after the playoff final that would have given us time to get someone new in time for preseason but the fact he walked just two weeks before the season started left us with very little wiggle room in terms of managing his succession.

I think the timing of his departure was a bit fishy. I get the impression that he left because he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to repeat his success at Town again another season because the squad was going to be far weaker and if he was in charge another season his stock would fall. So looking at it from the perspective of his self-interest, leaving made sense. But going so close to the start of the season wasn’t fair on the club and the timing of his departure and subsequent move to Greece seemed suspicious to say the least. Particularly when you consider the compensation Town missed out on from Olympiacos because we allowed Carlos to walk away from his contract.

Trying to be too clever in the summer transfer window

The summer 2022 transfer window wasn’t absolutely horrific for Town but we didn’t recognise the need to bring in immediate quality to replace Toffolo and O’Brien straight away. Instead we went for project players, like Jack Rudoni, David Kasumu and Tyreece Simpson, who all have potential to be great Championship players in the future but none were ready to compete straight away and needed time to bed in. So at the start of the season there was a huge dip in quality within the squad while these new players established themselves and adjusted to the Championship (or in Simpson’s case, were injured half the season and then in the B Team for the other half).

The players I’ve mentioned above were not bad signings for Town but they weren’t adequate replacements for the players that left. Just like the B Team players that are coming through aren’t ready to play 30-40 games a season yet either. 

It felt like our transfer strategy was trying too hard to outsmart the rest of the league rather than going down the more traditional route of bringing in players with experience of this level, that are mature and ready to make an immediate impact. These players obviously cost more money but that’s because they are more reliable and help you avoid falling into relegation fights. 

Bungling preseason

Getting into the playoffs extended the 21/22 season by a good few weeks for Town and that left the club with a tricky decision. Should they give the players a shorter summer holiday and get them back in for preseason at the usual time or grant them a decent length break but have a shorter preseason. There just wasn’t enough time between the playoff final and the start of the new season (which was earlier due to the winter World Cup) to be able to give the players a proper break and a full preseason. I’m not sure who made the call, but they went with a longer break and a shorter preseason. 

It may not have even been the wrong choice, as the players had endured a grueling season to reach the playoff final and needed to fully rest and recover for a new campaign. But the shortened preseason break also seemed to be poorly planned out too, with all the videos released by the club seeming to show a much slacker atmosphere around the place and players seeming to be having more of a laugh and a lot less angry Spanish shouting going on than when Carlos was around. The drop off in intensity was noticeable even to a layman.

By the time the season started, we just didn’t look nearly fit enough to compete in matches. Players looked to visibly wilt in the later stages of matches and our early performances were pretty shocking. 

Going with an inexperienced coach (and not backing them with an experienced team)

I don’t want to slag off Danny Schofield too much here, because he’s obviously such a nice bloke but it was obvious quite quickly that it was too soon for him to be given such a big responsibility and he wasn’t ready. He seemed a bit surprised himself that he had been offered the job when it came around but obviously he took it when it was offered but struggled with the extra responsibility. 

I think he was doomed from the start, as players often struggle to respect assistant coaches that step up to head coach. It’s hard to take them seriously when they’ve previously been the guy that sets out the cones and I think Schofield struggled to command the respect of the team. His inability to get results obviously compounded that and it ended up seeming almost cruel keeping him in the role as long as he was allowed to carry on.

The people higher up at the club didn’t do Schofield any favours though. They announced his promotion to head coach in such a low-key way that many fans thought he was just the caretaker. I think it was literally in the same press release as the one responding to Carlos resigning. So he had little fanfare or fuss made of him. They also didn’t do the obvious thing of bringing in an experienced coach to support him. I won’t say they set him up to fail but they didn’t give him the best opportunity to thrive either.

UPDATE: After publishing thid article I’ve listened to the latest And He Takes That Chance podcast and Radio Leeds’ Matt Glennon suggested that Danny Schofield had a lot of interference from outside, in terms of team selection and tactics. Soay e his failure was more a symptom of broader issues in the structure of the club than Schofield himself. Making him even more unlucky to be made a scapegoat if he was just the frontman and other people were telling him who to pick and what tactics to use.

Injuries to key players

I was reluctant to include injuries in this article because every team suffers them but I think we probably had them worse than most and to players that we could least afford to lose. It feels like a long time ago now and perhaps a slightly absurd prediction, but Dean Hoyle said he thought Tino Anjorin could be the Championship Player of the Season when he was interviewed around the start of the season. But he was probably fully fit for a maximum of two games, as despite assurances he was in tip-top shape, he still couldn’t complete 90 minutes in the early part of the season and then was ruled out for the whole season before we saw him reach his best.

Yuta Nakayama’s season-ending injury was a heartbreaking one, more for the player than for us as Town fans. As a regular in the Japanese international team, he was a few weeks away from the pinnacle of his career, so to be ruled out with a nasty injury just before the World Cup was a cruel blow to him. But it was pretty bad for our season too, as we’d just discovered, through trial and error, the best way to use him and he was showing some great form. 

Matty Pearson’s injury in preseason also meant we lost another key player, who showed in the run in just how useful he can be when he quickly became a regular source of goals at set pieces and defensive solidity at the back. It’s hard to imagine we’d have shipped quite so many sloppy goals if he’d have been in our backline in the early parts of the season, as while he doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles to his play, he does generally get the basics right.

On top of these long term injuries, we’ve had far too many niggling injuries that have meant regular starters have struggled to get into a rhythm. Danny Ward and Jonathan Hogg have both missed quite a lot of games this season, Lee Nicholls picked up a nasty shoulder injury in January, Pat Jones looked like he might be about to burst onto the scene but could stay fit long enough to establish himself, and obviously we lost Ollie Turton just after we’d sent Kesler-Heyden back to Villa because we thought we had that position covered.

So injuries aren’t the reason we struggled last season but it definitely didn’t help. You can cope with losing a few players here and there but I think the injuries we had just exposed the mistakes we’d already made in the transfer market, whereas we might have got away with not properly replacing Harry Toffolo if Nakayama had stayed fit and been able to do a job down that left flank. Similarly, if Tino Anjorin had stayed fit and scored 20 goals, he could have papered over the fact there was very little creativity elsewhere in the squad. So the injuries weren’t the problem, they just exposed the issues that were lurking under the surface.

Fotheringham’s flaws weren’t fixed

I could probably write ten thousand words just on Mark Fotheringham’s time at Town, so it’s going to be hard to be concise about the enigmatic Scotsman. I think I’m probably a bit of an outlier among Town fans when it comes to the former manager and Buzz Lightyear lookalike, as I think there were a few positives among the obvious huge issues with his management style. I also think some of the problems with Mark Fotheringham were easily fixable and he wasn’t given the support he should have been.

For starters, he was awful with the media and his press conferences were compelling watching for all the wrong reasons from the club’s perspective. So much so, I actually looked up to see if media training is part of the “badges” that he’d taken to get qualified as a coach – it is, so there’s no excuse for how badly he coped with relatively soft ball questions for local media. So either the club didn’t do enough to support him with this, or they did and he just ignored them.

There also seemed to be an issue with Fotheringham falling out with players, with him often hanging individual players out to dry in the press or publically tearing them to pieces on the touchline. It was quite common for players to go from regular names in the starting lineup to suddenly disappear from the squads without any explanation. 

The worst example of Fotheringham’s interpersonal style ruining a relationship with a player seems to be Sorba Thomas. I don’t have any inside knowledge of what went on, but from the things Thomas has said publicly, it feels pretty obvious that Fotheringham fell out with him, froze him out of the team and that was why our best outfield player (I know some will disagree with this but even when he was playing badly he was one of the league’s top assisters) was loaned to Blackburn. 

I think Fotheringham was a bad appointment and a poor head coach in the end but the club didn’t do nearly enough to improve his chances of success either. He came on his own and had to work with the coaching team that was already in place. Then the coach that he was allowed to bring in was another young, angry Scotsman like himself, in Kenny Miller. 

If the club were serious about giving the best chance of doing well, they should have given him someone with a bit of experience as a senior coach to work alongside him. Someone who had been there and done it before. They also needed to tell him when he was getting it wrong, rather than allow him to ruin the morale in the squad. 

January transfer window showed intent but not intelligence 

Our January transfer window was a mess but not in the way I expected it to be. With our league position looking perilous and the rumours of boardroom strife growing, I worried that we wouldn’t do anything because things were up in the air. But, in fairness to Dean Hoyle, he did put his hand in his pocket and sanctioned a number of transfer market moves. Like my dancing in Visasge and Ethos in the early 2000s, Town mostly the wrong moves. 

In January we brought in Lowton, Knockaert, Waghorn, Kamberi, that keeper from Forest that never played a game, Vaclik and Josh Hungbo. Of those seven (!) players that we brought in, only Hungbo and Vaclik made an impact. And I think we were a bit lucky to get as many games as we did out of Vaclik as he looked like he wasn’t physically fit enough to be playing at Championship level and the rumours he’d failed several medicals before coming to us don’t sound too far fetched. 

It felt like our approach to transfers in January was one of desperation rather than smart thinking. The plan seemed to be to throw enough mud at the wall and hope that some of it stuck. I suppose, given that Hungbo and Vaclik were decent, it did kind of work, but we most likely wasted quite a lot of money on all those other players that barely played. 

Sticking with Fotheringham when he’d clearly lost the plot

I mentioned above that I’m one of the few Town fans with a few (qualified) nice things to say about Fotheringham’s time at Town. OK, he was overall, a bad Head Coach but he did sort out a lot of the problems he inherited. He took the unfit squad he was given and got them into decent shape.

He also managed to get the team to play off a relatively solid defensive shape. It was very dour and defensive-minded but it meant we rarely lost by more than a single goal and most games had a chance of nicking something – though we rarely did because he couldn’t get the balance right and we showed almost no attacking ambition.

I think the real issue was that Fotheringham never really kicked on from getting the team fit and solid. After the World Cup break I hoped we’d see a team that would benefit from the extended break by having more attacking ideas and playing with more of a clear identity. If anything we seemed to get steadily worse and there were no signs Fotheringham had a plan to make things get better.

It’s quite sad when you can see a head coach losing the plot but the signs were there for quite a long time with Fotheringham. I think the club’s hierarchy kept the faith with him for far too long, and he was in charge for a run of games against teams around us at the bottom of the table which a new manager may have done well against but Fotheringham stood little chance in because he’d pretty much broken his squad and didn’t know how to fix it. 

Not having a settled squad of players

Town used the second most players in the Championship behind Watford. This might seem like an obscure stat to pull out, but we used 40 different players in the league last season (Watford used 41) whereas the majority of the league used between 28 and 33. I think we’re near the top of this leaderboard because we struggled to establish a settled squad. 

When Town have had very good seasons, it’s mostly happened when we’ve played a settled starting eleven from one week to the next. In seasons where we’ve struggled, the team changes from one week to the next. Poor form, injuries and rotation are all reasons to rejig things but it all adds up to a lack of consistency and makes it very hard to get any momentum. 

The other issue is that we definitely don’t have 40 Championship-quality players in our squad. So we’ve been having to backfill a lot of the gaps in our squad with B Team players that aren’t really ready for the step up. Sometimes the likes of a Ben Jackson will come in and do an admirable job (though often not over the long term) but it’s often the case that youngsters aren’t ready and you can’t have too many young players on the pitch at once or you can be exposed by more experienced opposition. 

The “Orcus In The Boardroom” stuff

I’m not going to get too deep into it, but I think the “off the field” stuff did have an impact on what was happening on the pitch. It’s pretty commonly acknowledged that when the players, the club and the fans are all aligned that everything starts to feel really good – so the opposite is true too. So when it feels like the club isn’t talking to the fans, the fans are angry with the club and the players aren’t performing on the pitch it can all feel pretty rubbish. 

I’d like to be clear that I’m not blaming the fans who protested, they’re entitled to voice their frustration. But it’s probably not ideal for players to look into the stands and see banners protesting the ownership. Or to open up social media and see rumours about all sorts of strife behind the scenes at the club. 

If I’m honest, I think this is probably the flimsiest of the reasons I’ve cited for the poor season we endured last season but the uncertainty at boardroom level probably did have a bit of an impact on the pitch to some degree. It certainly felt a lot easier and like a cloud was lifted when it was announced that a buyer had been found and administration was off the table. 

Not having a decent striker 

For completeness, I thought I better throw in that our lack of a decent striker. Danny Ward had a decent season in 21/22 with 14 goals in 43 league appearances (the best goal tally of his career) but in the season just gone he only managed five in 36, so a far more meagre return in nearly as many games. 

Like with the injuries, the lack of a prolific striker wasn’t the principle problem but not having a natural goalscorer exposed all our other problems. If we had a player like Gyokeres at Coventry then we could maybe have scraped a few more wins here and there which would have pulled us clear of trouble. 

Our style of play for long parts of this season meant that the strikers received very little in the way of quality service, and that meant if they were going to score it would be from a moment of magic they created themselves or converting one of the few half-chances sent their way. Sadly the strikers on our books weren’t good enough to do this. 

Will Town make these mistakes again next season?

I’m quite optimistic that we’ll be in better shape this coming season than we were at the start of the season we’ve just finished. I think the squad is in better shape and I hope that we won’t have to sell our best players (though keeping Sorba may be tricky as I think he’s mentally checked out of the club). I think a lot of the issues I’ve mentioned above were quite specific to the circumstances we found ourselves in last season. 

With a new owner, new management structure and head coach in place over the summer, it should feel like a fresh start and a chance to start again. While it’s unlikely everything will go perfectly, I genuinely think we can expect a more positive future for Town than the season we’ve just finished, particularly if the new people coming in learn the lessons from last season’s mistakes.