Burnley on the brink – but where there is Dyche, there is hope

Burnley punched above their weight for years but have fallen off the pace under new US owners… selling their best striker to relegation rivals Newcastle feels like the breaking point – but where there is Sean Dyche, there is hope

• Sean Dyche faces a daunting challenge to keep the club in the Premier League 
• Chris Wood’s sale to Newcastle heightens the prospect of Burnley’s relegation
• Chairman Alan Pace remains convinced that all will be well, even if they go down
• The six superb goals of Maxwel Cornet has been a rare bright spot this season

There’s a lot of fresh paint on the approach to Turf Moor. The vast brickwork wall leading up to the stadium is immaculate matt black and set into it is a new Sir Harry Potts Way road sign, adorned with Burnley’s crest.

Sir Harry, who took the club to the First Division title 62 years ago this spring, would certainly have been pleased with that.

He would also have known a painting over of cracks when he saw it. Turf Moor glitters like never before under new American ownership, with glittering LED advertising screens, corporate boxes in place of a long, antiquated dining room and aquamarine turnstile gates.

Burnley boss Sean Dyche faces a daunting challenge to keep the club in the Premier League

But they are fielding some of the oldest starting XIs the club has known and the league table reveals the consequences.

Bottom, no wins since October and their best striker sold to relegation rivals Newcastle. The Premier League’s smallest club stand on a precipice.

The hugely significant home match with Watford is in danger of being postponed after Burnley requested it to be called off due to injuries and Covid. It leaves them adrift at the bottom having played just two league games since the goalless draw with West Ham on December 12.

The loss to Tyneside of Chris Wood feels like a breaking point and several sources suggest that it is a direct consequence of the financial deal which last summer delivered the club into the hands of US consortium ALK Capital, led by former Wall Street financier Alan Pace.

Chris Wood’s sale to rivals Newcastle heightens the prospect of Burnley’s relegation 

That deal involved the new owners taking out a high-interest loan, repayable from the club’s own resources, to buy Burnley from their main shareholders Mike Garlick and John Banaszkiewicz.

The shareholding reverts back to the former owners if instalments due to them couldn’t be paid, though that was not what they had in mind.

ALK insisted that all payments to Garlick and Banaszkiewicz had been made and that the ongoing purchase of the club had no bearing on Wood’s sale. The 30-year-old had a £25 million release clause. It has been suggested that the clause may not kick in until the summer, though the club deny this.

Either way, Wood’s sale heightens the prospect of Burnley’s relegation even if Wood doesn’t kick another ball for Newcastle. Some here feel that’s precisely why they bought him.

Ten players are out of contract at the end of this season, including defender James Tarkowski

The structure of the takeover deal does not make new chairman Pace a popular individual around pubs like the Royal Dyche, a few hundred yards from the ground, though the on-field struggles of a tired side have been coming for two years. In the days when the club were cementing themselves as a Premier League side, reaching the Europa League in 2018 and reaping TV cash which took revenues to within £3m of Inter Milan’s, Garlick and Dyche ran Burnley together.

When Garlick decided it was time to cash out and Burnley FC sales prospectuses starting hitting mats, that relationship changed. Dyche could apparently not even establish from Garlick what his transfer budget might be, let alone what kind of targets he might pursue. Things became so strained that all communication had to go through chief executive Neil Hart. It was the sight of Sheffield United spending £62m last season, compared to a lay-out of £17.4m, that stuck in Dyche’s throat.

As the brutally competitive Premier League moved on, Burnley stopped. Every member of the starting XI against Leeds on January 2 had been with the club in 2017. The average age of the starting XI that lost to Huddersfield in the FA Cup (31.63) was the oldest in the club’s 3,812 post-War games.

Ten players are out of contract at the end of this season, including James Tarkowski. Newcastle have discussed moving for him this month, but the defender is understood to be determined to see out the season at Burnley out of loyalty, with Aston Villa and West Ham possible suitors this summer.

For all the suspicion, Pace has delivered something substantially different in the transfer market.

A silver lining in a season where Burnley have scored just eight goals has been Maxwel Cornet

The silver lining of a season in which Burnley have scored just eight goals has been Ivorian Maxwel Cornet whose six goals have all been world class.

Cornet was the first player Burnley have signed from the Continent since Steven Defour in 2016. It is thought that Pace travelled to Lyon to persuade the 25-year-old to choose them over Hertha Berlin and that would certainly have been typical of the way he involves himself in every aspect of the club. Pace has moved his family into the Ribble Valley after an initial period, post-takeover, when ALK executives took up residence together in a Lancashire property in lockdown.

Insiders describe a regime of relentless activity and meetings, with dozens of new faces and a seeming air of modernity — the Burnley women’s team’s games broadcast live on TikTok and evangelising about artificial intelligence system which was supposed to see players spotted on the basis of videos of themselves they’d sent in (two arrived but were not invited back). All part of Pace’s vision of Burnley as a global, innovative club.

But most of the senior executives who had helped preserve top-flight status were asked to leave by Pace, who for some unfathomable reason had no time for past achievements.

Hart, now Bolton Wanderers chief executive, commercial director Anthony Fairclough and academy head Jon Pepper all left, along with the club’s technical director, media chief and head of ticketing. New academy director Paul Jenkins has influence in the ‘transfer committee’ Pace set up.

Chairman Alan Pace remains convinced that all will be well, even if the club are relegated

The challenge now is Burnley’s uncompetitive negotiating position on wages, with £50,000-a-week the high end for them.

That is why Palace’s Christian Benteke is an unlikely replacement for Wood.

With Dyche unconvinced by Championship options, including QPR’s Lyndon Dykes and Cardiff City’s Kieffer Moore, the quest to replace Wood will not be an easy one. The club are also seeking a central midfielder.

The previous executives clearly got some things right. The 2020-21 main shirt sponsorship deal, with LoveBet, is thought to have been more lucrative than the 2021-22 deal with SpreadEx Sports.

Pace, who absorbs information rapidly and can be ruthlessly decisive, remains convinced that all will be well, even if the club are relegated.

Few seem reconciled to that. But where there is Dyche, there is hope. ‘He’s the one who has not changed through all of this,’ says one source. ‘He won’t let this go without a fight.’

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