How Ipswich won back-to-back promotions to reach Premier League with League One squad

Just 21 months ago Ipswich Town’s first away game of the season was in League One at Forest Green’s New Lawn Stadium in front of only 4,000 fans.

Now, when the Premier League fixtures are announced on June 18, it is possible that Ipswich’s first match away from home could be in Manchester United’s 74,000-capacity Old Trafford.

The three points earned at home against relegated Huddersfield Town on Saturday lunchtime confirmed Ipswich’s return to the top-flight after an absence of 22 years, becoming only the fifth club to earn back-to-back promotions into the Premier League (following Watford, Manchester City, Southampton and Norwich City). Better still they have achieved it in the most extraordinary manner. Not least because they will have amassed the greatest points total over two campaigns: 194 points.

But that does not go close to quantifying what Ipswich will have achieved. That comes, firstly, with a glance at the team-sheet from the XI that started against Forest Green – who, unfortunately, will be kicking off in the National League after the ignominy of their own back-to-back milestones: relegations rather than promotions.

For all the impressive investment in and modernisation of Ipswich under the American ownership of Gamechanger 20 Ltd, the company created to buy the club in April 2021 from the unpopular Marcus Evans for around £40 million and wiping out debts of £100 million, Ipswich’s promotions will have been achieved with effectively the same side.

The scorers against Forest Green? They were Sam Morsy and Marcus Harness. Also starting were Leif Davis, Cameron Burgess, Wes Burns, Conor Chaplin and George Edmundson. Those seven made 265 appearances between them in League One and, before this final weekend, have played 242 games in the Championship.

Indeed, astonishingly, 15 players who featured at least 10 times for Ipswich in League One have managed at least the same total in the Championship, with captain Morsy, Davis, Chaplin, Burgess, Harness, Burns and Luke Woolfenden playing more than 30 times in each division. But for injury that number of players would be even higher and represents not just astonishing continuity but also great coaching.

Ipswich have done it the hard way

It is essentially, therefore, the same squad and one that came out of League One having cost just £10 million. Last summer Ipswich spent a modest £4 million but engineered a number of smart loan deals including Chelsea’s Omari Hutchinson and, then, crucially in January, Bournemouth’s Kieffer Moore following injury to George Hirst. Head coach Kieran McKenna favours a powerful centre-forward who can hold the ball up and link play.

Ipswich have done it the hard way. League One was far stronger last season than this – as they battled it out with Plymouth Argyle and Sheffield Wednesday – and it has arguably been the most competitive Championship for years as Ipswich took on Leicester City, Leeds United and Southampton, the three clubs relegated from the Premier League, who are flush with their parachute payments of £41 million.

Undoubtedly much centres on McKenna. Even in the third tier, despite being in his first management job, the 37-year-old was being tracked by Premier League clubs such as Brighton & Hove Albion and Crystal Palace. At the start of this campaign it was widely remarked that if Ipswich did not make it their manager would and Palace eventually did consider the Northern Irishman as a replacement for Roy Hodgson.

Ipswich have undoubtedly given McKenna an environment in which to thrive. While the vision for the club is driven from his office at Portman Road by the demanding chief executive Mark Ashton, who was recruited from Bristol City shortly after the takeover, a visit to the club’s training ground shows how this quickly became McKenna’s domain.

He does not allow Sky Sports News – the staple of football training grounds – to be played on the television screens. Instead there is footage of that day’s training session, always filmed by a drone, or highlights from a recent match. This is to get the message across. Players glance up and what do they see? They see their work and its consequences.

McKenna had two Desso – hybrid grass – pitches installed and moved them closer to the first-team buildings, which have been updated. He switches players from one pitch to the other in training – with each exercise immaculately set up and organised by him – to make sure no time is wasted and the tempo remains.

McKenna’s ‘drill library’

McKenna’s work is based on what he calls a “drill library of practices” and, over the years, he has meticulously documented his training sessions. It is not unusual but McKenna is known to take it to incredibly detailed levels with a huge database.

Afterwards McKenna and his staff, which includes assistant Martyn Pert and first-team coach Lee Grant, who also moved from Manchester United, always hold a debrief. A senior player, Sone Aluko, joins them. The 35-year-old forward has played just two minutes of first-team football this season but is heavily involved and is one of 10 players who have asked to take their coaching badges, working from the Under-10s to Under-16s, which has helped the squad evolve. McKenna has encouraged this and not least because of his own background, coming through at Tottenham Hotspur as a youth team coach, backed by John McDermott, Alex Inglethorpe and Clive Allen after his own playing career was sadly cut short by a chronic hip injury at 21. “I went straight from crutches to coaching,” McKenna told Telegraph Sport.

McDermott, now the Football Association’s technical director, certainly identified something in McKenna who then, interestingly, set along a path to be a manager by the age of 35. Why then? It is usually when a playing career comes to a close.

His schooling at Spurs and, after that, with United under Jose Mourinho was exemplary. It helps that McKenna is a self-confessed workaholic but his attention to detail is that of a top manager and always has been. It is a thoroughly modern approach.

For example, after promotion last year McKenna identified that the Championship is the third highest in Europe for sprints and high-speed distance. League One was third lowest. So, he worked on how he could improve the speed of his squad and brought in quicker players.

Then he looked at average League One ball-in-play-time, which was just 48 minutes in the third tier. For Ipswich’s first Championship game, against Sunderland, it climbed to 67 minutes. So that was another area to work on and to help, Ipswich last summer dug up their pitch, laying proper irrigation channels, undersoil heating and sprinklers as part of the latest multi-million investment phase.

“We like to be thorough in understanding things,” McKenna said and that included a detailed analysis of the “physicality” and athleticism of his squad to work out whether they could cope in the Championship – plus still possessing the technical ability his attacking football demands.

“We needed to be able to rest in possession a little bit which was not something we focused on in League One because we were so dominant in possession,” McKenna explained.

Ipswich is the perfect fit even if, naturally, there was something of a gamble involved – given his lack of “No1” experience – when McKenna was chosen to succeed Paul Cook in Dec 2021 (when he was, indeed, 35) with the club 12th in League One. But, in fact, his time at Spurs and United taught him not just what it is like to work under pressure – and there was pressure and expectation at Ipswich also – but to be at a club that values youth development and what he calls a “local core”.

With that in mind, while much attention has focused on Davis, who has even been mooted as an England left-back, one of McKenna’s biggest successes has been Woolfenden, the Ipswich-born centre-half who came through the club’s academy and is now heading for the Premier League as a stalwart of the team. Under Cook, Woolfenden had been frozen out, was training with the Under-23s and would have left.

But McKenna saw something as Woolfenden said he needed “a bit of love”. The 25-year-old missed only that Forest Green game in 2022 due to illness and the head coach has spoken of how important it is to have a player who knows Ipswich’s “journey”.

“This is a progressive club and I know that I want to manage at the highest level of the game,” McKenna said. “I want to be back to that level, back to the Premier League and manage in the Champions League.” Now he and Ipswich are back.