Wolverhampton Wanderers are bottom of the Premier League, fourth in a mini-table of four winless teams and conceding goals at a rate of three per game.
It feels like a long time since the Molineux faithful were cheering on an influx of Portuguese stars on the way to Premier League promotion and enjoying the lethal goal scoring skills of Raúl Jiménez during a period as the top team in the West Midlands.
Wolves have been drifting. After finishing in the top seven in each of their first two seasons back in the top division, four seasons in the relative safety of mid-table have given way to a dismal start and precious little sign that it can be turned around.
Gary O'Neil has the backing of his Wolves players despite a poor start
After a shambolic 5-3 defeat at Brentford prior to the October international break, Wolves’ forthright captain Mario Lemina leapt to the defence of manager Gary O’Neil. But Lemina’s willingness for the players to shoulder the blame for his team’s shortcomings only tells part of the story.
Wolves are in disarray on the pitch because of a level of neglect behind the scenes. As the clubs around them in the bottom half of the Premier League seek to stabilise, Wolves remain under the ownership of Fosun International but without the transfer clout of super-agent Jorge Mendes, the driving force behind the Portuguese revolution in the Black Country.
O’Neil was appointed last year to replace a disgruntled Julen Lopetegui. The three players who left Wolves permanently in his first full transfer window were Pedro Neto, Max Kilman and Daniel Podence. They haven’t been adequately replaced and there was no obvious attempt to do so.
The Wolves boss is also suffering from the erosion over time of the squads that got the club to the Premier League and kept them there. He doesn’t have Matheus Nunes or Ruben Neves. He doesn’t have Conor Coady or Nathan Collins. He doesn’t have Morgan Gibbs-White or Jimenez, both of whom continue to thrive in the top half of the table.
This deterioration, gradual at first, has become impossible to ignore. There are still talented players in the Wolves ranks and still time for their summer acquisitions to prove themselves astute, but the loss of a succession of captains is indicative of an ownership group unwilling to prevent the key blocks being pulled from the Jenga tower.
At their peak, Fosun’s Wolves were derided for punching above their weight. It wasn’t normal that they were able to bring in Neves, once a teenage captain in a Champions League team, highly rated players like Diogo Jota, or established quality such as Joao Moutinho. Off the field, they barely seem to be fighting anymore.
In just their second season back in the Premier League, Wolves finished seventh for the second year in a row and reached the quarter-finals of the Europa League, losing only to a late goal against eventual winners Sevilla in Duisburg in 2020. Lopetegui was the coach who knocked them out.
Perhaps the inability to properly crack Europe after the coronavirus pandemic is one of the reasons the people responsible for the health of Wolverhampton Wanderers seem to have taken their collective eye off the ball.
Maybe the pandemic itself left a mark at Molineux, or the lessened influence of Mendes has made for a malaise that’s difficult for even a popular and capable manager to navigate.
Look at the trajectory of Wolves in relation to the clubs around them both geographically and in the league table, though, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that the appetite even to hold on to what they have is limited. Lopetegui’s gripes are bearing out in hollow backing for his successor and the bottom line is that this famous old football club deserves better than to be ignored from within.
So, it’s left to Lemina and O’Neil and the rest of the football people at Molineux to find a way out of a bind and stop the rot. The captain and manager clearly believe in one another and that connection gives Wolves something to rally around as they attempt to revive their season after the October break.
They couldn’t have asked for a more difficult start. Manchester City visit in the early kick-off on Sunday before a trip to Brighton & Hove Albion at the end of the month is followed by back-to-back crunch fixtures against Crystal Palace and Southampton – the other two teams currently in the bottom three – to kick off November.
