Burnley are down, but they might be back very soon

It’s hard to watch Burnley play without feeling both admiration and sympathy. The team tries so hard, and the manager is always honest and thoughtful in interviews. The club just seems so nice.

They’ve even had some good results this season in their foray into the top flight of English football. They’ve beaten Southampton and Manchester City, and also won away to Stoke. But that amounts to three of their five wins this season.

Apart from some good results against big teams – specifically Manchester City off whom they’ve taken four points – they haven’t had much to shout about. Not nearly enough, it turns out.

They have some poor stats too. The Clarets have won the joint fewest number of games, they’ve scored the joint fewest number of goals and they have the worst goal difference in the league. So it’s really not hard to see why they’re bottom of the table and five points from safety with only four games to go.

But, again, you feel admiration for Burnley. They’re in such an awful position, but they’ve never been adrift at the bottom this season. They’ve managed to find ways of drawing games if not winning them. They’ve only conceded three more goals than Spurs too – though that probably says more about Spurs than Burnley.

And they’ve done all of this with probably the lightest squad in the Premier League.

Burnley spent around about £10m this season, including a January deal for Michael Keane. It sounds like a lot of money for fans who are used to competing in the Championship. After all, the season before last Burnley spent just 750k. So they’ve spent a decent amount of money on Keane, George Boyd and Lukas Jutkiewicz, for example

But look at the teams around them. QPR have spent bucket loads of cash – but then they have bucket loads to spend anyway. Leicester have broken their record transfer fee twice this season, spending almost as much as Burnley did in all their deals for both Leo Ulloa and Andrej Kramaric.

So the other promoted teams have speculated in order to accumulate – though QPR are in deep, deep trouble, and Leicester are still menaced by the drop despite their good recent form. They may not accumulate an awful lot, but they’ve spent lots more than the Clarets.

And that’s admirable. When you look at Burnley you see an honest team, playing without heaps of flair, but with the cliched ‘heart and desire’. They’ve been rich in heart and poor in cash.

This is a sign of a well-run club, though. If – when – Burnley go down, they’ll get their parachute payments and they’ll be able to regroup. They haven’t blown their whole allowance on sweets and coke, they’ve put most of it straight in their piggy bank.

And that’s either very smart or very negative, depending on which way you look at it.

It’s either a sign that the club is taking its financial health very seriously or else it’s a sign that they never really expected to be competitive this season anyway. In an interview with the BBC, Dyche told of how Arsene Wenger found Burnley’s wage budget ‘amusing’ and that it might equate to just one Arsenal player.

So to be in with a shout of survival this late into the season on that small a budget is admirable, and with the honesty they show on the pitch week in and week out you have to have sympathy for the club. They have four winnable games left. But it’s a huge ask for a club who have won five games all season to win four consecutive games now.

In the big league these days money definitely talks and Burnley don’t have enough of it to stay up. It’s hardly a surprise, but it is sad. The upside is that having been so careful with the money they received from the Premier League’s TV deal, they may still be up there challenging at the top of the Championship next season.

No matter what happens, Sean Dyche is a good manager for a good club, and this season might not be the pinnacle of their achievements – it might just be another step in their progression. We might see them back much sooner than most.

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