Dyche quietens Premier League ‘noise’ to keep Burnley part of the establishment

“Sometimes the hardest thing is to do nothing other than what you believe in,” the Burnley manager Sean Dyche tells Goal.

He’s referring to that point of the season – Boxing Day – when his side had just been taken apart at home by Everton, losing 5-1.

“You’ve got to know,” he says. “Are you that far away from where you need to be?

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“And I didn’t think we were. It seems crazy, but I genuinely didn’t think we were miles away from where we should be.”

Where Burnley were was 18th in the table, three points from safety. For a team who finished best of the rest the season before – in seventh – it was quite the comedown.

It was plainly evident that they had lost some of what made Burnley Burnley. And amid the “noise”, as Dyche calls it, there was a resolve to put things back the way they were.

“I think there was a real acceptance,” he says. “There were no excuses, no sweeping anything under the carpet. It’s the old Muhammad Ali quote, skill without will is useless.”

To compete where they are competing is no mean feat for Burnley. That league position, a first European qualification in over half a century and a squad sprinkled with internationals all didn’t come easily.

What was required was a rediscovery of sorts, both from Dyche himself and from the players. It led to a stunning second half to the season, when they not only staved off relegation but claimed a big win against Tottenham and draws away at Manchester United and Chelsea.

“It’s probably my best season if you just went pure management,” Dyche says at the club’s well-appointed Barnfield training complex. “Finishing seventh last season is a pretty amazing thing but the best task I’ve fulfilled is making sure we are still in the Premier League this season.

“I take more value in this season, turning it around, than I did last year because you are talking about real management. When things are going well for you it’s not as big a challenge as when it’s going wrong and you’ve got to correct it.

“That’s the hardest challenge in management. I stayed pretty strong to what I believe is right for these players because guess who knows them the best? Me.”

Dyche refers to “the eye of the tiger” as a vital component in his Burnley make-up. Their early season form lacked it and he doubled down on the intangibles – qualities like hunger and desire. Dyche’s Burnley are always going to come back to rely on that kind of fortitude, no matter what is said about his team on the outside.

“Branding in football is such a big conversation now,” he says. “But whatever your branding is, you’ve got to win. In my time here, think how many managers have come and gone who used that phrase: ‘We’re going to play the right way’. Think how many managers are out of work. One style is not going to win the day every game.

“If we all had the best players in the world, we’d all play the most beautiful format we could play as long as that can then win games, because in my job guess what I’m paid to do? Win games.

“If we played glorious football and went down, what do you honestly think the fans would be doing?

“We haven’t got amazing groups of individuals, four or five individuals who can turn everything. We have to play like a team.

“I want productive mixed play. How many ways can you affect a game? We try to offer the players many different ways of working. But you do get put in a box sometimes.

“It’s certainly not something I lose sleep over. Six-and-a-half years, the change in this football club is enormous. You can’t just put that on ‘Oh, they put the ball forward’ because you’ve got to see the whole thing.”

It leads Dyche to speak about the wealth gap within the Premier League and how criticisms over his side’s style of play ring hollow.

“Take Man City,” he says. “Are they allowed to have 600 passes and bring in players for £50 million?

“Every player is £50m so you’re talking about fairness, then that’s a different ball game.

“We deliberately did not try to take them on at their game because there’s only one winner. Now other teams, we feel we can take them on at our game and not worry too much about theirs and I think we’ve done that.”

He points to the home and away victories over Bournemouth, the defeat of Spurs and those draws at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge as evidence.

“Imagine my players lives from six-and-a-half years ago, the ones that have been with us all the time. Look at their lives now compared to where they were.

“Trudging along with a mid-table Championship side, now they’ve been recognised for England, they’ve been recognised through the kudos of the promotions, staying in the Premier League.

“Contractually, they’ll certainly be recognised. I think there’ll be meat on the table at a weekend as my dad used to say. They’ll be alright. So there’s more to it than: ‘Oh why aren’t they playing this way?’.

“I know how to play. But I equally know you’ve got to make that work. And you’ve got to get success. And success in our world is quite simply winning.”

Dyche though is full of praise for Pep Guardiola and his team, pointing to the unseen side of their game.

“Underneath some of the great play at Man City, their teamwork is the thing that’s actually seeing them right,” he says. “They had it at Barcelona as well.

“They do the basics, make no mistake. They press, they play, they get back in shape, they work the backline, they work the pitch, they shorten the pitch, they do all the teamwork things really well.

“For all the beauty of Man City, trust me, they do all the hard yards. They do all the ugly bits of the game. Pep Guardiola is no mug, he knows you’ve got to do that to be truly successful. It will never go out of fashion in the eyes of managers. That is the ability to work for everything you get.”

Burnley probably finished as high as they possibly could last season, considering the disparity in resources between themselves, the rest of the league and the immovable top six.

“It’s not like the maximum of Burnley’s ambition is to be seventh,” says Dyche. “It’s just a reality. Where can you go? Where can you take it?

“For us building is about internal development, external recruitment, continued-building on what we’ve done as a club and continuing to find a way. The chequebook isn’t going to solve it.

“It’s very healthy from a manager’s point of view, but it can be frustrating as well. Because we keep building on something and then every time you get to a point of: ‘Come on then!’ it’s like the club has to be what it is.”

The manager points to a £10m net spend over the past four transfer windows as proof of Burnley’s careful planning. And the plight of other clubs – such as Fulham – who have gambled financially in the Premier League shows that the club are right to stick to their convictions.

“You don’t have to look very far this season for clubs that have spent heavily in Europe and gone down,” Dyche adds.

“There’s a bit of a myth that you pre-suppose every European player is better than every English player. It’s dying a little bit now because there’s a resurgence in the national side, the under-19s, the under-20s and stuff like that.

“It’s not just skill level. In the Premier League you need more than just skill. In Europe there may be some more technical players but can they adapt to the challenge of Premier League football? It’s faster, it’s stronger, the desire of it, the willingness of every team.

“Then when you add in a layer of our chairman and our club don’t want to take a gamble,” Dyche continues.

“So they don’t want to sign a £15m French player who’s never played in the Premier League, who’s 21, and then that ends up being a £4m French player going back the other way. If you look through the Premier League there’s a lot of those stories.”

Dyche and Burnley are not renowned for signing players from overseas markets, with Steven Defour a rare success. However, Dyche then lays out the challenges for any player coming into the Premier League.

“It’s moulding their mindset into what they need to do,” he says. “Players come in whether it’s a big fee or not and go: ‘Yeah, I’ll be alright’. Then all of a sudden: ‘Wow this is a bit tricky’. All of a sudden: ‘Wow my confidence is low’. Then all of a sudden: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I can’t find my way’.

“[It’s about] trying to speed them up through that process and come out the other end positively and ready to go and used to what we do.

“[Defour] is a top player for Burnley but it still took six months of in and out, in and out to get used to it and really do well. Slowly but surely the brain and the body adapt.

“The Premier League is a different thing. Most of the European managers I know and the ones I speak to, that’s been the thing that shocks them. It’s faster, harder, no one gives and inch, no one bows down.

“We can’t spend £30m on two European players that then take eight months to get involved in what we do. The big clubs can. They carry those players for an amount of time which gives them time to come through it. When they’ve got it they thrive and become top players.

“Finding time to get the adjustment period and win enough games to be in the Premier League, that’s the tricky bit. Add in language barrier, cultural shift, fitness levels, we can do one, maybe two, possibly three, but we couldn’t do seven at a time. They wouldn’t all get it at the same rate.”

But even shopping at home brings its challenges.

“It’s alright having a list but your first, second, third, fourth, fifth choice are suddenly gone then your sixth, seventh and eighth, well they’re gone as well because we are not market leaders financially,” says Dyche.

“There are certain players you know immediately, the wages and fees are too high. But then you narrow down which ones you can get. Even them we lose out on because someone will pay them more money.

“People go: ‘We’ve put x amount of pounds on this player and that’s what we want, end of story’. That’s made it more challenging. Players that have played one year in the Championship, £15m. It makes it tough.

“This club has to be balanced. It has to have a balanced view of what it’s doing. No debt, record profits, £10m net spend in four windows, low wage bill.

“If you add all that in, and then still got to play the beautiful game apparently, it’s not that easy. And win of course!”