As the new season dawns, the one thing we can say conclusively is that we don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next year. Last year there was a definite sense of being in transition, now we’re at the start of something we hope will be better. But, let’s be absolutely honest, we don’t have a scooby.

The Oxblogger Oxford United Survey 2023 results support that. As background, the survey has run twice a year since 2019 and typically gets between 200-300 responses. The summer survey is more comprehensive and done at the end of the season, a smaller survey happens in the New Year.

Whether this is representative of all fans’ views is hard to say, respondents are more likely to be on Twitter and specifically follow me. According to the data, you’re very likely to be male and white and attend most home games. The survey seems to attract a broad range of ages – the biggest segment is 46-55, but is only 22% of the responses.

The survey ran before most of this summer’s signings and presumably the general mood has improved as signings do appear to be happening earlier, which is generally taken to be a good sign. This is the first part of the results, and focus on how you’re currently rating the club. Next week we’ll look at predictions before launching into the new season.

Overall

The overall mood has improved since a collapse in January. The overall rating is still low – 6.5 – but a jump from 4.6. Before we get too excited, that’s still lower than the rating the club got from the first survey in 2019, which was off the back of a poor season and a series of winding up orders. By that token, those were more fun times than now. In summary, we’re in a better place than we were a few months ago, but that’s still a bad place.

Another way of looking at this is to review the spread of results. There are two things to consider here; where the peak is, a measure of the general mood is excluding any extremists who might skew the scores and how high that peak is, which indicates the level of consensus about that result. 

Overall, where neutral is five, the mood is positive, with over 30% of you rating us 7 and 56% seven or more. As you’ll see, 30% represents a reasonable benchmark to measure whether there’s a consensus or not. For this, there is a better than average consensus that things are, in fact, OK.

Mood, I suspect, is pretty elastic with the potential to spring back to something healthier with a few good results, fans are nothing if not fickle. But, it shows how damaging the indecision and performances in the middle of last season were.

Or does it? The club functions by the owners injecting large sums into the club and we gain from player sales, plus there are quite a few suckers like me who will buy their season ticket regardless of how things are going. The mood of the club probably has quite a marginal impact on the club’s general health in the great scheme of things, except to say, like everything in football, it matters because it matters.

Manager

The bounce-back from January, if you can call it that, is down to one thing; Liam Manning. The overall mood and manager ratings track much more closely than any other factor, which highlights the important role that the manager plays in determining how fans respond. 

That’s not to say you’re conclusive about him – his rating of 7.5 (up from Karl Robinson’s truly woeful 4.4 in January) is still the third worst managerial rating we’ve had, making him worse than for most of Robinson’s reign. The scepticism is healthy and expected, few can have fully shed the horrors of a 17 game winless run and we’ve yet to really see Manningball in action. There are very few people who are anti-Manning, but plenty who simply don’t know. Time will tell whether he can continue, but having achieved his first objective to stay up, given where we were, it’s not a bad start at all. 

The spread shows a big positive skew with a high peak (45%+), So, it doesn’t look like Manning has to convert many people to see his ratings jump up much higher than they are at the moment.

Squad

Manning’s next job is to rebuild his squad. This survey happened before our summer signings, so the mood is probably improving, but back at the beginning of June, you rated the squad 4.7, a drop from 5, so this was the weakest squad we’ve had in four years. 

The drop from January is pretty small and might be explained by the loss of Matty Taylor alone. But, as has been pointed out more than once, the problems go back further. This time last year, you rated the squad 7.3 so it’s reasonable to say the losses of Luke McNally and Mark Sykes without adequate replacements hurt us.

In terms of spread; the peak is 5 – neutral – with just under 30% of respondents rating us bang average. That seems to mean we generally agree that we don’t know if the squad has got it or not. That said you can also see that the overall shape is flatter with a skewing slightly towards the negative. That would imply there is still some scepticism about whether the squad is up to it, I suspect the neutrality is that most people are waiting to see what impact Manning has.

Board

Owners, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Our owners have had a pretty good run, this time last year they enjoyed quite a high rating of 7.7, which dropped to 6.5 in January and to 5.5 in this survey.

I suspect it’s much easier to lose ground as an owner than to gain it, we expect a lot, we don’t all agree what that ‘lot’ is and when it’s not forthcoming we get cross. When something good happens, it’s often viewed that this is simply what owners are supposed to do. When Darryl Eales’ first season went badly, people complained, when he built a promotion squad people complained about him buying fans beer and hotdogs.

The result is hard to decipher as I think there are multiple views about the board. It might be the slick and quite effective owners who are pursuing a new stadium, or the indecisive, slow-to-react owners who let Karl Robinson’s tenure go on too long. It could be the physically and emotionally distant owners (although, it’s reasonable to ask whether that’s important), or the more operational issue of keeping fans informed of things and making the club an exciting place to be, which has been a weakness in recent months.

The spread supports this view, the peak is just under 20% illustrating a lack of consensus about our owners. But it sits at around 6 out of 10 – indicating a slight positive – but you can see a slight skew towards the negative. This would suggest the overall view of the owners is inconclusive.

Overall, it does seem like there’s work to do, but as we’ve seen in the past with both Darryl Eales and Tiger, a period of apparent chaos immediately after a takeover can quickly give way to a period of success. 

Relationship

When I originally put this question in the survey, it was intended to try and get some kind of rating for the fans. If you asked directly how you’d rate the fans, I imagine, like turkeys voting for Christmas, we would rate ourselves very highly – if things are going well, we’re part of that success, if they’re going badly, then we deserve praise for sticking with it. 

The fans’ contribution is manifested in its relationship to the club (close or otherwise, positive or negative), that’s why this question focuses on the relationship.

What I don’t know is whether that’s how people interpret it. When relating to the club, who is that? With the owners, players, performances on the pitch or the club as a concept? Who knows? The rating of 5.1 is a fall from 5.5 in January which is itself a fall from a peak of around 8 a year ago. In this case, it appears that the rating is driven by the performance of the board specifically given the other variables have either improved or been largely flat. In short, those who run the club appear to have more to do to engage with the fans. The spread sits slightly to the positive – six – but the peak is low – sub-25% which would suggest a complicated picture.

Players

As you’d expect, your favourite players align closely to the best players from last year. Cameron Brannagan remains the talismanic presence in the squad despite playing a more under-stated holding role which afforded him less spectacular moments last season. It’s quite remarkable just how consistent he’s been over the years, Simon Eastwood, James Henry and Sam Long have all rated highly in the past, but nobody has maintained the acclaim of the fans like Brannagan.

It makes me think how will Brannagan be regarded in the future? If he can inspire a promotion or even move to a bigger club and be successful there he will surely cement himself as one of the greats. If not, he may be more regarded in the same mould as Paul Simpson or Johnny Byrne – a legend for those who witnessed them play, but whose legacy might fade over time.

The other two stand out players were player of the season were Ciaron Brown and breakthrough star Tyler Goodrham. With Brannagan, these three were a long way ahead of anyone else. Brown characterised a commitment that seemed to be missing in much of the squad. Goodrham represented hope, capped by one of your moments ofthe season his goal against Forest Green.

Both have an interesting season ahead of them; Brown’s selection will be under pressure given defensive options we now have whereas Goodrham will need to move from freshman palette cleanser to someone who genuinely changes games, whether he can make that transition remains to be seen.

Optimism

In terms of optimism, there has been a clear swing towards the negative, over half of you think that things are a bit or considerably worse than it was five years ago. Taken literally, that would mean things are worse than Karl Robinson’s first summer in charge in which we were extracting ourselves out of the Pep Clotet debacle. But, perhaps it is understandable, as frustrating as that was we didn’t save ourselves from relegation on the last day of the season or have a 17 game run without a defeat.

Non-the-less, despite everything, you strongly believe the club is on the right track. Confidence is in abundance when you cast forward five years to predict where we’ll be. This, we have to assume, is predicated on achieving the goal of a new stadium. I would agree, momentum seems to be with us and despite global recessions and pandemics, we still seem to have owners with the wherewithal, willingness and ability to invest in the club. What we want to avoid is doing a Derek Trotter and keep claiming that good times are around the corner, we can’t constantly be in the first year of a five year strategy.

Conclusion

The fist conclusion we can draw from these results is that you can’t draw any conclusions. These measure a snapshot in time, five wins at the start of next season would see the scores jump up, five defeats would see it plummet. It’s more volatile than the markets during a Liz Truss mini-budget.

I suppose, we should try to learn lessons; indecisive leadership is damaging, it’s not irreparable, but it means greater effort is required to simply return to the same place. What we don’t know is whether there are long-term impacts of these mistakes. Certainly, with Karl Robinson each misstep would erode trust and he could never quite return to previous levels. If Liam Manning was to achieve identical results to Robinson, would we have the same response? Or, are we damaged by last season in ways we have yet to discover?

Who knows? Barring promotion, Robinson hasn’t left much head room for Manning to exceed his achievements. His main quality is that he’s not Robinson. Will a stirring win over Reading or a cup giant killing give the same returns as our runs into the play-offs and quarter-final in the League Cup? Are there higher highs or lower lows? What is the highest rating anyone will ever achieve? What’s the lowest? I guess there’s only one way to find out.