One man’s largely pointless and reductive assessment of how we’re doing this calendar year. 

On the pitch | B

Realistically, the team has two objectives at the moment – stay in the division and keep the fans on side. Achieving the first one ought to be enough to satisfy the other, but a football fanbase is a strange and multifaceted beast, with vastly varying expectations.

The first half of 2025, so the second half of last season, was a wild mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, as a relegation scrap is always likely to be. The Cardiff away game, for example, was one of the worst late-season performances I’ve ever seen from a relegation-threatened side, and yet it contained that Cam Brannagan freekick, which will go down in history as one of our most memorable and miraculous moments ever, and was arguably the catalyst for our survival. We survived the Championship last season and for the vast majority of supporters it didn’t matter how we did it. Mission impossible accomplished – a huge achievement.

This season we’ve struggled to find an identity – many of our statement summer signings have failed to have any notable impact, and our team changes every week, which the predictable outcome of frequently looking disjointed and in disarray.

Once again, just about surviving is realistically the best we were ever likely to achieve this season, particularly given how monied the promoted teams were. This season we have been bobbing around the relegation line, which is about par for us, but getting dragged into the mix just before the January transfer window has done for Gary Rowett in the same way that it did for Des Buckingham. 

I strongly suspect that – should we stay up this season – we’d be in for at least one more year of this before we could gain a foothold and start thinking about what else we could achieve at this level. Would that be enough to keep the fans onside? Supporters don’t like losing lots of football matches, regardless of the level, and as has been noted elsewhere, now the novelty of being in the Championship is wearing off, expectations – rightly or wrongly – have already started to change. 

The manager | B-

It’s very possible that, of the head coaches in our price range who would be willing to take on the least fashionable job in the Championship, Gary Rowett was actually the very best we could hope for. Of course, this statement might age really badly when Jurgen Klopp is appointed next week.

The only assessment of Rowett’s performance in the first half of 2025 that matters, is that he kept us up. The size of this achievement shouldn’t be understated.

This season, Rowett initially attempted to adapt our playing style to be less about outright dogged defensiveness, adding a bit more attacking intent, but this had mixed results. He then tried to be a bit more resolute again in November and December, without going on full lockdown, but that seemed to make things worse.

By the end of his tenure, Rowett still hadn’t figured out what his best options were for personnel or approach. Whether that tells you more about our recruitment or about Rowett will come down to personal interpretation – I personally suspect it’s a bit of both. After recent games he sounded more and more like a man who isn’t keen on the job or the support he got from the club or the recruitment team.

His pragmatic honesty was refreshing but I’d have preferred a bit less “Well, I probably won’t be here in two years” and a bit more “If we do well, I could help you build a successful Championship side to take the club into its new stadium.”  He was ultimately proved right of course, but I can’t help thinking that if you go into at job with the expectation that you’ll be sacked within 18 months, then that risks making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also doesn’t send a very good message to the guy in charge who IS trying to build a successful Championship side to take the club into its new stadium.

The owners and board | A-

One only needs to look at the likes of Sheffield Wednesday (and Reading and Bury and Blackpool and York and… well, and older versions of Oxford) to know what happens when your owners aren’t throwing straight dice. While it’s always worth keeping a very, very skeptical eye on any owner, we do appear to be among the lucky ones right now. 

Buying Indonesian internationals for the development of their national team and/or to raise the profile of our club in a profitable market is far from ideal, but it’s a fact that our city’s famous name is what made our owner see us as investable in the first place, so we don’t get one without the other, and it’s probably a reasonable price to pay for a relatively rational, sensible owner who is willing to invest and help us punch above our weight. 

Recruitment | D+

A player-by-player analysis of our recruitment would be an article by itself, but in summary we’re still too reliant on Cam Brannagan in midfield, our defence looks worse than it did at the end of last season, and we don’t look any more threatening going forward. That might be an indication of the increased quality of the division or – more likely – that our squad turnover and additions haven’t yet made us stronger.

It’s still not explicitly stated who calls the shots on recruitment, but Gary Rowett distanced himself from the process more than once, and the club loves to talk up Ed Waldron’s role as Head of Football Operations. My concern with those kinds of roles has always been accountability – if the man advising the board on footballing matters is also the man largely in charge of the team’s footballing direction, who at the club has the knowledge or wherewithal to question his performance? More specifically, given that Ed Waldron the man in charge of recruitment, and he ALSO  the man the board asks about the performance of the players, who in a position of authority at the club is ever going to tell the board that the quality of recruitment hasn’t been good enough?

That’s not to say we have a problem right now, but it could easily become one – and when your head coach open criticising the summer’s recruitment in post-match interviews, it’s clear that the balance isn’t currently spot on. 

Infrastructure | A-

It feels like other football clubs have the world bending over backwards to get them a stadium. The Welsh government has given one of the Championship’s most wealthy clubs £18 million pounds of tax payers’ money to pay for the expansion of the Racecourse Ground. Birmingham City, a club owned by the most obnoxious people imaginable, have the red carpet rolled out allow them to build them an ill-conceived, probably AI-generated monstrosity. Manchester United, one of the richest clubs on the planet, are also looking like they’ll get massive public funding injections to do the same. Luton had councils practically begging them to build a stadium. All in the name of regeneration, giving the local economy a boost, the creation of first class facilities for community use.

Our club came up with a similar proposal to create world class community facilities in an under-invested area, and a very small number of permanently cross people with a disproportionate amount of power blocked it and forced us to fight tooth and nail over the last spare scrap of land for a much less appealing, watered down alternative that is worse for all parties. Meanwhile, our city’s limited other developable locations are taken up with eye-wateringly expensive luxury canalside second homes, absurdly unaffordable cram-them-in high-rise flats, or f**k-off great red rabbit hutches.

And so with all that in mind, the fact that we somehow secured planning permission at the first time of asking is nothing short of miraculous and huge credit must go to everyone involved in that process, including our owners and the club’s senior management. It was a feat so unlikely that Firoz Kassam himself, a man not unfamiliar with land deals in the Oxfordshire area, once laughed heartily in a radio interview at the very idea that we’d find land for another stadium.

In fact, external observers may well look at us and say “how the hell have Oxford managed to get themselves a new stadium after spending only 25 years at their last new stadium, which they didn’t even finish building?” That’s how relatively straightforward it has seemed so far.

We shouldn’t count our chickens just yet of course. There are still lots of things that could go wrong to stop or delay the stadium – legal challenges, funding issues, discovering the perfectly preserved mummified carcass of a new species of mega-mammoth at the Triangle, a crash involving one of those nuclear waste lorries that apparently always use the A34, or just one of your regular gargantuan illegal fly-tips that seems to be all the rage in OX5 these days.

The final cautionary note is that we don’t know what the club is going to have to give away to secure the investment to build the ground. Despite their massive injection of tax payers’ money. Wrexham’s funtime good guy owners have been forced to sell a reasonable chunk of the club to a corporate American hedge fund that was set up by someone in cahoots with their country’s favourite sex-trafficking dead peado. We need people to give us over a hundred million quid – who will that end up being, and what will they want in return?

Communications | E

One day I will do a longform Oxblogger Newsletter article on this. It’s my wheelhouse, so I have a lot to say, but let’s put it this way, if you have the bloke in charge of raising money also managing the comms team, then the priorities might not be aligned to what supporters want or need. There’s plenty they’re good at, but it’s in a narrow field, and overshadowed by other parts of the club churning out ChatGPT slop, constant SPAG errors, getting opponents’ team names wrong and just choosing not to announce some bits of news. This is particularly disappointing from a club that reportedly laid off some long-term fan favourite employees under the banner of needing to be more professional.

Brand, Marketing and Commercial | E

I’m certain the board’s mark for this will be very different, dealing as they are in hard numbers and statistics. But I’m not on the board.

Pitching the club as some kind of luxury lifestyle brand with video ads and photoshoots of young, attractive models in and around the buildings of one of the world’s most famous but inaccessible and elitist education establishment is a clear sign that we’re no longer the audience as we discuss on the latest episode of the Oxblogger podcast. Check your fan number on your season ticket. It’s now your Attendee Customer Reference. We’re being deliberately reclassified to set us apart from the new audience: the bazillions of enthusiastic Asian football fans our owners want to tap into. They are, presumably, non-attendee customers.

It’s important to reiterate that if we do want to sustain this level of football the club does have to work harder than most to generate revenue streams. Exploiting our city’s famous name and targeting an under-tapped Asian market in which our owner and shareholders have some clout is clearly a smart move. The problem is the tone deaf way we’re treated in the meantime. It might be naivety on the club’s part – though if they’re still unsure how this works, they’re not paying enough attention – or it might just be a simple transactional view of it all.  a few of us noisy ones might grumble and complain but we’ll all still show up and pay our money. 

As I’ve said in these pages before – this may just have to be the price we pay to be at this level. Do we want to be in the Championship and treated as full wallets ready to be emptied, or do we want to play in League 2 but all be in one big ramshackle happy family? There clearly won’t be a consensus on that.

Overall | B

On balance, we’ve had a good year. Staying up and securing planning permission were both monumental achievements. There’s still stuff we need to work on for the here and now and for the future,  but we still seem to be moving slowly in the right direction on most of the important fronts. However, we end 2025 on something of a footballing knife-edge and some big calls have to be made in the next month.