This is the tenth promotion I’ve experienced as a Cardiff City fan (there’s also been ten relegations) and you’ll get an idea as to why I rate it right up there among my favourites if you compare it to the other nine – note that all of these sides played a forty six game league season apart from the 92/93 team that played four fewer, while, of course, the 25/26 figures are only for forty three matches.
Season Pts F A
1975/76 79 69 48
82/83 86 76 50
87/88 85 66 41
92/93 83 77 47
98/99 80 60 39
00/01 82 95 58
02/03 81 68 43
12/13 87 72 45
17/18 90 69 39
25/26 85 80 44
Two things really stand out to me. Although the 92/93 team might have gone on to reach 95 points if they’d played a forty six game season, the current side will become the highest points scorers out of the ten if they can win two out of their last three matches – while two wins and a draw would make them the only ones to average two points a match.
Secondly, as a side that has not scored more than four goals in a match yet, it looks nigh on impossible that we’ll be able to catch, or pass, Alan Cork’s 2000/01 outfit’s goals total. That side had Earnie in prime goalscoring form and a centreback in Scott Young who got into double figures as a goalscorer, but the current side have already exceeded all of the other eight by at least three goals and it’s as many as twenty in the case of Frank Burrows’ 98/99 team.
1975/76 under Jimmy Andrews will always be a real favourite promotion for me because it was my first one some thirteen years after watching my first game. Then there’s the two promotions to the Premier League with the second one under Neil Warnock being my favourite of the two because it was so unexpected and, of course, we weren’t on Vincent Tan’s daft dalliance with red shirts then!
2002/03 was not an enjoyable season in many ways as too much expectation led to a toxic atmosphere at times, but a combination of it being so unexpected (we were on a dismal run of five games without a win going into the Play Offs) and the fact that winning a Play Off Final is a superb way to go up, make me put it in my top five promotions.
However, I’m struggling to work out which one out of 75/76, 17/18 and 25/26 would be my favourite. If pressed, I still think I’ll just about opt for 75/76. Would I do so if, say, it was my second or third promotion rather than my first? Maybe not, but, thinking back, I don’t think this season has had an equivalent of the famous Hereford game in front of 35,000, there was only five thousand less present at Selhurst Park when we went there and played Palace off the park and the Christmas time 5-2 win over a good Peterborough team was a spectacular watch.
If there is a disappointing aspect to this season, it’s our record against the division’s top teams, the Lincoln home game was a real let down in particular and the fact that the nearest thing we have to a 75/76 Hereford game (don’t forget they finished Champions that season) was the occasion when we did perform in a game when the pressure was on – the game where we were far from flattered by the 2-0 victory margin over Bolton.
At the heart of it all and, for me the biggest single reason for the season turning out to be as good as it has been is our manager. Brian Barry-Murphy was picked as the twenty fourth best manager (i.e. the worst) in League One in a pre season podcast I watched back in July I think it was. However, there were also quite a few pundits who found us a fascinating club to talk about last summer because they saw what we could be and, overall, I’d say we’ve reached the heights they anticipated and maybe a bit more.
Despite a wage bill which I’d guess was a lot down on 24/25, we are still probably among the biggest payers in the division and it cannot be denied that we have plenty of advantages over several of our rivals at this level, but it tends to pass unnoticed that City under BBM have hardly been huge spenders in the transfer market. Yes, we’ve signed Gabriel Osho for a probable seven figure fee and we have a commitment to spend a similar amount on Nathan Trott now we’ve gone up, but you look at clubs like Huddersfield, Luton and Stockport and they’ve outspent us.
No, BBM was true to his reputation as someone who would come in and give our home grown youngsters a go to the extent that the team which took on Peterborough on the opening day of the season had Ryan Wintle at twenty eight as the only over twenty five year old in the starting line up.
In those early months of the season, much of any success we had was based on the contributions of youngsters such as Dylan Lawlor, Joel Colwill and Ronan Kpakio who gained their first experience as regulars in the first team squad. All three of them have won first Welsh caps this season (as did Isaak Davies who has had another frustrating injury hit campaign). The remarkable Lawlor has developed to the extent that I’d rate him as maybe the best defender out of our four centrebacks now whereas back in the autumn, so much of his game was based on his eye catching contributions as a ball playing defender.
The younger Colwill had a purple patch two or three months ago and, like many City fans, I’ve been a little surprised that more was not made of his energy and drive at the time when we underwent what I’ll call an elongated blip as March turned into April. As for Kpakio, he’s had a tougher second half of the season and could probably do with his summer break now, but his cause has not been helped by having to play out of position so often and the fact that Perry Ng has, arguably, been our best player in 2026. Perry’s certainly been back to his best, albeit at a lower level of course, compared to what we saw from him in our last two seasons in the Championship.
Others young players like Cian Ashford, the on loan Omari Kellyman, Will Fish, Ollie Tanner, Yousef Salech and the Player of the Season candidate Joel Bagan have all looked entirely at home at this level and occasionally far too good for it – all five of them who are contracted to us (hopefully, Bagan, Wintle and Ng will sign new deals in the coming weeks now we’re promoted) have no reason. to fear the Championship and I hope, but don’t expect, that a deal can be done to extend Kellyman’s stay here to a second season.
Any notion that back in August that we’d be promoted would, no doubt, have been predicated on Rubin Colwill living up to his advance billing of being maybe the division’s best player. In the event, injury took him out of the middle third, and a bit more, of our season and in truth, our performances probably improved in the aftermath of the injury he suffered at Northampton. I don’t think Rubin has been as eye catching as many would have expected him to be either, but, on the other hand, I don’t see the Rubin of 24/25 or earlier scoring that header on Saturday and he no longer looks like someone who feels he has to do something out of the ordinary every time he’s in possession.
For me, BBM and his coaching staff have done what the best in their profession do – they don’t rely on (expensive) players brought in from elsewhere to get success, they are also capable of improving the players they inherit and again I’d say that while the fact that they’ve been playing at a lower level always has to be borne in mind, this has definitely been true with the likes of Rubin, Ng, Ryan Wintle and Chris Willock.
Again, it should not be ignored that morale always seems good in successful sides, but it genuinely does seem a happy ship down at Cardiff City Stadium these days – as an example of this, Callum Robinson could be forgiven for throwing a wobbly given how little game time he’s got in recent weeks, but he was there on Saturday leading the on pitch celebrations.
No, the appointment of BBM has to be seen as a spectacular success and, for the first time in ages (possibly Malky Mackay before it all went wrong for him), we have a young(ish) manager that other clubs will be casting envious glances at. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility at all that City receive offers for their manager this summer which would be a first in decades I would have thought if it happened.
It’s no coincidence that our manager is mentioned in so many of the songs we hear at game these days, one of them mentions the “Murphy way” and there definitely is one. It’s about playing on the front foot and there is an emphasis on build from the back passing football which, after so much basic, direct, clod hopping football in recent seasons is most welcome for me. However, with that, there was always, especially while Salech was fit, the option to go more direct, thereby keeping defences guessing in a way they didn’t have to when our false number nine system was kept in check.
There’s far more to BBM’s Cardiff than just “passing for the sake of it, tippy tappy football” – yes, it can look a bit like that when we’re playing poorly, but I don’t believe that this team are ever sent out to play in the manner that we did in games like Stockport and Huddersfield away and Lincoln at home.
Having called the appointment of BBM a spectacular success, it has to follow that you give credit to Vincent Tan, Mehmet Dalman and Ken Choo for appointing him and for the fact that they were able to realise they were on to a good thing and so just let their manager and his staff get on with it.
However, I would recommend that anyone who has not seen this video from what I reckon are the best EFL podcasters there are a watch.
I say that not just because it is a very good video, but also because, despite the fact that they need to keep across the minutiae of seventy two different clubs, they are clued in enough about City to realise that there is more than enough evidence to suggest that they know full well that the appointment of BBM could owe more to luck than judgment.
Let’s not forget that, despite someone at the club letting it be known that BBM had “blown away” whoever it was who interviewed him at his first meeting with the club, Vincent Tan in particular it seemed wanted Nathan Jones the Charlton manager and it was only when he signed an impoved deal with the Addicks following their promotion last season, that the Board, eventually, opted for BBM.
Now, of course, Nathan Jones has got a decent to good CV as a manager and there’s nothing to say he couldn’t have come here and taken us up, but I think it can be taken as read that the type of football used to do that would have offered a big contrast to what we’ve seen under our current manager.
So, I’m afraid that I’ll be needing more proof that the three men at the top of the club off the field now “get” how to run a football club. Anyway, to quote those who were, rightly as it turned out, playing down takeover talk last summer, opting to sell up just after you’ve been relegated from the Championship means you, almost certainly, have to settle for less than you could have got a few months earlier.
Vincent Tan can maybe get what he thinks will be a more realistic selling price for his club now we’re back in the second tier and so, I’d say there’s a chance that we may be under new ownership, or in the process of getting it, when the 26/27 season kicks off.
That’s one reason why the only prediction you’ll get from me in terms of incoming transfers this summer is that any spending will be on the modest side. Other factors to be taken into consideration are our grizzly Accounts for 24/25 which would have left little room for manoeuvre last summer if we’d stayed up and it being questionable as to whether BBM wants to spend fortunes in the transfer market anyway – everything he’s done at Rochdale and Cardiff suggests that, primarilly, he wants to develop the players he has and bring through Academy youngsters.
No, unless we decide to cash in on Lawlor (I hope we don’t for at least a year yet) or sell two or three likely first teamers, I don’t see us spending on a large scale and, truth be told, I don’t want us to.
I’ll finish by saying that the first inkling I had that this could be a special season came about ten days before a competitive ball was kicked. It was on 23 July when we played a warm up game at QPR’s training ground
What we did in the first half especially that day was such an eye opener – the football we played was like nothing I’d seen from a Cardiff side in years with the precocious Dylan Lawlor at the heart of so much that was good. We gave what turned out to be a pretty good Championship side something of a run around in that first half and, although we had to settle for a draw in the end, the impact that BBM and his coaches clearly had after little more than a month in the job couldn’t help but make you feel optimistic about what was to come.
