Matt Maher: Wolves chiefs prove it’s not always good to talk

Despite a return of just one point from the first six Premier League matches, equalling the worst start to a season since 2003, the message from inside Molineux is for everyone to stay calm and everything, eventually, is going to be alright.

“It’s important the fans understand what we’re trying to do and buy into it,” sporting director Matt Hobbs said last week told The Telegraph, during an interview which he and Jeff Shi hoped would provide supporters with insight yet if anything only served to frustrate the fanbase more.

Talk will always come a distant second to action in sport. If you want to take supporters with you, first you need some positive results and Wolves haven’t had nearly enough of those over the last six months.

There’s mitigation, of course.

It is more than fair for Gary O’Neil to reference a fixture list which has been, statistically, the toughest through the opening six games.

The Wolves boss is also on solid ground when pointing out the longer-term record of just one win in 16 matches is influenced, strongly, by the injury crisis which gripped his team in the final months of last season.

Yet supporters do not see the game through the same methodology as a manager. They live on emotion and it is just once in nearly seven months Wolves fans have experienced the winning feeling in the league. It is why tomorrow’s match at Brentford, though still very early in the season, feels such a big one.

Immediately following it is a home match against Manchester City, before a trip to Brighton, by which point the campaign will be a quarter old.

The big downside to emphasising the difficulty of your fixture schedule, as O’Neil has perhaps done a little too much, is the greater pressure it places on those matches which fall into the more winnable bracket. Brentford away is certainly no gimme but the Bees are no Arsenal, Chelsea, Villa or Liverpool.

O’Neil’s position is not expected to come under any threat even if Wolves were to lose in west London tomorrow and that feels right. The mitigation for the poor start is valid.

Besides, the main cause for supporter discomfort at Molineux goes well beyond the head coach and instead centres around the nagging sense Fosun aren’t nearly so invested, in every sense, as they once were in Wolves.

That is what Hobbs and Shi were essentially trying to address last week.

It didn’t help they were clumsy when addressing the issue of the league’s profit and sustainability rules.

Club insiders have been at pains to point out the pair were specifically referencing summer 2024 when Shi claimed PSR had “not been a massive challenge” and Wolves had “never been close to the line”.

Without that context, such comments seemed strange when considering the club spent the 2023 summer window insisting the need to raise more than £140million in player sales was entirely due to PSR and had nothing to do with any instruction from China.

Shi, a lightning rod for fan frustration in the early weeks of the summer over a big increase in ticket prices, also did himself few favours with a rather rose-tinted review of recent seasons.

“I don’t remember many seasons we’ve been far away from Europe,” he said.

Wolves have finished the last two campaigns in 13th and 14th positions. In terms of European football, they’ve been nowhere near it and while they did reach the quarter-finals of last season’s FA Cup, the less said about the capitulation to Coventry the better.

Shi did at least sound more positive of winning a trophy then when writing in the Express & Star earlier this year, when he infamously said Wolves might not be the “ideal choice” for supporters who desire silverware or consistent European football. In what felt something of an attempt to retract that comment, Shi now believes such achievements are “imaginable” albeit they can feel a long way off with your team sat bottom of the table.

Any verbal gaffes aside, this was simply more of what you have heard before. It has long been clear Fosun will not be returning to the big spending which typified the early years of their reign.

Shi has never been anything less than consistent in stating that and both he and Hobbs deserve credit for not simply telling supporters what they want to hear.

The difficulty is the model in which the club now operates is, well, difficult.

Buying young and cheaper, while cracking untapped markets, sounds a good way to go but you’ve got to get the balance right.

You can’t blame supporters for worrying, just a little, after watching experienced players Max Kilman and Pedro Neto leave and be replaced by youngsters who currently aren’t at the same level.

It is not that Wolves aren’t spending money. We are a long way from the final years of the Randy Lerner era at Villa, in terms of the severity of budget constraints.

Yet across the whole piece, it is possible to hear just a few echoes with big ambition and bold promises gradually giving way to exercises in expectation management.

Wolves are convinced they are on the right path but if they want supporters to feel the same they need to start providing some reasons to believe.

Winning at Brentford would be a good start.