Matt Maher: Are the Wolves running the risk of standing still?

Monday’s superb win at Manchester United has them sitting eighth in the table, well in sight of the European positions.

In the space of six months at Molineux, head coach Bruno Lage has rejuvenated a team which for so much of last season looked tired.

Granted, there are improvements to be made in attack, yet in defence Lage’s team are miserly in the extreme. Only runaway leaders Manchester City have conceded fewer goals. Fears this would be a season of struggle have proven pretty much unfounded.

Set against the positivity are the increasing frustrations of a fanbase who want to see the club capitalise on the solid foundation by adding reinforcements in this month’s transfer window.

Barring an unlikely change of plan – or the sale of Adama Traore – it is likely to be an unremarkable few weeks. On Wednesday, technical director Scott Sellars made clear their position.

“It’s hard to predict what happens in any transfer window, but it’s certain we won’t bring in a large number of new signings,” he said.

Though such an approach might disappoint fans, it is far from without logic. January, as Sellars also pointed out during his interview with the club website, can be a fiendishly difficult month in which to do business. Over the past 20 years, the winter window has accounted for less than a fifth of the Premier League’s yearly transfer spend. Ongoing concerns over the impact of the pandemic is likely to make the market even more tricky than usual. No club wants to sign players just for the sake of it.

Some realism might also be required about what is actually achievable. Wolves might have looked far better than United this week but besting the Red Devils (a club who will look to spend their way out of trouble) over 38 games is a different matter. Arsenal’s resurgence under Mikel Arteta makes infiltrating the so-called big six appear a far tougher prospect than 12 months ago. How appealing and how much of a prize, really, is a place in the Conference League?

Keeping your powder dry and waiting for the summer window makes a lot of sense in that respect. In an era when the reflex action of many clubs is to simply chuck money at a problem, there is a reluctance to be too critical of one apparently prepared to take a more patient approach.

Yet such a strategy is not without risk. Prioritising the long-term carries the danger of standing still while others push on. Where Wolves are concerned, there is also the fact much of the current frustration stems from a failure to adequately strengthen last summer. Sellars’ description of their squad as ‘fantastic’ might ring true when assessing its quality but not its depth. This is a campaign which could very easily be derailed by an injury or two.

The sense Lage has not been sufficiently backed since replacing Nuno last summer has, meanwhile, been chiefly fuelled by Lage himself. Putting more pressure on the club’s board might not have been the head coach’s intent when he last week outlined the club’s needs for the January window but it was the effect. His unprompted monologue in the wake of the win at Old Trafford, where he stressed the strength of his relationship with the hierarchy, came too late to change the narrative.

Lage also hit on the fears of supporters when discussing the future of Ruben Neves. The midfielder, enjoying his most consistent Premier League to date, is acquiring a growing number of suitors with United prominent among them. Convincing him to stay at Wolves, Lage explained is ‘about creating a big team that fights for different things’.

That remains the stated aim of owners Fosun. The difference now is the timescale in which it might be achieved. Between 2017 and 2019 the trajectory was incredibly steep – promotion, followed by Europe in what felt like the blink of an eye. At one point chairman Jeff Shi was speaking candidly about winning the Premier League and becoming the biggest club in the world.

The past two years have delivered something of a reality check, as the difficulty of cracking the top-six hegemony became apparent and the pandemic hit. Sellars’ words this week, much like the club’s extensive interviews with Shi and the rest of the board last summer, were an exercise in expectation management.

That can be difficult, particularly when expectations have risen quite so high as they have in the past five years. Lage’s early success has further stirred such aspirations but is unlikely to prompt a change in the long-term plan.