Ipswich Town will want to just enjoy their first season back in the Premier League season since the close of the 2001/02 campaign, hopeful of bucking the worrying trend of the last few promoted sides going up to the top flight.
Luton Town, Burnley and Sheffield United all fell back down to the Championship after just one solitary season in the top division, with the Tractor Boys praying they don’t succumb to the same underwhelming fate.
It doesn’t look as if the Ipswich squad is going to be dismantled and picked apart, however, even with the club’s meteoric rise to the Premier League putting the Suffolk-based outfit firmly into the spotlight, but they could face a losing battle to keep Kieran McKenna in the dug-out.
They won’t be waving goodbye to any homegrown products such as Luke Woolfenden though even with the manager’s future up in the air, knowing that his sale of a former academy star, on the contrary, was the best possible call to make back in 2011 with hindsight on their side.
Connor Wickham’s time at Ipswich
Connor Wickham’s rise up the Ipswich ranks would be nearly as quick as the Suffolk club soaring all the way up to the Premier League in the present day, with the teenage sensation securing a major move to Sunderland off the back of just two full seasons in the men’s team.
The young starlet would set the Championship alight in his last full campaign donning Ipswich blue, finding the back of the net nine times, which included this sumptuous solo strike against Sheffield United that saw the entire Blades defence watch on stunned and perplexed.
Winning the EFL Young Player of the Season off the back of this breakout season, Wickham would also be rewarded for his goalscoring heroics with a move all the way up to the Premier League with Sunderland for a price in the region of £8m.
Gaining such a sizeable amount for their homegrown talent at the time would have felt like a justified price to part ways with, with that only heightened when you consider how much the 6 foot 3 forward struggled away from Portman Road.
Looking at TotallyMoney’s Transfer Index to take into today’s inflated transfer market, the deal only looks like more of a rip-off from Sunderland’s end.
Now without a club, after last featuring for Charlton Athletic briefly, Wickham must put down this Sunderland move as a regretful one that dented his confidence so early into his fledgling career.
Wickham’s transfer value in 2024
According to TotallyMoney, if this same flop deal went through in 2024, Wickham would have cost Sunderland an eye-watering £21.5m.
That would make the deal even more of a colossal waste of money, considering the towering centre-forward is remembered more for his lengthy patches in the Stadium of Light treatment room over being a deadly finisher of chances.
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Ipswich record sales – top five |
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|---|---|
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1. Tyrone Mings |
£9.6m |
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2. Connor Wickham |
£8m |
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3. Richard Wright |
£7.6m |
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4. Kieron Dyer |
£7.6m |
|
5. Titus Bramble |
£5.7m |
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Sourced by Transfermarkt |
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Only scoring one Premier League strike during his debut season in his new Wearside surroundings, Wickham would never surpass five goals during a poor stint at the Stadium of Light before Crystal Palace took a risk on the former Ipswich prodigy to come good.
The Eagles arguably got an even more cursed deal than Sunderland, with the former England U21 international only managing to make 12 league appearances over his last two campaigns at Selhurst Park owing to recurring injury demons.
Ipswich know that they sold on their former Academy star at the best possible time now, with Wickham being their record sale in a theoretical world, with no such fervent interest apparent yet in their current crop of top gems.
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