Why Wycombe are chairing League One (for now)

Perhaps it says something about the landscape of Sky Bet League One that it took a run of ten consecutive wins for people to really sit up and take notice of Wycombe Wanderers — a club, after all, owned by a Georgian billionaire, with a bright, young, English manager in Matt Bloomfield and, in Richard Kone, a free-scoring striker whose journey could be turned into a movie one day.

Such is life, though, for clubs in the orbit of Wrexham and Birmingham City, whose celebrity patrons and lavish spending cast a long shadow over England’s third tier these days.

Wycombe, however, have registered more wins, collected more points and scored more goals than any team in the country — and, with a third of the season gone, they have a four-point cushion at the top. An 11th win in a row arrived at Wealdstone on Saturday, which put them in the hat for the FA Cup third-round draw on Monday night.

Wycombe, who spent a season in the Sky Bet Championship in 2020-21, have long relished their underdog status, of course, but that standing is likely to be tested if Mikhail Lomtadze’s goal of taking the club into the Premier League one day is backed up with action.

Lomtadze, a former private equity investor and Harvard Business School graduate who is based in Kazakhstan, is the chief executive of Kaspi, a banking, payment and marketplace super app used by more than half of Kazakhstan’s 20 million population and is making moves throughout central Asia.

He is yet to visit Adams Park since completing a takeover in May but he is the real deal: Forbes puts his fortune at $5.8billion.

Wycombe’s trajectory, however, is not simply the result of their new-found wealth. Momentum on the pitch has been building since the turn of the year. There has been no spending spree in the transfer market. Bloomfield, while handed an increased budget in the summer, is still working with what is understood to be the ninth-highest wage bill in the division.

In June, Wycombe signed a long-term lease for the use of a new training ground in Harlington, west London, formerly home to Queens Park Rangers and, before that, Chelsea. A sum of £1million was spent on upgrading training pitches, while the gymnasium and changing rooms have been refurbished and there are plans for a new indoor playing surface.

The new training base comes with the benefit of shifting Wycombe’s academy catchment area into the densely populated capital, where the club plan to scout for young and perhaps overlooked talent. Last month’s talent ID day began a process that will result in the formation of an under-18s team by the end of the season, the first staging post in a journey towards Category One status.

Dan Rice, who has worked in recruitment for Fulham, Arsenal, Southampton and Everton, made no secret of the club’s ambitions after his appointment as chief football officer and interim chairman in the summer. “The medium-term goal is to be back in the Championship, be sustained in the Championship, and long-term is the Premier League. We’re not going to hide that,” he said.