'Boring, boring' Burnley - or one of the most tactically astute newly promoted sides we have seen in a long time?
It was around January of last season when Burnley were first labelled “boring”.
The precise origins of what many Burnley fans consider a myth are hard to trace across the vast wilderness of the internet.
The idea, that Burnley were boring, seemed to bounce around the lesser-viewed corners of the web before then, but the idea burst into life when a Guardian podcast was released after Burnley’s goalless draw with Leeds United, on 27 January, titled: Boring Burnley’s peerless defence.
The match had ended with the second lowest expected goals (xG) of the season, illustrating how few chances there were. And, 29 games into the season, other statistics were pointing to a conservative approach: Burnley had scored only 36 goals – a return rate closer to teams at the bottom of the table – but were also yet to concede 10.
Despite this they were third in the Championship table, their chances of promotion blossoming unexpectedly after a summer of upheaval, selling in numbers to cope with the impact of relegation from the Premier League and a new manager, Scott Parker, in charge.
But now people thought they were boring.
The prospect was put to Parker by BBC Radio Lancashire a few days later and he replied: “It was only a week ago we scored five goals against Plymouth. We didn’t score against Leeds and quickly the narrative swings that we’re a really boring team.”
BURNLEY, ENGLAND - APRIL 21: The players of Burnley lift Scott Parker, Manager of Burnley, into their air as they celebrate victory and subsequent promotion to the Premier League following the Sky Bet Championship match between Burnley FC and Sheffield United FC at Turf Moor on April 21, 2025 in Burnley, England. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Parker’s ‘boring’ tactics will be Burnley’s biggest strength (Photo: Getty)
Parker had little choice but to answer the question. But then it stuck. The boring tag was amplified, picked up by rivals, swept around social media, and became a point of fun.
But it also stuck in the craw of Burnley fans, who quite enjoyed last season, thank you very much. Once I found some willing to discuss it.
I had been banging my keyboard against a brick wall for a few weeks this summer, trying to find Burnley fans to discuss the claims. I get it: you are back in the Premier League for the first time in 12 months and a journalist is asking you if you are boring as everyone says you are.
But I was fascinated by the idea that Burnley were “boring”. Look at the Championship table last season and they came second only on goal difference to Leeds United, with 100 points.
How could they be boring? Where did the idea come from? For whom, exactly, was it boring?
Then I posted a request in the Burnley subreddit, placed on my tin hat, and waited. And the responses came.
“Prepare for a rant!” Robin Veevers, a 32-year-old who has been a season ticket holder since 2008, wrote in an email.
“To get to the bottom of things, Burnley’s ‘boringness’ in the modern game can be traced back to the Sean Dyche era, never mind today. Back then, the key was to simply survive amongst England’s elite with a wafer-thin budget that simply wasn’t suited for a Premier League club.
“In fact, if you total up the nine years under Dyche’s reign, his net spend was lower than Leeds United in a single season.
Veevers added: “I rant about Dyche’s tenure for an article about Scott Parker because we’re fairly experienced with this strange culture of football elitism where they believe points in football should be given to the team that is ‘most attractive to watch’.
“You can call it a mixture of top six favouritism, an overriding social media consensus and Burnley’s modest size as a football club not having the same sort of clout as their fellow promoted sides.
BURNLEY, ENGLAND - APRIL 21: Fans of Burnley celebrate following the team's victory and subsequent promotion to the Premier League in the Sky Bet Championship match between Burnley FC and Sheffield United FC at Turf Moor on April 21, 2025 in Burnley, England. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Burnley fans insist it’s all a myth (Photo: Getty)
“It’s always been a struggle trying to battle the stigma that Burnley playing ‘bad’ football was a necessary thing to survive. But there has never been a wrong way to win a football match within the rules of the game, and Scott Parker bringing back the Sean Dyche-ian method of a rock-solid defence of hard-working grafters only brought back more of this wild stigma.”
Commenters on Reddit, who are anonymous, also weighed in.
“Season ticket holder here,” said one. “Boring Burnley seemed to peak due to the amount of home draws we had. A team who went undefeated at home and hit 100 points should never be described as boring.”
“Not boring but relentless and inevitable,” another said. “We were fitter, faster, stronger and better coached than the majority of clubs, and people forget that our core squad were new players who hadn’t played much for us before. Testament to Parker who came in replacing an icon, but left with a weak squad of players with no motivation.
“I had just as much fun this season watching us win 1-0 away as I did under Kompany winning 4-2, this if anything was more unexpected given the amount of change we had, and coming off the back of a horrific prem season.”
As a reminder, to those who quickly forget the relegated sides, Burnley went down in a blaze of errors passing it out from the back.
Vincent Kompany stuck to his Manchester City philosophy staunchly. The club were relegated. He got a move to Bayern Munich.
“We saw the opposite of boring under Vincent Kompany,” says Brendan Flood, former Burnley co-owner during the Dyche years.
“We couldn’t defend at all. We attacked in a reckless way, and we lost games every week. It was awful.
“We were trying to play it out from the back and that didn’t work. We were being found out almost every game within the first 20 minutes.”
Tyler Bolam, 30, a lifelong fan and season ticket holder, concurred via email.
“Football is about winning,” he wrote. “Entertaining football is fine, but how fine is it when you lose every single week?
“We tried this under Kompany and it was miserable. Sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves that football is a game, and the object of the game is to win. It isn’t a Tom Cruise film filled with action sequences every 20 seconds to entertain viewers. It was never meant to be.
“If a multiple record breaking 100-point season is a boring season, then I’m fine with being boring.”
Last summer, Burnley generated over £100m in player sales, reinvested some back into a new, young squad, Parker came in.
“More than half the team he played at Luton in the first game, where we won 4-1, was sold within the following two weeks,” Flood explains.
“He had to completely reform the team and that included bringing some guys out of the reserves who hadn’t really played, like CJ Egan-Riley. Then bringing new players in who made a difference. He started to create a new team.
BURNLEY, ENGLAND - MAY 03: Josh Brownhill of Burnley celebrates scoring his team's third goal during the Sky Bet Championship match between Burnley FC and Millwall FC at Turf Moor on May 03, 2025 in Burnley, England. (Photo by Ben Roberts - Danehouse/Getty Images)
Burnley outperformed their xG last season (Photo: Getty)
“We were grinding out wins and draws pre-Christmas and it wasn’t as attractive as under Kompany in the previous Championship promotion season. Any Burnley fan would agree the Premier League season under Kompany was the worst we’ve ever had – it was terrible.”
But Parker was working magic – albeit not, perhaps, magic you’d see on stage – and by the turn of the year, promotion was in their sights. Marcus Edwards, once compared to a young Lionel Messi by Mauricio Pochettino when the pair were at Spurs, came in on loan from Sporting Lisbon in January and added flair to attack.
But the season was built on the defensive.
Ball-playing Pep Guardiola disciple in goal, James Trafford, destined to return to City this summer. Connor Roberts and summer signing Lucas Pires full-backs, Egan-Riley and £10.2m summer signing Maxime Esteve at centre-back.
“They were so resilient and the rest of the team bought into it,” Flood says.
“The team started to commit to wanting to achieve a record number of clean sheets.
“It became the whole thing that everybody wanted to achieve and we equalled the record of Port Vale, which, if you imagine in the history of football we’ve equalled the record number of clean sheets, that’s something else.”
Back on Reddit, fans continued to offer a defence almost as strong as Burnley’s last season.
“Only two teams in the division scored more goals than us. Does not letting other teams score make us boring?” one posted.
Another said: “Burnley are and have been pushing shit uphill for years trying to stay in that soul-sucking shitshow called the Premier League due to not being bankrolled by ‘sportwashing’ oligarchical owners therefore we have to dig a bit deeper to find talent and have to resort to what some would call boring tactics to compete.”
But is the boring tag fair? If anything, Burnley were more lucky than boring, the stats suggest.
“Obviously, ‘boring’ is a subjective term and there’s more than one way to win a football match,” Analytics FC chief executive Alex Stewart says.
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“But it’s important to note that, statistically, there is nothing to say that Burnley were boring. They scored the third most goals and were above league average for traditionally exciting things like dribbling, 1v1s, and progressive passes and carries.
“Only six teams got the ball in the box more and Burnley had the fourth best passing rate, meaning they zipped the ball around quickly but kept possession really well.
“What did happen was that Burnley hugely overperformed xG and xGA [against]. Trafford had a season for the ages, preventing almost 12 goals more than expected.
“At the other end, Burnley scored around 8 goals more than expected. This means that while it’s unfair to characterise Burnley as ‘boring’ – whatever that means – you could characterise them as lucky. Or at least as having benefitted from significant, and probably unrepeatable, overperformance.”
Like all the best football debates, this one will never end. But the majority of Burnley fans couldn’t give a hoot. If anything, the consensus is that being “boring” will give them the foundation to stay in the Premier League.
“I don’t care about whether people call it boring or not,” one Redditor wrote.
“We’re Burnley, not Barcelona, deeply sorry if we’re not sexy enough for the football aficionados…
“I think Parker’s pragmatism will give us a better chance of staying in the Premier League, which is bittersweet really. I don’t know how much I enjoy watching us scrap for 17th place, fight for a top 10 finish for a season, before slowly circling the plughole for years.”
If anything, slowly circling a plughole for years sounds far more boring than winning 100 points in the Championship.