Ipswich Town's Bold Approach to Premier League Return

Ipswich Town are not tiptoeing back into the Premier League. Not this time.

Chairman Mark Ashton has made the message plain: the club has to be “a bit braver” in how it attacks life at the top level. The recruitment drive under Gary O’Neil is already bearing that out, with targets who carry both pedigree and edge.

Japanese forward Daizen Maeda and Morocco centre-back Issa Diop, both on the scoresheet at this summer’s World Cup, headline a new, bolder profile of signing. Ipswich are no longer shopping solely for survivors. They are looking for players who have already lived in the heat of major tournaments and shown they can handle it.

And they may not be done with that market yet.

Paraguayan attacker Julio Enciso, who worked with O’Neil at Strasbourg last season, has emerged again on the radar. Ipswich know him well. He endured an injury-hit loan spell at Portman Road in the second half of the 2024-25 campaign, a stint that never quite caught fire but left enough of an impression for the club to keep watching. The links now suggest unfinished business for both player and manager.

The context around O’Neil is very different to the one Kieran McKenna walked into when he took Ipswich up. McKenna, fresh from back-to-back promotions and riding a wave of goodwill, had the luxury of patience. He could talk about long-term projects and incremental steps.

O’Neil does not have that cushion. He knows it.

“Two seasons ago, the club didn’t get anywhere near staying in the division and this time we need to do better,” he said last month. No sugar-coating, no nostalgia. Just a clear acknowledgement of the scars from that last Premier League campaign and a demand that this version of Ipswich looks and feels different.

That urgency runs straight through their transfer strategy.

“That’s why we’re trying to add quality to the squad from different parts of the world and we’re trying to add some different attributes,” O’Neil explained. This is not a cosmetic refresh. It is a deliberate attempt to raise the technical level, the physical profile and the tactical flexibility of a squad that must learn quickly or suffer the same fate as before.

Signs of that new edge appeared at the weekend. Ipswich swept aside Rayo Vallecano 3-0 in pre-season, a result that mattered less than the intent behind it. The tempo was higher, the aggression sharper, the patterns of play more ambitious. For a manager who knows how thin the margins can be at the bottom of the Premier League, it was a useful early marker.

O’Neil did not pretend the job is close to finished. After that win, he made it clear the recruitment drive is still in motion, saying the “plan is to do quite a bit more.” That line will have encouraged supporters who watched the last top-flight stay unravel too quickly, with a squad that ran out of answers long before the season ran out of games.

This time, Ipswich are trying to arm themselves differently: World Cup scorers, international experience, varied styles, and a manager under no illusions about the scale of the task. Brave, as Ashton put it, is not just a slogan. It is the minimum requirement if Ipswich want their return to the Premier League to last longer than a single, brutal swing of the trapdoor.