Paul Heckingbottom: Time to Win for Preston North End

Paul Heckingbottom knows the talking has to stop. Now, it’s about winning.

Backed heavily in the summer and handed the kind of transfer budget Preston North End have rarely seen, the head coach arrives at September with a dozen new signings, a rebuilt squad – and four straight Championship defeats.

Bottom of the table. Three goals scored. The noise growing.

“There’s no way we had a competitive team at the start of the season,” Heckingbottom told BBC Radio Lancashire, laying bare just how chaotic those opening weeks felt. “The squad has changed every single week from the first game.”

That churn is over now. The excuses, by his own admission, are not.

“We’ve got the tools now. We’ve put the squad together. Now we have to get to work and get the wins. That’s the only way noise stops. You’ve got to start winning.”

Backing, but pressure

The club’s hierarchy have given him what many of his predecessors could only dream of: unprecedented financial backing, a chance to reshape a group that faded badly last season. Preston sat fourth in January, then collapsed, winning just three of their final 15 league games to slide to 14th.

Heckingbottom has been quick to stress his gratitude for the board’s support, but he’s equally clear that money alone doesn’t flip a club’s fortunes overnight.

“The biggest thing that we had to do as a club if we want to move forward and start competing is make sure we can develop our own players,” he said. The model, as he sees it, is simple and unforgiving. “Ultimately the benefit is you have success together, or you sell players and move on and invest.”

Long-term, he talks about progression, higher finishes, promotion, growth. Those are the big-picture ambitions. Right now, they feel a long way off.

“Progression, finishing as high as we can, and winning promotion and growing the club is further down the line. The short term is just winning games.”

Goals in short supply

The table tells its own story. Four games, four losses, three goals. A team still searching for fluency and threat.

The summer only sharpened the challenge in the final third. “Even now, we lost five centre-forwards in the summer, and we’ve replaced them with two,” Heckingbottom admitted. That kind of turnover leaves scars. Systems have to be reworked, relationships rebuilt, habits relearned.

So Preston are having to get creative. Literally.

“We’re going to have to get goals and assists and create chances in other ways. We’ve tried that with the wider players,” he said, pointing to a more collective responsibility in attack. Set-pieces will matter. So will contributions from unexpected sources.

“We’ll need goals from centre-backs as well this season, which we haven’t previously had enough of.”

It’s a blunt assessment, but it underlines the reality: this can’t be a team that waits for a No 9 to solve everything.

Derby day test

Next up, Blackburn Rovers. A Lancashire derby with edge at the best of times, now loaded with early-season jeopardy for Preston’s new-look side.

Heckingbottom insists the tools are finally in place. The squad, he says, is ready to compete. The backing has come, the rebuild is done.

Now comes the only currency that counts in the Championship: three points, and the first sign that this expensive reset is heading in the right direction.