How Well Do Harris Teams Start Their Seasons?

Looking at previous campaigns to see if early struggles are just part of the process

Last week, I was listening to an episode of Max Rushden’s Football Weekly - that’s not its official name, but because it’s hosted by a Friend of the Pod™️ and an avid U’s fan, it’s the name it will get in these circles. On that particular show, the excellent journalist and Italian football expert Nicky Bandini was on the panel. She pulled out an Italian phrase I hadn’t heard in a while: “Il calcio d’Agosto è bugiardo” - “football in August is a liar”.

The saying is fairly self-explanatory. As fans, we love jumping to conclusions. We translate our emotion, passion and desperation of wanting our team to win into instant verdicts based largely on result. Win, and we’re espousing all the reasons why we’re surely getting promoted. Lose, and what we’re looking at is an inconsistent team that’s not quite good enough. Often the arguments lack any sort of nuance - take Saturday at Bristol Rovers, people would be very quick to excuse the poor first half if Kouassi didn’t fluff his lines and we got out of there with a point. The narrative is so often result-dependent.

And in August, that’s just accentuated. We take the small sample sizes of the competitive games we’ve seen, and despite it being often a new squad with numerous new players, assume that we’re the finished product already. I say ‘we’ because I absolutely fall into this category. We all do, it’s part and parcel of being a fan.

Right now, the perceived wisdom is there are flashes of good stuff from this United side, but the inconsistency is really disappointing.

Our results have been perfectly mid-table: we’re currently 13th, and if you took the PPG return from those five games and averaged it out over the course of the season, we’d end the campaign on 64 points, which would have us 12th in both the past two seasons. As many fans expected.

But are these results lying to us? Are we actually better than that, and the inconsistent August results are telling porkies - once we eradicate some individual defensive errors, could we actually start getting results more in line with our underlying numbers and performances (at times)?

Or, are we actually worse than this - are the defensive frailties a deeper-rooted issue, and the bluntness in attack something that can’t be sharpened?

Or is the answer somewhere in the mid-table middle.

The next two back-to-back home games will give us a big clue, but before that it felt like a moment to go looking for some clues elsewhere. So I thought, is there any trend in Harris teams from the past and how they start their seasons? Could the way the opening 10 games played out in his previous 9 seasons where he’s started the season in place at a club indicate whether August 2025 was lying to us or not?

In this piece we’re only looking at seasons in which Harris has been in place at the club the entire summer, and only looking at league form. Obviously this is just a very cursory glance at results, it doesn’t take into account any of the context behind them such as who the opposition were and the transfer window timings. Similarly, it’s not looking at any underlying data - literally just, is there proof that Harris often starts seasons inconsistently, before the team improves their results? Or is what we’ve seen not a lie at all and in fact a sign of things to come?

All of this is in the hope that we see a trend towards his teams getting better in the second group of five games as they get to grips with his style, culture and system.

Here’s hoping…

Photo courtesy of the Cambridge Independent