Swansea City: Luke Williams’ plan to compete in the Championship

There are other “good signs”, Williams points out, alongside room for improvement.

“We need to be smart about what minutes we give which players – who is suffering, who is in a good place mentally, who is in a good place physically, who is quicker to recover,” he said.

“We need to be double-switched on with tactics, how we approach our set-pieces. Then we need to train so training gives the boys the chance to be at their optimum level for a certain style of play. Then we have to impose that style of play, because we can’t condition the players correctly in a certain way if we don’t play like that every week.

“We need to get many things correct to have a chance of being able to fight with the big boys.”

Six years since they were relegated from the Premier League, Swansea are not among the second tier’s financial heavyweights.

As a result, many of those proven Championship players who are available this summer are likely to be out of Swansea’s reach, because bigger payers will make better offers.

Williams says Swansea are trying to “hack the trends” by competing with more powerful clubs – and that one key to their chances is style of play.

“We have the second-most possession in the Championship. We have almost the highest XG (expected goals) in the Championship,” he said.

“So what does that actually mean? It means we pass the ball well enough to try to score. And we get the ball back quicker than every other team in the Championship now.”