Town chairman and CEO Mark Ashton says the club is in work mode ahead of tough season back in the “unforgiving” Championship.
The Blues discovered their fixture list for the 2025/26 campaign at lunchtime with a visit to Birmingham City live on Sky Sports on Friday 8th August up first with Southampton, like Town just relegated from the Premier League, the first visitors to Portman Road.
"Tough,” Ashton told TownTV when asked what he made of the opening weekend visit to St Andrew’s. "It is, they’re all going to be tough.
"I think the beauty of the Championship, as we’ve seen, is that anyone can beat anyone on their given day.
"Birmingham will come into the division with high energy, high expectations and we’ve got to be the very best versions of ourselves. We’ve got to be ready because this season’s going to be tough.”
He added: "It’s going to be another tough season, the Championship is so unforgiving, but I like the Championship, I like the rhythm and routine of the Championship, Saturday-Tuesday, Sunday, Wednesday, the games come thick and fast, more so than in the Premier League.
"And I think that suits us because I think [manager] Kieran [McKenna] is good when he gets the players into a rhythm, he’s good when he gets them into that focus and Kieran, the team, myself, the staff, the club, we’re going to have to be ready come the 8th [August] because it’s going to be very tough.”
Ashton says Portman Road has continued to be a hive of activity over the summer.
"There have been no days off since well before the West Ham game,” he continued. "We are in work mode. We’ve delivered the Fabio Wardley fight, which I thought was great for the town, the county, for Fabio and the club, it gave us global exposure, and we’ve got three Ed Sheeran concerts just around the corner. And we’ve got commercial activities on a daily basis on the pitch.
"It’s very, very busy. We’re in a transfer window, we’ve got work to do on the football side, we’ve got a training ground that’s now under construction, so, as ever under this ownership, there’s a lot going on at this football club, there’s a lot to do and we’ve got to be ready again for the start of the season.”
https://x.com/IpswichTown/status/1938247126586429667
Asked what he wants to see in the campaign ahead, Ashton, who took on his CEO role four years ago this month, said: "Everyone starts on that opening day of the season with huge optimism, we all do. We have to be the very best versions of ourselves. The plan’s not going to change, Plan B is to do Plan A better and to be more effective. We’ve got to do more of it.
"I think we know what we’ve got to do, Kieran knows what to expect from the league, we are working hard to retain the squad that we’ve built, because we’ve got some really good players, and we’ll add to that over the coming weeks. That will happen. We’ve been active as an ownership group in every transfer window. This will be no different.
"But we need to be the very best versions of ourselves and I’ve said this before, an amazing football club, a beautiful football club that we’ still trying to rebuild, we’re still in the early stages of rebuilding this football club.
"We’ve had huge success in the last two or three years but we can only do it as one, whether you’re fans, whether you’re players, stakeholders, commercial customers, the local authority, you name it, we have to be as one.
"And if we’re as one, this club will be unstoppable because it’s such a big, powerful club.”
With an eye on keeping hold of the squad, centre-half Dara O’Shea signed a new contract earlier in the week, tying the Irish international to the Blues until the summer of 2030.
"We worked hard to build a really good squad last season,” Ashton continued. "Ultimately we fell short. We’ve talked about that, there’s a full stop now at the end of that season and we need to look forward.
"But we also want to retain our best players and that’s not easy because we’ve recruited good players who are in demand.
"So we want to make sure we retain what we need to retain and then we want to recruit on top.
"You can tell from my tone, there’s a real excitement on fixture release day, and I get that. I’m in no mood for messing, this is focus. We’ve got work to do. We’ve got a squad and a team which needs to be prepared.
"This season will challenge us in every way other Championship seasons have. It will challenge the depth of the squad, it will challenge the staff, it will challenge the board, it will challenge the ownership and, importantly, it will challenge fans.
"We are in work mode. We need to be ready, we’ve got a job to do and we’ve got a long hard season ahead.”