Fulham seal Premier League return as Mitrovic starts party against Preston

Fulham are back where they belong, that being the netherworld between the Championship and Premier League where the club has spent the last five summers. Each summer since 2017 has seen the club either promoted to or demoted from the top division.

With two goals from Aleksandar Mitrovic, taking him to 40 for the season, and another from Fabio Carvalho, two stars of the campaign made sure Fulham achieved their objective for the season. The planning starts now on how to avoid that state of summer limbo.

Marco Silva is set to manage his fourth Premier League club in just over five years and has almost as much to prove as Fulham. Having not dropped below a top-two position since the 13th match of the campaign and scored 98 goals, 33 more than anyone else, his team are more than worthy of their elevation. But as Norwich and Watford have shown this season and as the Cottagers themselves well know, Championship domination represents zero guarantee of comfort come August.

The incomplete but already towering Riverside Stand suggests modernisation as a possible answer to how Fulham might stop being a yo-yo club. But having spent close to £100m on players for the doomed 2018-19 campaign and reported losses of £93m for a similarly fated 2020-21 season, Shahid Khan, their American billionaire owner, will have to keep digging deep.

A similar set of players came down under Scott Parker and Silva and Khan surely must augment them with greater quality, even if promotion has been achieved with flair and fun, enterprising football.

After defeats to Coventry and Derby, merely edging over the line would have sufficed for Fulham. Nottingham Forest’s defeat of West Brom had added tension to what might instead have been a promotion party from