January has put Michael Skubala right in the middle of English football’s rumour mill: Lincoln City odds-on for promotion at 10/11, Huddersfield links bubbling away in the background and a new major investor poised to reshape the club above him. The former PE teacher suddenly finds himself as the calm figure at the centre of a very noisy month.
The league table tells its own story. Lincoln sit in the automatic promotion places, chasing down Cardiff and holding off a pack of clubs with bigger budgets and bigger wage bills. Results through autumn and into the new year have turned a tidy project into a serious push for the Championship, with City’s price for promotion shortening to 10/11 as bookmakers finally caught up with what the performances have been hinting at for weeks.
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After that, everything comes back to the same question on the pitch: can Skubala keep this squad producing promotion-level performances while the noise around the club grows louder?
The manager in the middle of a moving club
Lincoln are not just chasing promotion; they are in the middle of a change off the pitch as well. Former San Diego Padres chief Ron Fowler is set to take a controlling stake in the club, pending EFL approval, with Clive Nates moving upstairs into a co-vice-chairman role. It is a significant moment: an American investor with serious sporting pedigree stepping into a League One promotion race that is on a knife edge.
For a head coach, that combination, new majority shareholder incoming, Championship within reach, squad still evolving, can easily become a distraction. Some managers lean into it, talk about “projects” and “next phases”, and lose the edge in the here and now. Skubala has gone the other way. His public message has stayed consistent: this squad is ahead of schedule in some areas, short in others and still needs work even while it’s winning games.
That line came through clearly in his recent admission that there are “three key areas” he wants to strengthen in this window, a nod to the depth issues that have occasionally been exposed when injuries bite. The deals for attacking options like Alfie Lloyd from QPR underline the point; evolution, not revolution, while the table looks good.
Huddersfield rumours and the lure of the “massive club”
That would be enough to keep any manager occupied, but the attention intensified once Huddersfield were reported to be looking at Skubala.
Once the Terriers parted company with Lee Grant, the market for their next permanent manager did not take long to latch onto Skubala. Prices of around 4/1 have put him firmly among the frontrunners, just behind more established Championship names like Liam Manning, who was sacked by Norwich in November. This is not the first time Skubala has been asked about Huddersfield either; before the recent cup tie he called them a “massive club”, fully aware of the size of their fanbase and the potential there.
Understandably, that creates an uneasy undercurrent for the Lincoln fans. On the surface, nothing has changed: Skubala still talks about the long-term project at Sincil Bank, still fronts up after games, still pushes for the extra 1 percent in each window. The reality is that most football supporters live in perpetual fear of the rug being pulled out from under their feet when the going is too good. Sustained periods of success for clubs outside of Manchester City often make fans uneasy for reasons they can never quite explain. For the Imps’ faithful, that paranoia will feel justified as Huddersfield make admiring glances at Skubala from across the floor.
The irony is that his success with Lincoln is exactly what has made that interest inevitable. The tactical shift in League One with City pressing higher, building more bravely and manipulating space in a way that looked more Championship than third tier, has not gone unnoticed outside the Imps bubble.
10/11 says promotion and the run-in will decide Skubala’s legacy
Strip away the speculation and the ownership talk, and the season still boils down to something very simple: can Lincoln hold their nerve from here? Promotion odds of 10/11 suggest the wider market now believes Skubala’s side are more likely than not to get the job done, with Cardiff heavy favourites and the Imps the clear second choice in the race for the top two.
The performance levels support that view. This is a side that has hit five in a game already this month, that has gone toe-to-toe with higher-division opposition and learned from the draw with Luton at Kenilworth Road. City are no longer scraping results; they are imposing themselves on matches and reacting with maturity when decisions go against them.
For Skubala, that is where the real test lies. Not in whether Huddersfield make a phone call, nor in how quickly Fowler’s majority stake is rubber-stamped, but in whether he can keep those external stories out of the dressing room and maintain the same clarity that has taken Lincoln from mid-table to odds-on for promotion in the first place.