Fulham have been quietly impressive this season - but may struggle to build on Marco Silva's foundations

Quietly, Fulham have been rather good this season – very quietly, in fact, because perhaps no other team in the Premier League has attracted less media attention than they have so far this season. That’s probably something which grates on supporters who can sense some genuine forward momentum under Marco Silva.

In fairness to a media that probably should devote a few more column inches to the Cottagers, Fulham have gone about their business in undemonstrative fashion. Silva is not rewriting the tactical rulebook and the team are not great entertainers. They are, however, in with every chance of achieving European qualification – but is this really a team who are inching their way towards the top table, or one which requires further investment to reach the next level?

The Premier League’s quiet overachievers

One suspects that if you were to take a straw poll of football fans in almost any watering hole in England, almost all of them would agree that eight-placed Aston Villa had a realistic chance of playing continental competition next season, and many would give tenth-placed Brighton every chance as well – but that few would give an endorsement to Fulham, who are sandwiched between the two and just one point below Villa, who finished in the top four last season.

It may be because Fulham, ticking away nicely with a recent win at St. James’ Park in the bag and progress to the fifth round of the FA Cup assured, are not an especially flashy or fashionable team. There are few big names, there isn’t much flair, and only Antonee Robinson has been grabbing many headlines.

Silva’s team are greater than the sum of their relatively modest parts. For goals, they are reliant on players like Alex Iwobi and Raúl Jiménez, who have scored 16 of the club’s 35 Premier League goals between them – players respectively dismissed by the broader public as indifferent and as being past their prime thanks to that horrific head injury a few years prior. Fulham simply aren’t especially sexy.

But sexy is not the same as good – as they will have to be this weekend to beat a high-flying Nottingham Forest whose own story of overachievement has garnered considerably more press coverage. Lest we forget, however, Fulham beat Forest 1-0 away earlier in the season, making them one of just two teams to win at the City Ground since the start of the current campaign.

What makes Fulham’s league position and underlying solidity especially impressive, however, is that it has all been built on a budget, at least by Premier League standards. Their squad was put together for a cost of £204m, according to Transfermarkt estimates – only Everton, Southampton and Ipswich Town have spent less in total.

Granted, Fulham aren’t precisely ‘poor’ their owner, Shad Khan, has an estimated net worth of £10.7bn, according to Forbes, and they are in the process of becoming the first (and quite possibly last) Premier League team to add a rooftop swimming pool to their stadium. The cost of season tickets is sky-high. Fulham earn a lot, but don’t necessarily spend it on their squad - and that begs the question as to how long they can go without making a significant overhaul of a team that is playing extremely well together, but isn’t getting any younger…

Fulham’s concerns for the future

The biggest barrier to long-term success may be the combination of a relative lack of investment in the playing squad and the fact that it’s already one of the oldest in the league – based on players selected for starting XIs, Fulham’s average age of 27.6 is exceeded only by West Ham and Everton.

Only one player under the age of 23 has started a league game for the club over the course of the campaign – academy graduate Josh King, a talented 18-year-old midfielder who may be close to becoming the first home-grown player to make the cut in the first-team in many years.

King offers definite promise, but he is the only player under 21 to have made a single appearance for the club all season. Fulham’s youth output is poor for a team that have hovered around the top flight for such a long time and on the occasions that they do produce quality players (Harvey Elliott being the most obvious example) they tend to leave at a young age.

If the owners aren’t prepared to invest significantly in either the academy or the senior squad, then there will be a limit to how far Silva can realistically take this side. The bones of this squad will, at least have a couple of years left in it. There may be few youngster in the set-up there are also only three outfielders over the age of 30 – Jiménez, Harrison Reed and Tom Cairney. The short-term outlook is respectable.

But if Fulham want to be more than a mid-table side who intermittently flirt with a European jaunt, something will have to give eventually. They will do well to keep hold of the superlative Robinson, whose haul of 10 assists is bettered only by Mohammed Salah, and whose creativity and pinpoint crossing has been absolutely critical to Fulham’s success – he is, perhaps, the one part of the machine that can’t be replaced quickly or on the cheap.

Silva has taken Fulham to the brink of their best league finish in 13 years, and this is a club which deserves more recognition than it has been getting – but it’s also a club at a crossroads. If the owner doesn’t invest the cash in such a way that they produce more Kings or sign more Robinsons, then they will almost certainly stall out after a year or two. They need to act soon to avoid that, and to realise the ambitions of a support base which can sniff their first European run since 2011.