Slavisa Jokanovic has tempered expectation at Fulham, insisting his side’s primary goal is to survive in the Premier League.
The Cottagers, who returned to the top flight by beating Aston Villa in last season’s Championship play-off final, have spent £100million over the summer and brought 12 players to the club.
However, the Serbian sounded a cautious tone ahead of Saturday’s Premier League opener against Crystal Palace.
“We arrived last in the Premier League, our principle objective and target must be to stay up,” he said.
“We still haven’t started the competition and I prefer walking step-by-step. We will have more information after the first game, it is better to think this way and we will see our level at the end of the season.
“Our first target must be to stay up. We are starting to build a team to try and be competitive at this level.
“We came third in the Championship, we arrived here last and at it’s important and necessary to show ambition and desire to be competitive and spend money to bring players who can help us.”
Jokanovic brought in a dozen players over the summer – five during Thursday’s deadline – as Jean Michael Seri, Maxime le Marchand, Fabri, Andre Schurrle, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Alfie Mawson, Calum Chambers, Sergio Rico, Joe Bryan, Luciano Vietto, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa bolstered the Cottagers’ ranks.
The boss was happy to splash the cash and would have carried on going if he could.
“It’s important to have investment, I always want more, more and more,” he said.
“For my position it’s normal to need players. We have made great investment and I expect it to benefit the club.
“It is normal, we arrived last in the Premier League and we need to adapt the team and make investments.
“We have made great investment and I expect this will help us to be more competitive in this division.”
One potential problem of bringing so many players in is that Jokanovic must manage them all and keep them happy, not that he is worried about that.
“I am not Santa Claus, I don’t need to make anyone happy,” he said.
“I try to make hard and great competition between the players, this is the most competitive (league) in the world and they need to fight for their position in the training ground.
“My job is to pick a starting XI, this is my job.”
He does have decisions to make in defence as Denis Odoi is suspended, Tim Ream is injured, as is new signing Mawson.
