Why Kevin Nagle will be sitting a little bit more comfortable at Huddersfield Town right now | OneFootball

Huddersfield Town owner and chairman Kevin Nagle will be confident he has got his Lee Grant decision right already.

It is very early on in the 2025/26 League One season, but Huddersfield Town have started the campaign exceptionally well and that may well be easing concerns of owner and chairman Kevin Nagle.

The American businessman isn’t necessarily the subject of as intense a criticism as the neutral may expect with regards to Huddersfield supporters, given what has gone on since he took over the club.

They plummeted from Championship promotion contenders to mid-table fodder in League One last season, with pretty much all of his major decisions, particularly with regards to managerial sackings and appointments, having undesirable consequences.

Despite that, many have backed him and whatever pressure that there was on him may well be easing at the moment after his risky appointment of Lee Grant earlier this summer appears to have been a shrewd move, based on the extremely early evidence of this season.

Huddersfield appear to be gelling well

On the opening day of the campaign, Huddersfield put in a professional and impressive performance as they dispatched last season’s play-off finalists Leyton Orient by three goals to nil at the John Smith’s Stadium.

The Terriers backed that up by eventually easing to a 2-0 defeat of Reading at the Leasing.com Stadium in their second game of the campaign, to leave them sitting at the top-of-the-table after two League One matches.

What has been shown most in those two games is the sheer depth of that Huddersfield squad, with Ruben Roosken coming off the bench to score the third against Orient and then Cameron Ashia coming on to score against Reading.

In their opening game of the season, fairly big-money signings from recent transfer windows such as Lasse Sorensen, Joe Taylor and Dion Charles were all on the bench, with Sean Roughan and Lynden Gooch dropping to the bench against Reading.

Eight new summer signings started against Leyton Orient and five started in Berkshire, and yet the cohesion and control displayed by Huddersfield has remained impressive.

Grant could rescue the reputation of Nagle

The appointment of Grant was always going to be one that divided opinion, with the pressure on after the poor stint in charge of Michael Duff, who was sacked in mid-March last season.

Grant, a rookie boss who was a part of Kieran McKenna’s coaching staff during Ipswich Town’s rise of back-to-back automatic promotions from League One to the Premier League, is highly-rated, but there are obviously no guarantees, and no inclinations as to how good the former Man Untied goalkeeper can be as a coach.

It remains extremely early but, learning on the job, he is displaying a maturity and control over his team and squad that is very impressive and perhaps beyond his coaching years.

Huddersfield have an extremely competitive squad and ensuring players remain happy will be an issue, but another issue would have been the teething concerns of a big, perhaps bloated squad that has seen a lot of new signings come in this summer to try and build something cohesive on the pitch.

Tough matches against Orient and Reading were seemingly ideal tests to try and ensure that whatever disconnect may be at Huddersfield, it could be punished.

Instead, they have come through the tasks more than unscathed and now look as though, once they find a fluency and groove on the ball, they could begin to potentially dominate the division.