6 August 2022. Fulham 2-2 Liverpool. The Premier League put us on notice.

The opening day of the 2022/23 season is, in retrospect, the entire next two years compressed into ninety minutes. Liverpool, who would finish second behind Manchester City and reach the Champions League final, came down to a sweltering Craven Cottage. Mitrović headed Fulham in front from a Kenny Tete cross on thirty-two. Núñez levelled from the bench just after the hour. Mitrović restored the lead from the spot on seventy-two after a Van Dijk foul in the box. Salah, with ten minutes to go, salvaged 2-2.

For most newly-promoted sides that result would be the highlight of August. For Fulham it was a thesis statement. The summer's recruitment had been heavy: Bernd Leno for £3 million from Arsenal, João Palhinha for £20 million from Sporting, Andreas Pereira for £8.5 million from Manchester United, Issa Diop from West Ham, Carlos Vinícius from Benfica, Manor Solomon on loan from Shakhtar, Daniel James on loan from Leeds, plus a free for Willian after his Corinthians stint. The team that walked out for the opener was a fundamentally different team from the Championship one. It was also, on the early evidence of that 2-2, immediately competitive at the top level.

The Cottage spent the rest of August in a kind of pleasant disbelief. A 2-2 against Wolves where Mitrović scored a brace. A 3-2 home win over Brentford in the local one that swung on a Mitrović header in the closing minutes from a Kevin Mbabu cross. Fulham sat in the top half at the end of August. Then they sat in the top half for the rest of the autumn. The team that nobody had predicted to finish higher than fifteenth was, by the time the World Cup break arrived in November, sixth.

Sixth at Christmas. Sixth in February. Tenth in May.

The 2022/23 season under Silva had a clean three-act structure. The first half belonged to Fulham at their most uncomplicated: Mitrović scoring, Andreas Pereira creating, Palhinha dominating in midfield, Tete and Robinson driving the full-back lanes, and Leno producing the kind of saves that turn 2-1 wins into 3-1 ones. By the time the World Cup break arrived in mid-November, Fulham were sixth in the Premier League. The week of football either side of Christmas tightened things further: a 2-1 win over Crystal Palace on Boxing Day, a 2-0 at Leicester two days later, a 2-1 home win over Southampton on New Year's Eve. The Cottage genuinely had its top-half thoughts on.

The second act was January through early March. The Mitrović form held. Fulham went into late January with a 2-1 home win over Chelsea, then dropped a 2-1 at Newcastle, beat Sunderland 1-0 at the Cottage in the FA Cup, and continued to plug at the top half of the league through February. Sixth was still the realistic target. The European-place chat had moved from "if everything goes right" to "with one more good month, we are genuinely in this."

The third act was March, and the third act was the Mitrović ban. Fulham had been pushing back hard against Manchester United in the FA Cup quarter-final at Old Trafford on 19 March. They were leading 1-0 with twenty minutes to go. A Willian handball in the box led to a controversial penalty decision against Fulham. The handball was given. Mitrović shoved referee Chris Kavanagh as he walked back into position. Red card. Willian also dismissed for protesting. Penalty converted by Bruno Fernandes. Three United goals in the final twenty minutes. Eight-game ban handed down to Mitrović. Five Premier League defeats in a row followed. The 6th-place team became the 10th-place team. The first top-half PL finish since 2011/12 still went down as a triumph. The autumn that produced it was a hint at something the spring took away.

Fulham 2-1 Chelsea. 12 January 2023. The night the Cottage announced itself.

Silva's first significant Premier League scalp came on a Thursday evening in January when Chelsea came across town and got beaten. Willian, the player who had spent most of his Chelsea career across the river before joining Fulham on a free, scored on twenty-five against his former club. Koulibaly equalised just after the break. Joao Felix was sent off for Chelsea on fifty-eight. Carlos Vinícius, on the night Mitrović was suspended, headed in the winner on seventy-three from a deep Andreas Pereira cross. It was Vinícius's first Premier League goal. The Cottage saw out the closing fifteen minutes with the kind of nervous standing ovation it had not had to do at Premier League level for a number of years.

The win lifted Fulham to sixth in the table. It was the moment the season's first half started feeling like something more than over-performance. It was also, for Silva specifically, the moment when the post-Watford-and-Everton narrative began to shift. The "promoted manager who is just keeping us up" reading was no longer correct. The "manager who can actually beat Premier League teams" reading was now in the post.

Chelsea were not, that season, the Chelsea of vintage years. Graham Potter was in his short-lived stint, the squad was mid-reset, the team was about to drop into the bottom half. But the result counted regardless. The way Fulham played, in front-foot mode with Vinícius on the line, Pereira pulling strings between the lines, Palhinha winning every second ball in midfield, looked like a team that belonged at this level. It was the first home Premier League win over Chelsea Silva produced. There would be more.

FA Cup, 19 March 2023. Old Trafford. The afternoon the bottom fell out.

The FA Cup quarter-final at Old Trafford on 19 March 2023 is the moment Silva's first PL season turned. Fulham had been getting up among the European places. A win at Old Trafford in the cup would have been one of the bigger Saturday-afternoon results the Cottage had produced in the modern era. For seventy minutes it looked like that was happening. Aleksandar Mitrović had given Fulham the lead in the first half from a Wilson cross. United had not had a sustained period of pressure. Fulham looked like they were going to see it out.

Then the meltdown. Willian appeared to handle the ball in the Fulham box. Referee Chris Kavanagh, after a brief check, awarded the penalty. Mitrović, who had been verbal with the officials for most of the half, lost it. He pushed Kavanagh from behind as the referee retreated from the penalty spot. Straight red. Willian, protesting the decision, was also sent off. Bruno Fernandes converted the penalty on seventy-one. Marcel Sabitzer scored at the back post on seventy-three. Fernandes added a third in the seventh minute of added time. 3-1. The FA Cup quarter-final lost in twenty minutes from a position of complete control.

The eight-game ban for Mitrović landed in the following week. Five Premier League defeats in a row followed. Manchester United away (the league fixture, lost 2-1). Bournemouth at home (lost 0-1). Arsenal at the Cottage (the 0-3 that ended any European hope). Newcastle away. Tottenham away. The 6th-place team came back to 9th by mid-April. Mitrović served the ban. The team finished 10th in a season the early part of which had hinted at top eight.

The 10th place was still, statistically, the first top-half Premier League finish for Fulham since 2011/12. Silva still won the EFL Championship Manager of the Year for the previous season (announced post-promotion in May 2022). The first season back at the top table delivered fifty-two points, fifty-five goals scored, and the look of a side that, given a couple of upgrades and a better disciplinary spring, could push higher in 2023/24. What it did not deliver was the European campaign that had been hanging in the air through February.

Summer 2023. Mitrović sold, three replacements walked through the door, the rebuild began.

The 2023 summer is the topic of Part 3. The short version, for the purposes of Part 2, is that Mitrović forced his way out in late July and went to Al-Hilal on 19 August for a fee Sky Sports headlined at over forty-six million pounds. Fulham, in response, signed Raúl Jiménez on a free from Wolves, Adama Traoré on a free, and Calvin Bassey for eighteen million from Ajax. Timothy Castagne came in from Leicester. Alex Iwobi arrived from Everton on deadline day, 2 September 2023, on what BBC and Sky reported as a reported £22 million deal that would turn out to be the bargain of the year. Carlos Vinícius stayed as the secondary striker. Rodrigo Muniz, returned from a Middlesbrough loan, came back into the squad.

The 2023/24 season had to start without Mitrović and without the kind of structural certainty the previous year had been built on. Silva's response was to push Jiménez into the focal-point role, ask Iwobi to function as the creator from the left, and rotate Muniz into the centre forward spot as the season got into the back half. The first half of 2023/24 was uneven. Fulham took a 5-1 home defeat to Arsenal on the opening day. They lost 3-1 at home to Aston Villa in early September. They picked up a couple of decent wins, sat in mid-table through October, then started to find a rhythm in November and December.

The 13th-place finish that followed at the end of the season can read, on the table alone, as a step backwards. The deeper read is more interesting. Fulham scored fifty-five league goals in 2023/24, the same total as 2022/23, despite losing Mitrović and replacing him with a free transfer and an internal promotion. Fulham reached the semi-final of the Carabao Cup, the closest the club had come to a major cup final in the Premier League era. Fulham won at Old Trafford, beat Arsenal at the Cottage on New Year's Eve, and beat Spurs 3-0 in mid-March. The cup runs ran through Palhinha at his best. The cup runs ran through Iwobi's emergence. The cup runs ran through Muniz's belated breakout.

The Liverpool Carabao semi-final. The night we almost broke Anfield's heart.

The Carabao Cup run of 2023/24 will be remembered as the closest Silva-era Fulham came to a major cup final. Fulham entered at the second round and got Tottenham at home on 29 August, drawing 1-1 and winning 5-3 on penalties after Davinson Sánchez missed and Kenny Tete buried the decisive fifth spot kick. The third round, on 26 September, was Norwich City at home, won 2-1. The fourth round paired them with Ipswich at Portman Road on 1 November and Fulham won 3-1 with Wilson, Muniz and Cairney scoring. The quarter-final was a 1-1 at Goodison Park against Everton on 19 December (Keane own goal, Beto to equalise), settled 7-6 on penalties in Fulham's favour after Tosin Adarabioyo scored the decisive kick. The semi-final draw paired them with Liverpool.

Anfield, first leg, 10 January 2024. Willian, on a free from Corinthians, latched onto a chestily mis-directed Van Dijk clearance on nineteen minutes and dinked it across Alisson. The away end at Anfield erupted. Fulham held that lead for nearly fifty minutes, until Curtis Jones equalised off Tosin Adarabioyo's shin on sixty-eight. Cody Gakpo finished from a Núñez cross to win it 2-1 on seventy-one. The away end carried the team off knowing they had lost but knowing the tie was alive. The 2-1, on the run of play, was an arguable result.

The Cottage, second leg, 24 January. Luis Díaz put Liverpool in front on eleven, and the aggregate scoreline of 3-1 felt closer to insurmountable than aggregate-of-one-goal usually does. Then Issa Diop, who had been arguably Fulham's best player across both legs, kneed home a Harry Wilson pass on seventy-six. The game finished 1-1. Liverpool through 3-2 on aggregate. The closest a Fulham side has come to a major cup final in their Premier League era. A semi-final lost on a deflection.

That tie still hurts. The 2-1 at Anfield is one of the proudest away days of Silva's tenure, the kind of night Fulham supporters bored their nephews about for the rest of the season. The 1-1 at the Cottage was the right kind of ending: not embarrassing, not surrendered, just an aggregate-of-three-two that ran out of time. What it left, in its way, was the marker that Silva-era Fulham could go toe-to-toe with one of the best teams in Europe across two legs of a knockout tie. The marker remained unconverted into a final or a trophy. It still mattered.

Manchester United 1-2 Fulham. 24 February 2024. The first Fulham win at Old Trafford since 2003.

Exactly a month after the Liverpool semi-final ended, Fulham went to Old Trafford and won. The match was not a classic. Bassey opened the scoring on sixty-five with a rebound finish from close range. Harry Maguire equalised on eighty-seven, the ball coming off Leno's hands and into the Fulham net via a chaotic spell of late United pressure. The match looked headed for a 1-1 that, on balance of play, would have been about right. Then it kept going. Seven minutes of injury time. Adama Traoré carried the ball from his own half, beat Maguire, and laid it into the path of Alex Iwobi, who got a touch to settle and rolled it past Onana into the bottom corner. 90+7 on the clock. The first Fulham win at Old Trafford since 2003. The first Premier League win in the era.

The Cottage celebrated in away ends for the rest of the spring. Iwobi, signed for a fee BBC reported as around twenty-two million from Everton on deadline day in summer 2023, had not been the headline signing that window. The Mitrović sale dominated the headlines. The Bassey arrival dominated the budget conversation. The Iwobi signing, in many quarters, was reported with a slight raised eyebrow about whether a player who had not really kicked on at Everton was going to be the right fit. By 24 February 2024, after a run of stitching everything together, after the Liverpool semi-final goal in the second leg, after the late winner at Old Trafford, the eyebrow had been put away.

Iwobi's value in this Fulham side was always about the things that did not show up neatly in a goals-and-assists column. The running. The link play. The ability to function as a 10 or a left winger or sometimes as the inside runner from a deeper role. The Old Trafford goal was the one that put a finishing touch on the column. It also, in the run of fixtures across the back end of 2023/24, set up the 3-0 over Spurs three weeks later.

Fulham 3-0 Tottenham. 16 March 2024. The Cottage in March, the Muniz brace, the dent in the top four.

The Tottenham 3-0 belongs in the same paragraph as the Old Trafford win because it was the same theme on the home ground. Rodrigo Muniz had quietly turned into the best Fulham striker of the post-Mitrović era through January and February. The Premier League Player of the Month award for March 2024 would shortly be handed to him. The Cottage's home form had picked up. Tottenham came down to SW6 on a Saturday with a top-four push in motion. Fulham beat them 3-0.

Muniz opened the scoring on forty-two. Sasa Lukić, who had arrived from Torino in January 2023 and turned into a useful rotation midfielder, made it 2-0 on forty-nine from a Castagne cross. Muniz added his second on sixty-one. The Cottage spent the closing thirty minutes counting through the songbook in the order it actually wanted to hear it. The 3-0 itself ended any meaningful top-four hope Tottenham had been clinging to for the second half of the season. It also, for Fulham specifically, lifted the team into the top half briefly before the spring fade arrived.

Fulham 2-1 Arsenal. 31 December 2023. New Year's Eve, the Cottage, Arsenal in a title race.

The 2-1 over Arsenal on New Year's Eve 2023 deserves its own paragraph because it was, in the moment, slightly mad. Arsenal in late December 2023 were in a genuine title race. They had been at the top of the table since October. They came to the Cottage on the last Sunday of the year and lost 2-1. Bukayo Saka had given them an early lead on five. Raúl Jiménez equalised on twenty-nine from a Tom Cairney cross. Bobby Decordova-Reid scored the winner on fifty-eight from a corner. The Cottage saw out the closing thirty minutes with the kind of nervous standing-up celebration that you only really get from a side that has just beaten a title-chasing rival on home soil.

Arsenal had Saka, Martinelli, Trossard, Odegaard, Saliba, Gabriel, Rice, Havertz, Jorginho, Tomiyasu, Raya. The team that lost 2-1 at the Cottage was their genuine first eleven, or close enough to it. The result was a contender for upset of the season at the time. It put Fulham temporarily in tenth, with a 4-0 win over Birmingham in the FA Cup a few days later capping a strong run of festive fixtures. The fact that the Cottage produced a Big Six scalp twice in three months (the Arsenal NYE and the Old Trafford win in February) was the strongest evidence yet that Silva's Fulham was building rather than just holding.

The numbers, in tabs. 22/23 and 23/24, compared.

Click between the two seasons.

Across two Premier League seasons of stabilising, Silva produced two top-half-ish finishes, a major cup semi-final, and Premier League wins over four of the Big Six (Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United, Tottenham). The Cottage, by the end of 2023/24, had a manager who had unambiguously earned the conversation about a contract extension. The contract extension came in October 2023. The conversations about the extension after that one would, by 2026, dominate the spring. The story of those conversations is for Part 4. The story of the season that pushed the question is for Part 3.