Carlos Corberan reveals renewed determination to deliver West Brom success

The Baggies fell at the final hurdle before a Wembley final against Southampton, who went on to reach the Premier League.

A challenging summer rebuild while attempting to be compliant with FFP rules has proven difficult, but Corberan remains ambitious.

“When you achieve a play-off place you immediately feel you want to go to the same situation again and you have the desire to come in to find another story,” Corberan said. “You play a play-off, you say ‘OK, we need to come back again and we need to achieve what we couldn’t achieve’.

“This is the desire you are going to have. The days after a demanding season you have the game you played in your mind but it was necessary to move directly forward and start to work because we knew we had a lot of players who finished their contract.

“Normally when you make a play-off you will have interest in players who have helped achieve that. We knew we would lose many players, of the 23 available then we lost 13. So I was aware of the big challenge in front of us.

“The fact we finished later in the play-offs gave us the situation that we couldn’t waste any day. But always in football it’s adaptation. You have an idea and have to adapt, especially to the financial rules right now.”

Corberan was well aware of the profit and sustainability challenges the club faced this summer, even after the takeover from Shilen Patel’s Bilkul Football WBA, who still foot the club’s losses. The historical haemorrhaging of money under Guochuan Lai is why Albion and the EFL are working together to ensure no PSR points-related sanctions hit down the line.

The head coach’s task for the campaign ahead became tougher still a couple of weeks ago when key players Okay Yokuslu, Conor Townsend and Brandon Thomas-Asante were sold to allow the club to recoup fees and free salary funds with just a year left on their deals.

Corberan said: “The rules affect a lot how you can approach the market, so we have had a summer of adapting and the challenge we knew we had at the start of the summer increased when we had important players departing, Townsend, Okay and Asante. The difficult of the work we have to replace increased.”