Portsmouth boss John Mousinho opens up on Bristol City and interest from other clubs

Portsmouth boss John Mousinho opens up on Bristol City for their managerial role and interest from other clubs this summer.

Talking to ‘Portsmouth FC, The News’ who live streamed the press conference from the training ground, Mousinho spoke on a range of topics.

In the end, Bristol City went with the appointment of Michael Skubala. After also being linked with the Stoke job, Mousinho remains at Portsmouth.

Interviewer: I mean first of all the calibre of job you’ve done for Pompey when the season ended there were plenty of concerns that there might be interest from other clubs. Did that pan out at all?

Mousinho: To a certain extent and there was yeah there was some real interest at the start of the summer. I think the one that had the most sort of air time was Bristol City. There was an initial conversation I think between the club and my agent but it didn’t get any further than that. So no official approach I you know spoke to I spoke to the club about it really early on as per my contract just to make sure everybody’s on the same page but absolutely nothing progressed. Bristol City didn’t contact the club or ask for permission to speak to me. So I think that got a lot more air time than perhaps was going on behind closed doors and that was dealt with sort of fairly swiftly. So yeah that was the one bit of sort of one bit of real interest. There were a couple other bits of sort of minor interest that never went beyond that and yeah to be honest it was a pretty sort of calm summer after the first couple of weeks of wild speculation and a lot of it I just sort of watched with interest knowing that yeah it wasn’t true.

Interviewer: You’re being very honest about that as well.

Mousinho: Yeah, I can come in and lie to you and cover things up. I think that was one that there’s been plenty of other I guess not incidents, but there’s been plenty of other bits like this in the past that have never got out into the press. This one was public, nothing ever comes from my end. I’d like to keep things very very very tight, even if there has been other interest from other football clubs. So, you know, over the past 3 years, for the most part, we’ve managed to sort of stave that off and never have the conversation in public because I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. And as you saw over the summer, there’s that wild speculation and fans thinking X, Y, and Z’s going on when it’s really not. So, yeah, I never mind being open and honest about things, particularly when they’re out there. I think it would just be a bit disrespectful of me to come in here and start lying and covering up and said nothing had happened over the summer.

Interviewer: What would it have taken you to leave Pompey for you?

Mousinho: I don’t know, I mean it never really it never really came to that at all. My position was very very clear at the back end of the season. It’s not a football club that I’m looking to leave. It was a case at the back end of the year whether that got taken in the wrong way or not. But anything that any demand I made in the football club or anything that I wanted to improve here going forward was for the betterment of the football club and something I think that the fans deserved the football club deserved. And as long as I’m here, I’m going to keep pushing. Whether it’s the back end of the season or whether it’s now, I’m still going to keep pushing for things that I think are going to make the football club better. So that’s yeah, that’s that’s never really anything that’s sort of popped into my mind. My job here is to try and make Portsmouth as good as possible and to try and make us even more competitive in the Championship and one day, I’m not saying that that’s soon, but one day to to kick on so we can be a club that can compete for a spot in the Premier League.

My latest video update from Pompey’s training ground with a lot of ground covered.
– Mousinho confirming Bristol City and other summer interest.
– Transfer updates on Shein, Marezi & Collins.
– Playing and transfer budgets
– Players leaving
– Injury updates.
It’s all here⬇️ pic.twitter.com/p5RhKSNrdN

— Jordan Cross (@pn_jordan_cross) June 29, 2026

Interviewer: So, did you get the assurances you wanted from the owners at the end of the season as well to make you want to stay here and achieve even more at this football club?

Mousinho: Yeah, I mean, it was never about that. I know it got painted to sort of be that. Those final showdown talks, it was never that. For me, it was look, here’s how we’ve been for the past couple of seasons. This is where we’ve managed to finish. I think we’ve overachieved massively over the past two years, over the past three years to be honest. I know there’s certain expectations in League One, but I still think we overachieved that year as well. So, it was about going, look, I think that we’ve done a fantastic job of staying in the league over the next two years. And I think we need to have ambitions now, not to all of a sudden become a side that competes at the top end of the Championship, but to kick on from that. And in order to do that, I think that we need all these things. And it wasn’t never just about finance. It’s been about the football club as a whole and making sure that if we you know, for example, if we do have increased finance, whether that’s free player wages or through transfer fees, then that’s backed up that’s underpinned by the football club as a whole.

Interviewer: Considering you’ve overachieved the whole time you’ve been here, are you now going to be given the tools to stop overachieving and to try and rise up that lead, do you feel?

Mousinho: Yeah, I mean it’s a really difficult one because there’s a willingness of the football club to to really kick on and there’s the owners aren’t here to try and stay in the championship forever. We aren’t all of a sudden going to be a football club that spends beyond our means and that’s always been the case. I think since the owners have taken over, I don’t think it’s ever anything that can surprise anyone connected to the football club. We’re more than willing to try and push that to the limit of where we can go. And just to give you an example of that, the financial rules in the Championship have changed this year. So with the sort of squad cost ratio rules that come in, there’s still a certain restriction on what we can do because it’s revenue based and there’s a bit of equity we can put on top of that, but there’s only so much the football club can actually spend. So we’re going to try and be as competitive as possible within that. There’s certain other areas and this is probably what is really pressing for me when you do have that sort of financial restriction because of the league rules and we want to become sustainable as a football club. So when you marry those two together I think that you can then try and maximise how you spend that money and how you operate on a day-to-day basis with everything else you do that doesn’t actually cost a huge amount or it doesn’t cost a huge amount relative to millions and millions pounds worth of wage bills. So, I think that’s the big area for me that we’re focusing on in the summer. And look, we’ll try and be as competitive as possible. There’s also a bit of the unknown, particularly with the new rules. We don’t know where we’re going to stand next year with other budgets and other football clubs. So, we know where we’ve been over the past two years and the benchmarking comes out every year. We, you know, sort of figure out where we are at the back end of the season and yeah, going into next year, it’s a little bit of an unknown, so yeah, hopefully that’s not too too vague an answer, but that’s yeah, that’s just the way it is.

Interviewer: Has your budget increased this year?

Mousinho: Yeah, we’ve increased the budget. So, we’ve gone up again if you look at where the Championship’s been over the past couple of seasons, sort of non-parachute payment clubs last year, I think the budget increase was around sort of 16%. Parachute payment clubs, if you include them, that ups everything to about 25%. So, that’s a bit of a the parachute payment club skew everything a bit, but if you look year on year for budgetary increases and you go around 16% that’s probably where we’re going to be from last year to this year. I think it’s a really healthy number relatively unfortunately because everyone else spends money it might put you roughly the same spot. We think there’s going to be a couple of clubs with the new rules that maybe don’t have that level of increase and there’s going to be a couple of owners that don’t necessarily put that money in next year. So hopefully that sort of makes us rise up the league a little bit and gives us a bit more of a competitive chance. But yeah, at the moment we don’t know. I guess it’s one of the frustrations of owning a football club, which I can understand. The pressures to spend money and to lose money are absolutely massive. And we’ve increased the budget again this year. The owners are going to lose even more money. They’re going to put much more equity into the football club. But yeah, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re all of a sudden going to be able to compete with everyone else in the league.

Interviewer: The players you’ve been linked with so far at higher price levels as well. Does that reflect that you are upper tier now in terms of how much you can spend on an individual player?

Mousinho: Yeah, the one thing the one thing so away from away from wages and that being restricted by obviously the sort of the the new league rules there’s this transfer budget which will which will go up this year where we’ve been over the past couple of seasons from from how we moved away from what we were in League One. We thought it was a decent enough jump in year one and year two. I think when the dust settles when we look back at it, we whilst it was relatively quite quite a big jump just within where everyone else was spending in the league and you can probably see it again straight away this year. Derby have reportedly spent 6 million pound on Bobby Clark. So everything shifts really really quickly and they’re a side that came up with us two years ago. So yeah, there’s more money available to spend on fees and we’ve got to get it right. We’ve got to make sure that we spend it on the right players and we do that in the right way and underpin it with everything else that goes on with the football club.

Interviewer: Realistically, how much more can you achieve here?

Mousinho: It’s a really good question. We’re not sitting here all of a sudden saying we need to, you know, we’re demanding sort of top six. I think that the demand from myself as it always has been is overachievement. So we want to overachieve. We want to sort of sort of push as high as we possibly can in the league. I think there’s a real determination to move away from where we’ve been in the past couple of seasons and improve upon that. And if we can improve upon that and become sort of comfortably mid-table as a starting point, I’m not saying that’s where we want to finish, but if we can take ourselves away from a relegation battle with eight playoff spots in the Championship this year, then I think if we get a lot right, then all of a sudden that maybe becomes a possibility. And if we don’t, we’ll be faced with the same sort of trials that we’ve been faced with over the past couple of seasons. So I don’t know yet. I don’t know what other clubs are going to go and do, we haven’t spent any of the money yet. So, you know, we were not sure what that looks like in terms of those players that are incoming. That’s going to be a very very big part of what we achieve this year. And so yeah, all a little bit up in the air, but whatever we do, we’re going to try and maximise it and finish as high as we can.

You can watch the rest of the video below…