Sheffield Eagles endured an underwhelming Championship season in 2025, finishing 11th in the league and winning just six games out of 24.
Led by former Batley and Castleford Tigers coach Craig Lingard, the club have made some astute signings to help them improve next year, including former Super League players George Griffin, Jordan Lilley and Kai Morgan.
The second tier season is due to get under way in January, with the Challenge Cup competition also taking place to start the campaign. The Eagles are well over a week into pre-season now, with coach Lingard happy with where his side are currently.
Providing a pre-season update, the boss revealed how the first part of the off-season had gone, with the focus on allowing the new players to bond with the current squad.
“It’s nice to get back in,” he said to the club’s social media channels. “We’ve had a bit of a longer break that I wanted or I’m used to, but we’re getting everybody back in now and you can tell pre-season’s started because the rain and the wind and the dark night’s are here.
“It’s been really pleasing to see how everybody’s connected together. There’s a lot of new guys who have come in… we’ve actually got more new players than we have returning players, so it’s a big transition.
“It’s always difficult when you transition with that many new people, so part of the emphasis for pre-season is making sure that these guys spend a lot of time together as possible. That’s what we’re trying to manufacture in this pre-season period before Christmas, that we want to get these guys spending some time together and that first week that we’ve had, although it’s only the first week, it feels like they’ve been together quite a long time and they’ve connected pretty much immediately.”
Lingard believes that Sheffield can be one of the top teams in the Championship next year, and be amongst the title fight for only the first time since 2023. He thinks that, with the recruits that have been brought in, the squad has the capability to do just that.
He said: “We’ve brought players in from good environments, from quality environments and they’re bringing that work ethic, that experience, that leadership… and I thought that was really important, that we needed to bring leaders into the group. Not only good players, but good people and good leaders and they’ve certainly brought that in with them.
“We’re bringing in people that show that we want to get back towards the top end of the table. We don’t want to just survive, we don’t just want to get to the end of the season and win half of our games, we want to be challenging at the top of the table.
“For us to do that, it means that we’ve got to make sure that we bring the right people in, we bring the right experienced people in that are going to contribute to the team and the squad.
“We’ve got 17 players that can play on a weekend, so we want to make sure that we’ve got a collection of players that are struggling to get into that team, that are fighting to get into that team.
Championship boss reveals new training base with reasons outlined for cross-county switch
Lingard, who as mentioned was a former boss of the Tigers, has revealed that the club has shifted training facilities, in a bid to allow his team to become more united and train with each other more often. The switch sees them now train in the Castleford area, which he believes is a positive for two different factors.
He said: “One of the things I struggled with last year was the lads not doing their gym and their conditioning together. It’s a massively important part of the game is that, where you’ve got to sweat together you’ve got to struggle together, you’ve got to go through dark times together in those conditioning drills.
“That’s been a really important aspect for me, to make sure we get that facility where we can make sure that the lads are training together collectively.
“The conditioning and the way that they weren’t doing it together with the public gym in Sheffield that we had and I just felt that I needed to be able to control that and make sure that I was happy with the facilities that we’ve got and getting everybody together at the same time in the same venue.
“The other thing about coming to Castleford, as well, is that it just makes recruitment so much easier.
“Your locality to Hull, to Leeds, to Wakefield, the far side of West Yorkshire, to Lancashire, it just means that it’s a lot closer to a lot of people.”
He confirmed that whilst the move wouldn’t be permanent, they are currently in the best facilities possible for their needs.
“As a club, we want this to be a temporary situation for us, because we want to be back based in Sheffield and hopefully with the new ground that’s going to be developed and built, we can have our own facilities and we can transition back to Sheffield and have a Sheffield team training in Sheffield and playing out of Sheffield,” said Lingard.
“I just felt at this moment in time, for us, that we needed to control what we can control, certainly after last season, it was a massively disappointing season.
Sheffield’s plethora of new recruits have all been in for their first week of pre-season, and the boss couldn’t be happier with how they have started.
“The energy and the leadership that they’re bringing in. It’s not necessarily that I’ve brought 10 captains in, but it just means I’ve brought individuals in that still want to achieve and still want to succeed and they’re bringing in things from successful environments.
“We brought a couple in from Bradford who finished third for the last three seasons. We’ve brought a couple in from York who eon the league and got to the Grand Final and won at Wembley.
