Preston North End

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Preston North End have released a statement condemning racist abuse directed at left-back Thierry Small following the club's 1-1 draw with Queens Park Rangers on Monday.

North End stated that they had discovered "deplorable comments of a racist nature" aimed at Small on a club Instagram post.

Small, 21, scored an own goal in the 82nd minute of the match and the abuse has been reported to Lancashire Police.

"The club continues to reiterate its stance against racism and condemns any behaviour of this nature," the statement said., external

"There is no place for such abhorrent and frankly disgusting and discriminatory language in football nor society

"If and when the individual responsible is identified, they will be banned from Deepdale for life."

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Preston North End manager Paul Heckingbottom says he was frustrated with the way his side drew 2-2 at Leicester City.

Mistakes from his side were to blame for both of Leicester's goals.

Patson Daka took advantage of Andrew Moran's weak backpass to put the Foxes in front early on before Pol Valentin's poor touch allowed Daka the chance to blast in the second.

The point sees Preston drop to 15th place in the Championship.

"We created all four goals," he told BBC Radio Lancashire:

"Regardless of the position they've got some real good individual players and we defended our box well.

"They got in behind us once where Dan (Iversen) makes that save where we get things wrong, apart from that it's shots from the edge of the box.

"For us to give them two goals the way we did, to just get that point is really, really frustrating."

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Championship clubs spent just over £69.5m on agents fees over the past 12 months according to figures released by the Football Association,, external an increase of £6m on the previous year.

The figures cover the period from February 2025 with Ipswich Town the top spenders, paying £11.7m having spent the first three months of the accounting period in the Premier League.

Southampton (£8.3m) and Leicester (£5.8m), who were relegated alongside Ipswich are the second and third-highest payers on the list.

Troubled Sheffield Wednesday were the most frugal when dealing with agents, spending £534,559.

Wrexham come in sixth on the list with an outlay of £3.6m while current Championship leaders Coventry spent just short of £1.5m.

Championship agents' fee spending, external

• Ipswich - £11,738,920

• Southampton - £8,381,358

• Leicester City - £5,866,587

• Sheffield United - £5,005,498

• Norwich - £4,020,206

• Wrexham - £3,660,584

• Swansea - £3,088,645

• Middlesbrough - £2,900,314

• Bristol City - £2,774,990

• Hull City - £2,450,431

• Stoke City - £2,088,886

• Birmingham City - £1,996,502

• Millwall - £1,982,348

• Preston North End - £1,831,233

• QPR - £1,829,036

• Watford - £1,612,833

• Coventry - £1,497,990

• Derby - £1,409,507

• West Brom - £1,346,030

• Oxford - £1,235,536

• Charlton - £904,698

• Portsmouth - £831,818

• Blackburn - £676,980

• Sheffield Wednesday - £534,559

Fresh from scoring for Ghana during the international break, Leicester will hope Abdul Fatawu and Jordan Ayew can transfer that form into goals for their club as they continue to battle to avoid a second successive relegation.

Four defeats from their past five games means Preston's play-off challenge has dissolved and they start Good Friday's match (15:00 BST) 11 points short of the top six.

• Leicester have won their past two home league games against Preston, having lost four in a row against them beforehand. They last won three consecutively between 1937 and 1950.

• Following their 2-1 win in August, Preston are looking to complete the league double over Leicester for the first time since 1957-58.

• Leicester have won just one of their past 13 league games (D5 L7), beating Bristol City 2-0 at home last month.

• Following a 3-1 win against Stoke last time out, Preston are looking to win consecutive league games for the first time since January (vs Sheffield Wednesday and Bristol City).

• Only Sheffield Wednesday (3) have kept fewer clean sheets than Leicester (5) in the Championship this season. However, two of the Foxes' five have come in their past three games.

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Preston North End forward Milutin Osmajic scored twice for Montenegro on Tuesday but could not help the side to a win during their 3-2 friendly loss to Slovenia.

The 26-year-old opened the scoring in the 20th minute before Swansea's Zan Vipotnik equalised in the 41st minute.

Omajic was able to peg back the lead before the half-time whistle but Slovenia scored twice - including another for the Championship's top-scorer Vipotnik - to take the win in the second half.

The two goals bring Osmajic's senior international goal tally to seven, with the North End man scoring in each of his past three games for Montenegro.

Preston boss Paul Heckingbottom praised his side's character after they came back to beat Stoke and end their seven-game winless run in the Championship.

Heckingbottom feared it would be more pain for Preston when Stoke took an early lead and was delighted with the way his side responded with Alfie Devine scoring twice and Milutin Osmajic once.

He told BBC Radio Lancashire: "Listen, I've been saying it's about the wins. No-one is interested in what you say when you're not winning, you know it's about the win.

"We have played well in previous games and not got over the line and today we started really well again, and then their first pass, their first cross, they score.

"We had that against Norwich, where we started the better team, made a mistake and they go one up. Kenny McLean puts one in the top corner from a free-kick.

"We were the dominant team, but we couldn't get the goal, couldn't get the points. Today we did, so, yeah, that will make everyone feel better, definitely.

"The performance was excellent from start to finish and we turned the game round from that difficult start, and it wasn't just me thinking 'here we go again', so, yeah, it's great."

Preston North End boss Paul Heckingbottom has called for "realism" amongst fans amid a difficult spell at the club.

The Lilywhites were fourth in the Championship table in January, but are now 17th after winning just one of their past 12 matches.

And while Heckingbottom understands the fans' anger, he also feels the expectations were raised too high during the first half of the season.

"If we are a team who are bottom three budget and bottom three in terms of net spend, why should we be expected to beat the teams that aren't?" the 48-year-old told BBC Radio Lancashire.

"I've always said it's not about money and it's not. If we look at the teams at the bottom, some of them have huge wage bills. But we need to make sure we are going in the right direction about that.

"There's other teams still fighting, there is other teams spending, there is other teams still chasing what we are chasing. We have no right to be any better than the other teams we are playing against."

Striker Milutin Osmajic has trained and will be available for Friday evening's game against Stoke City (20:00 GMT) after spending their defeat by Norwich City on the bench.

But both midfielder Ali McCann (ankle) and defender Lewis Gibson (shoulder) will need to wait until after the international break to make their respective returns.

"We were not ruling him [McCann] out because he was feeling really positive but he's not made it," Heckingbottom added.

"Gibbo [Gibson] has trained but I think we rule him out. He's not been strong enough in his arm."

Listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds

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Having both spent time in the top six earlier this season, Preston North End and Stoke City will look to rescue their campaigns when they meet at Deepdale on Friday (20:00 GMT).

Stoke put in an impressive display to beat promotion hopefuls Watford 3-1 on the weekend to reignite some embers of hope for their own push, though they are still nine points short of sixth place.

While hosts Preston might have their eyes glancing in a different direction. After winning their first two games of 2026, they have only won once since (against Portsmouth in February) and are now closer to the bottom three than the top six.

• Each of the last three league meetings between Preston and Stoke have ended level, including two 0-0s; as many goalless draws as in their previous 18 league games combined.

• Stoke haven't lost any of their last five away league games against Preston (W3 D2), which is already their longest ever unbeaten run away to the Lilywhites.

• Preston have lost their last four Championship games – they last lost five in a row in the same league campaign in their final five matches of the 2023-24 campaign, under Ryan Lowe.

• Since the start of December 2025, only two teams have won fewer points away from home in the Championship than Stoke (8) – West Brom (3) and Sheffield Wednesday (1).

• After scoring five goals in seven Championship starts for Preston between October and December 2025, Daniel Jebbison has only netted in one of his last nine (one goal v Swansea).

Image source, Getty Images

There have been plenty of contentious decisions in the 2025-26 Championship season so far.

Offside goals given, perfectly good goals ruled out, red card offences missed, penalties not given, dubious spot-kicks awarded. You name it.

With the video assistant referee (VAR) only used for the play-off final, the outcome of every second-tier game in the regular season can hinge on how on-field officials see incidents in real time.

• Would you want VAR introduced for every league game in the Championship?

• If so, why?

• And if not, let us know your reasons.

You can share your thoughts on VAR here or comment below, and we will publish a follow-up article soon with a selection of your responses.

Andy Bayes
Sports editor, BBC Radio Lancashire

Image source, Shutterstock

In the space of 12 league matches, Preston North End have dropped 13 places in the Championship.

It's about as dramatic a fall from grace as you're likely to see.

They were three points off the automatic promotion places on 4 January with a 19-point buffer between themselves and the relegation spots.

The numbers are alarmingly different 69 days later.

They are now 21 points adrift of second-placed Middlesbrough, 11 off the play-offs and 10 from the bottom three.

The 2-0 win at Bristol City 12 games ago felt like a big moment. A vocal away support singing their heroes home, with a manager growing in popularity game by game.

Speaking to the Lancashire Post, external in his after-match interview at Norwich on Saturday, Paul Heckingbottom was clear in his opinion that staying in the Championship wasn't a foregone conclusion.

He pinpointed a dramatic drop-off last season, where North End won only once in the league after the victory at Norwich on 11 February, as a case in point.

The final day survival last season should have been a wake-up call, and for a while it looked like it had been.

Granted, the squad has undergone significant change, but since they won at Norwich 13 months ago, they've played 53 league matches, and they haven't won 40 of them. Draws have been an Achilles heel in both seasons, but in the last four games a draw has looked far from likely.

The stats show that they had 15 attempts at the Norwich goal on Saturday, but I can't honestly remember describing a full-stretch save from Canaries keeper Vladan Kovacevic to keep them at bay.

Andrew Hughes will be disappointed with a header that went well wide, and Michael Smith failed to make contact with the ball four yards out to reduce the arrears to 2-1.

Norwich's quadruple change on the hour looked like they firmly believed that the points were already safely in the bag after being far from brilliant themselves.

Not for the first time this season, a 34-year-old central midfielder was the star of this Championship show. Kenny McLean is another second-tier player ageing like a fine wine. He had time and space on the pitch when others didn't. His free kick to make it 2-0 was a touch of class, although had the North End wall jumped, it could have made a difference.

Clearly it's a time of frustration. Was enough done to strengthen a promotion push in January? Is the squad better off for January? The manager said it would be criminal if the squad didn't come out of the winter window better off.

This is season 11 back in the second tier for North End. On one hand, that's an achievement that a lot of clubs and fans of others could only dream of. On the other hand, some fans are looking at it feeling that under its current guise, they've reached their ceiling.

The owners of the club, the Hemmings family, have made no secret of the fact that they'd like to hand over the keys sooner rather than later. They have to plug a sizeable hole on the balance sheet every year, and it's not something they see going on forever.

Whatever league position they finish on 2 May, it's undoubtedly going to be another busy summer at Deepdale. The likes of Daniel Jebbison, Lewis Dobbin and Alfie Devine will return to their Premier League parent clubs with another four senior players out of contract.

It's massively important that they go into the summer break having arrested this horrendous run which has terminally damaged their season.

Preston North End manager Paul Heckingbottom believes his players "made it hard" for themselves following their 2-0 loss at Norwich City on Saturday.

Ali Ahmed and Kenny McLean's first half goals succumbed the Rams to their 13th loss of the season and they are now on a four match losing streak in the Championship.

They currently sit in 17th place in the table on 49 points.

"Another tough one. We had a bright start and had the best chance of the game, and then a moment, a lapse in concentration," Heckingbottom told BBC Radio Lancashire after the match.

"Odel[uga Offiah] was the correct side, they take the shot, Odel is the wrong side and we're one down, which gets compounded by a referee decision.

"Those are the things that are costing us. But after a bright start, we knew that we were still in the game and we knew we'd made it hard for ourselves, but we responded in the right way.

"The big frustration is that we didn't score. If we'd have taken any one of those chances, we'd have made it much more difficult for Norwich because we were the team in the ascendancy in terms of territory and chances in the second half, but we never made them feel that tension and anxiety that can come if we'd have got a goal."