Swansea City need £12.5k-a-week star to burst into life under Alan Sheehan | OneFootball

Zan Vipotnik had a mixed first season with Swansea City, and will need to show more next season if he's to thrive and the Swans are to improve.

With the new Championship season just weeks away, Swansea City's Zan Vipotnik should have a point to prove after only showing flashes of his talents last season.

The 2024-25 season was an underwhelming one for Swansea City, who troubled neither the top nor the bottom of the Championship by finishing in 11th place in the table.

The Swans are now looking to rebuild this summer, following a season when they seemed unable to put together the sort of run which would propel them towards the play-off places.

That inconsistency was perhaps best represented by Zan Vipotnik.

The Slovenian forward completed his first season with the club following his transfer from Bordeaux having only lived up to his pre-season billing sporadically, and needs to come to life in his first full season under new manager Alan Sheehan, who replaced Luke Williams in February on a caretaker basis which was made permanent at the end of April.

Vipotnik had impressed prior to Swansea at both club and international levels

Zan Vipotnik arrived at Swansea in July 2024 with a decent record.

He left his previous club Bordeaux after they were demoted to the third tier of French football over financial issues, having scored 10 goals for them in 37 Ligue 2 matches during the 2023-24 season.

Prior to that, he had built himself a good reputation.

Bordeaux had signed him after he scored twenty goals in thirty league appearances for Maribor year before, and he'd also shone for the Slovenian national team, having represented them at every youth level from under-15 to under-21 before making his debut for the full national team in February 2023. He has to date made 17 full appearances for his country.

Vipotnik may find himself with rivals for a Swansea place in 2025-26

But Vipotnik's first season at Swansea didn't go entirely without hitches.

By October, then-Swansea manager Luke Williams was defending him in the press, saying that the forward would "be able to show his talent" once the striker comes to terms with life as a Swansea City player following a slow start. By December, he was being described as "a player who is gradually coming to terms with life in the Championship".

By that point, Vipotnik had made 16 League appearances, and he would go on to make 42 in total for them throughout the 2024-25 season. He scored seven goals, which was a moderate return on the number of appearances that he made, although it should be added that only two of these appearances lasted the entire duration of the match concerned.

Now 23 years of age, the point of feeling that this is a younger player still finessing his craft has passed.

With only Millwall the only club in the Championship's top 16 clubs last season to have scored fewer than their total of 51, Swansea are understood to have been looking at other attacking options this summer, and they remain a possibility for the return of Oli McBurnie, who was on the Swans' books from 2015 to 2019.

If Swansea are to show the ambition required to push themselves up the Championship table next season, Vipotnik will have start coming good on the promise that he showed earlier in his career. He may yet find that there is greater competition for a first team place than last time around.