AFC Wimbledon manager Neal Ardley knows there will be no easy games in League One next season.
The Dons made it to the third tier of football for the first time since their 2002 formation by winning promotion via the play-offs.
They will be taking on teams like Sheffield United, Bolton, Charlton and Bradford, who were not so long ago gracing the Premier League.
AFC Wimbledon will be operating on one of the smallest budgets in the division and even fellow promoted sides like Oxford will have greater spending power.
Ardley knows that right from game one, a trip to Walsall on the opening day, every match will test his side to the limit as they battle to stay up.
He told GetWestLondon: “You look at every game and think they’re all going to be tough and it begins to dawn on you, but we have a lot of confidence and momentum from last season because we finished so strongly.
“We did a lot of good business in the build up to Wembley re-signing Barry Fuller, George Francomb, Darius Charles and Dannie Bulman and that gave us a platform to go into the summer with 12 or 13 solid players. That was our main plan.
“You look at the fixtures and think teams that got promoted with us like Northampton, Oxford and Bristol Rovers are, on paper at least, going to be some of the lesser teams in the league.
“These are teams that we were fighting with at the top last season and that just shows the size of the task we face.”
Wimbledon’s opening day clash with Walsall is followed by a League Cup first round trip to Peterborough before they resume the league campaign with the visits of Bolton and Scunthorpe and then head to Northampton and Rochdale in a hectic August.
