Hugo Bueno eager for 'key' Wolves role

After getting his chance with the senior team under interim boss Steve Davis, and remaining part of the squad under Julen Lopetegui, Bueno made 23 appearances for the first team.

He impressed in his breakthrough season and the 20-year-old is now eager to kick-on with his career in gold and black.

“I still have to remind myself that this was my first season as a senior Wolves player, and it was an introduction to the Premier League,” he said.

“I think I did really well, but hopefully with more experience inside of me I can now put more good performances and become one of the key players for next season.

“I think I can be one of them, but I also know the difficulty of that and how hard I’m going to have to work to achieve that. I’m just going to give my best to try to be one of the most important players next season.”

In a difficult season in which Wolves battled relegation, Bueno’s emergence was one of the shining lights of the campaign.

Lopetegui’s arrival in November sparked Wolves’ revival, but Bueno insists he was always confident that the club would get out of trouble.

He added: “Definitely. That was one of the things I thought, even when we were bottom. I knew we were going to get out of the relegation zone soon because you just had to look at the players we had and the quality of the training sessions.

“Obviously, things weren’t going well, but I knew the quality was there. We just had to progress, keep working and the results would come, and that’s what we did.

“But it was also the energy that we needed because I remember we had the quality, but we didn’t have the motivation inside of us. But since the new manager and the new players came in, we had the feeling that we could get out of there easily.

“We just had to work hard and make sure that everyone was ready to play. To be honest, the team was incredible in so many of the matches, so we’re really happy as a team to have got out of the relegation zone.

“I love to prove myself. I’m very competitive as well, so I love to have competition against me, but I also worked very hard every day for the opportunity. When the new manager came in, I had some minutes with him straight away, so I knew that was going to be good and I was just hoping it would stay like that.

“I knew about him before and saw him when he was at Real Madrid and also with the national team, so I knew he was a top manager, so it was really exciting for me when the news came out about him coming here.

“I was excited because I knew he was a good manager, the fact he was Spanish didn’t matter to me, because I would have worked hard to prove myself to any manager. But it’s been amazing working with him and hopefully we can stay like this.”