davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Yes, I agree. With this manager I'm relaxed about it to a point. We need a system right now more than we need another series of £30M flops.
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If I'm being completely honest, looking at the finances and our tendency to drop clangers with 30 mill in our back pocket there is a big part of me relieved we kept our powder dry. Its like seeing a child run around the place with a scissors when it comes to us and funds to spend.
I agree we need to be pragmatic and play a certain way, ill never want the "manager" here, so wed differ there - i dont even think hes a bad manger. Its like Klopp, hes a really good manager but id be loath for him to come here, they arent what we should be about.
Moyes was the right man for me, especially given where we are now financially and where we will be for the next few years, hes on to a good thing where he is though from his point of view, i'd suspect we'd differ there to. lol
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toffeeblue9
Player Valuation: £35m
Agree with a lot of this. I doubt we will sell Richarlison and DCL in the same summer though - Richarlison is the more likely candidate (assuming there is a European market for him - PSG in a post-Mbappe world might be most likely) given he will have two years left on his deal next summer. Let's call it £70m or so to be on the conservative side, which will give us an accounting profit on him of north of £50m. Driving the wage bill down will be a big focus, although next summer also sees James, Sigurdsson, Tosun and Delph leave the club which sees us shed over £400k per week off the wage bill as well. Next summer is a big reset moment for us (we will also have to sell the high-earning Mina who will have one year left on his deal) and, despite the fact I threw my toys out of the pram about him coming here, we probably have a good manager in place to deal with that. Not sure we will need to deal at the free transfer/bargain basement end of the market, but I'd be v surprised to see us bringing in any big earning/huge transfer fee types
I honestly couldn't be less arsed about how much a player is bought for, mate.
In fact, the whole point of recruitment and scouting is to buy good players for cheap, not just spend big because you have the money - which is where we've gone wrong.
But, and I know you're not doing this, in no way does that excuse us not bolstering key positions that have been needed for ages. We have made a series of baffling decisions even this year. And there is a seeming inability to decide on targets unless the manager at the time happens to have kept in touch.
We didn't need to go and spend £20m on a right-back. But we needed to go and get a right-back. We did neither.
Yeah that’s the baffling thing. Seamus is past the peak of his powers, Kenny is very poor backup and even I, who knows no much about football, could see that.
Seems we went all in on Dumfries and then were left clutching at straws when he sacked us off.
and @davek , for once I agree
I have been fairly certain for a while now that in more ways than one, we are skint
Then people go "we've got the money, it's just FFP" etc etc
I don't think it is. I think it's painfully evident the well has dried up. And now, with the stadium coming on, it's a period of consolidation which is needed and I think again it's been evidenced in hiring Benitez. He won't take us down and can probably get the most out of a pretty low budget, but then again I also fear we are already pandering to his needs if the Rondon report is correct and he is actually on around £90k p/wk. Which is mad, absolutely mad.
I have no issues with selling players to fund transfers. It is what it is and almost every club has to do it.
However, our issue is we have dross that we are unable to shift who actually earn the biggest money, and those are both Walsh and Brands signings. It means the players we do not want to sell are the ones we have to. Again, that's the way of the world. We are 100% banking on Richarlison getting sold next year and hopefully a great season for him gets us £80m+ from PSG, Barca or Madrid, depending on what happens with Mbappe.
But, we have no groundwork in place. Unlike Leicester, who in the majority of cases replace before they buy, we are just going to have to scramble around after the fact, and I don't trust the people in charge to make the right buys either.
He didn't even sack us off, we just couldn't get the funds in place in time. £12.5m. It was nothing for a player who'd come off a good Euros.
But then where was the urgency after that? By the looks of it the next target on the list was Patterson. How mad is that. Not in any way a similar profile of player either based on playing style or experience.
The talk was we wanted to get the deal done before the Euros but yeah it does seem we stalled on the deal and once inter came in we were done for.
Surely there was another decent RB we could have got for a relatively modest fee or on loan. Mad.
toffeeblue9
Player Valuation: £35m
I think it'll be a case of "wait and see" on whether or not we genuinely are proper skint, or it's just a case of P&L rules being our issue currently. I find it difficult to believe that Benitez would have come here knowing we were absolutely potless, given a lack of transfer backing seemed to be at the heart of his fallings out at Liverpool and Newcastle, but by the same token I absolutely accept that the days of £200m or whatever in a summer are now well gone.
Moshiri has bemoaned the FFP stuff, which sort of suggests he *wants* to spend, but by the same token we know that he is currently personally funding the stadium initial works until financing is in place. He isn't a bottomless pit of cash. Next summer will tell us more.
Whatever the case, getting saleable assets into the club needs to be a big focus - as things stand we only have DCL, Richarlison and arguably Ben Godfrey who are young enough and good enough for another team to look at them and think spending a huge amount of money and handing us a big profit would be worth it. I think the signing of Kean was a daft one, given the presence of DCL but it does at least have the logic behind it of "buy young and talented" and it's much easier to get rid. More of these please (sort of). It's also why (whisper it quietly) I don't think the signing of Iwobi was as ridiculous as people have made out - Ok, this argument might sound less crazy right now as he's in the midst of a little bit of good form, but again he was young enough (at 23) and not on high enough wages to be an absolute millstone around our necks. Even if these sort of signings bomb, they're a better bet than a Sigurdsson/Tosun/Delph/Bolasie/Walcott type of player at the back end of their 20s, handed a big contact into their 30s with little to no resale value and virtually impossible to shift given the wages they earn. Free transfer signings of the likes of Townsend, Rondon etc on 2 year deals are fine as long as they're only there to supplement a younger squad that we build.
toffeeblue9
Player Valuation: £35m
I'd love to know what went on there, but it sounds (on the face of it) that deals we may have teed up earlier in the year (like Dumfries) were simply reassessed when Benitez came in. We may never know really
It sounds like that too, but we also didn't have the funds for Dumfries at the time it seems.
That being said, I'm again worried about the extent we're giving Benitez (or any manager) control of recruitment.
If we've scouted Dumfries for a while, done our research, assessed where he'd fit in, then he should have been brought in (if the money was there). That's how the DoF model is meant to work.
As it turns out, regardless of the money for a sec, it seems like the main reason we didn't get a right-back at the end of the window was because Benitez didn't know any well enough to get on the phone to them.
Maybe he'll get Steve Finnan out of retirement in January.
Brands said our operating model was going to be buying young players for decent fees but relatively low wages.
We clearly chucked that in the bin for Ancelotti. As you say, it’s wait and see what our transfer budget will be like next summer.
I think we had a budget of about £15-20m but we had to clear some player(s) to spend that.
Kean's loan has helped. We'll have flexibility over a few years due to how the deal is structured and also an immediate cash injection from the loan fees. Add in Small compo when that comes, whatever it is, and Vlasic sell-on, plus a tiny slither of the Lukaku pie (maybe they were already accounted for).
Regardless of players currently here, I reckon we have a bit of money to spend. But after that, it's all about sales IMO. Yes, I'm sure Moshiri would pump more money in if he was able to but even then, a sustainable model would be for that money to be focused on the stadium and the squad to be self-sufficent.
Three years into the DoF's tenure here, that really should be the case.
I think its a spectrum mate, there has to be balance.
I agree i think our recruitment has been criminal for about five years in terms of the balance of the squad, firstly, we sold Rom had 4 no 10s and no center forward - we still didn't buy a decent one and DCL came through. The season before last where we sold Gueye and had no central midfield, that was the worst for me criminal, we were also very short on center backs and very lucky we didn't pick up a bad injury. This year its full backs. We always seem short, we always seem like we need wingers and central midfielders, weve invested 10s of millions in those areas, how may reserve keepers have we brought in - its been really bad. Recruitment is supposed to support on the pitch development and progression - in our case its undermined it.
Then on the opposite hand, im glad we didn't panic buy, AMN - turned into the best thing since white bread for a couple of days last week, where three weeks ago we would have scoffed. KWP sniff similarly.
I suppose where i am at its not about the need, its about the process and decisions being made - i just dont have trust in either the process or the people involved. From that point of view its a relief to me that we didn't speculate - or get an AMN for the sake of it as we're posting losses of 139 million. We cant be trusted with money when it comes to the clubs welfare. Like i said above, us with money, is like a child running around the place with a scissors.
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Earwigjoe
Player Valuation: £10m
Also relieved the window closed without us overpaying for rubbish again. No excuse for not getting a rb in again though. Maybe a year off will force a reset and a rethink and can produce a working system for us instead of the disastrous scattergun approach since Moshiri came in.4 yrs without a rb. Im sure Brands could've found a cheap rb somewhere in the world to give Seamus a rest, he did nothing all summer every signing was Benetiz. No idea why we have a dof if moshiri lets every new manager pick the signings. i hope we win every game but Benetiz however I'll never accept whilst hes still loved by that lot. Moyes should be here if we're going down the austerity route... Imo, Moyes should be here even if we had money.
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