I've been thinking about this today, on the second holiest of news days (according to Sky). Where the fook is our scouting? We appear to have been linked, with any realism, to two players this entire window. A winger who used to play for us and James McCarthy. We have absolutely no other options at all. In the Summer, our best signings have been Dwight Gayle, Matt Ritchie and Ciaran Clark. With a bit less success Mo Diame, Isaac Hayden, Daryl Murphy and DeAndre Yedlin. Go back a bit further and we saw some success that continues with Shelvey. I mean, any one of us on this board can watch a few matches and work out that these players will do a decent job - because we've seen them doing it for years. There's no doubt. I think the job of convincing them to join is harder than working out if they're any good. I don't know if this is deliberate or whatever and whether I should actually be grateful after so many god-awful French imports, but I'm really struggling to understand what it is that Graham Carr actually does anymore? He's in essence a glorified (by Mike) Chief Scout, but who exactly have we 'scouted' with any success recently? You look up and down the leagues and there's decent players appearing both domestically and from abroad. Payet, Mahrez, Fuchs, Vardy, Keane, Mane, I mean it's a really, really extensive list of decent footballers who've been signed for £10m or less over the last two to three years. And what have we been doing in that time? Caballa, Thauvin, Doumbia, dare i say Perez, Mitrovic, Haidara and so on. I'm struggling to understand why we appear to be pretty much at the very arse end of the scouting spectrum, yet continue to employ GC, the unmovable brains behind the whole thing? Why are we so bad at finding new talent?
Unfortunatley our scouting department does work... for cAshley. Sign players cheap, sell them high - Wijnaldum, Sissoko, Cabaye, Debuchy, Janmaat all bought a profit to the club. Perez was bought for under £2 mil and some muppet will pay at least 5 times that when he leaves. Yes there have been some failures in the likes of Cabella and Thauvin but I'd imagine we would not have lost astronomical amounts on any of them and not enough to dissuade the powers that be to discard their current model. The scouting department works for the board, not the club, fans, players or manager.
I think that the problem does not lie with the scouting and network but more the people following up on scouted players. I am sure we will be scouting and making suggestions for lots of players however once they are put on the table I believe that Rafa and subsequently Ashley are saying no. (Most likely the latter). I know a couple of weeks ago a report surfaced suggesting that Ashley was taking an active interest in our transfer dealings and to date we have not made any progress since. It won't be coincidence. This transfer window is going to see some bang average players going for 10 million plus so you can see why he would want us to wait till the summer. We should be able to attract better players (assuming we go up) however its a little bit of a risk as if we do not go up the blame will (from the outside) lie at Rafa's door and not Ashley.
Far be it from me to get too defensive of Rafa or Mike, but I really think it is just difficult to do business. Particularly for a club who is looking towards promotion from the Championship. You either pay over the odds for PL players who are not getting a game for a reason and you're likely competing with desperate PL clubs, or you buy Championship players who you'd have to move on in the summer, or you target young players outside the top division who are ridiculously expensive and the top clubs hoover up just for the craic. Its tough. The foreign angle is not one which has served us well, and most of the decent ones only want PL football. Its a case of having money but finding it difficult to use. I'd rather we kept it back and used the loan option. Lets face it we are nice to have area bar the number 10 role. Regardless the resource afforded to Rafa should have been good enough to get out of the division comfortably without any excuses. I'm sure we are identifying players but they will likely be falling in the "not doable now" category. We just need to manage the current bunch a bit better in my opinion.
