£8m we paid for Caulker for 48 games in 3 (?) seasons. That's £166,000 a game excluding wages. Cheers Harold.
Though to be fair I'm sure we have had even worse value for money and many other clubs have as well. Just goes to show how important having a professional back room team who really check players out before signings is, and it becomes a vicious circle when you have a headstrong manager who thinks a couple of calls to his mates is all you need to do and you can't afford a proper back room staff anyway. The smaller clubs end up taking a good chunk of the risk for the bigger ones, helping them fix their relative positions in stone. At some stage the financial arse will fall out of this game as a result because it's getting less and less competitive, and less and less interesting as a result. Most of us don't really care which of Chelsea, Utd, City, Liverpool or Spurs win the league, as long as it's not Chelsea. Leicester was a spectacular one off.
Did you like the way the club was being run when the owners were throwing millions at has beens, never will be and wasters thanks to messers Hughes and Redknapp?
Personally, I can recall being fairly enthusiastic when we signed Caulker - a young, promising England international who appeared to have a promising future ahead of him. Like so many - far too many - of our recruits, he hasn't lived up to his billing. So how wrong was I? You (SB73) make a later, related point about having staff at Loftus Road who can thoroughly check players that we sign: if it were really thorough, I wonder whether that research would have brought Caulker's off-field problems to light. Of course, when you're investing that sort of money, you really should try to get a TOTAL picture of what you're buying, not just on-field ability, but I wonder how many clubs do so. There's too much wasted talent amongst young footballers who perhaps get too much, too soon (a certain Moroccan springs to mind). I don't know whether Caulker will be able to get to grips with his demons but I hope he does and that we get a welcome share of the mooted sell-on fee.
He knew this was going to happen did he? Was widely applauded as a great signing when we made it on these forums. No doubt you were saying the opposite were you?
Apparently the real reason for the delay in signing Hoban is QPR coulnt afford the bus fare for him to come over for the medical.
Young centre back and just what we needed at the time. If he'd worked out as expected no way was he overpriced. You're really good at this hindsight thing I notice.
