So now you're arguing it's not a bad signing if the player doesn't play? If a player isn't deemed good enough to get onto the pitch, how can you deem the transfer to be anything other than a failure? He probably will be a decent player in 5 years time but as he's not ours we won't see him. We're more than halfway through the season and he's not playing, unless there's a major injury crisis he almost certainly won't make the bench this weekend either. No, our recruitment hasn't been that bad. We've been operating under a tiny budget for most the period, and the L1 recruitment was the best we've had in over a decade.
I don’t want to get into an argument about who’s good and who’s bad, but surely this depends on the definition of how a loan is successful or not? Id argue Slater was a success because it got him into the club, we worked out if he was any good or not, and then we signed him for a low fee. Sounds good to me. We might do similar with Simons. I’d argue a loan is only a failure if they don’t play AND they don’t sign. Using loans to assess players, especially young ones, I think is quite canny.
I completely agree, and it's why I spent all summer saying there's no point in signing players on loan without options to make permanent.
We had that spell when Man Utd were our feeder club. Brady, Chester were fantastic successes ( sure they were loans initially), Stewart was great on loan but flopped afterwards. Also another who’s name I dont remember, but he was their U23 captain then hardly got a game for us. Sure I’ve missed someone.
Mannone on loan from arsenal around the same time terrific too, Livermore was 22 when we got him from Spurs, there's plenty of examples.
We didn't have an option with Slater, nor do we with Simons though. The two players he cited. Plus weren't you the one that spent the summer arguing that an option to buy is meaningless?
That’s him. Yep, Dudgeon and Evans too. Sure we tried before we buyed with most of these? Most were successful, a couple weren’t mainly due to injury
What’s an option worth unless they’re **** and we still want to sign them? If a player has a good enough season they’ll want to move on to better things anyway.
