I feel it’s a low risk move between £5-8mil. If he pushes on in the prem and we stay up, he’s a bargain. If he just keeps his head above water and we go down he’ll be a great asset in the Championship.
I dont think we ever bought them with intention of looking at resale value. They were 'they will do a job' singings, as it turned out 'and then some'
I genuinely thought he’d do what Marinakis did at Forest and go mad if we ever got promoted. I’m pleasantly surprised that it seems like he won’t do that and will try to do the ‘buy low, sell high’ method that worked for a lot of well-run clubs. I still think we’ll buy a lot of players for high seven-figure or low eight-figure sums, at least one marquee signing and a few free agents with plenty of Premier League experience. We won’t go mad like Forest and buy 30 new players in two transfer windows. It will be a more low-key version of Sunderland’s strategy but on a smaller budget.
He kind of distanced us from the Sunderland model. He said they spent a lot (which I'm not disputing) implying we wouldn't spend nearly as much, which probably means adjusting expectations. I slightly worry that this is how you do a Burnley.
We won't "do a Burnley" or whatever ****e they tar us with. It's not in this club's DNA to have a season that's over by Christmas. We'll be kept guessing until the end!
Anyone following Acun's Q&A's in previous years should probably know by now that 6-8 realistically means 10-12.
For balance, he did also say he thinks we'll sign 1-2 players who are of the level that we'll seriously miss when they're injured (maybe a weird way of putting it when I write it out but it sounded better when he said it). But he did talk a lot about going down and coming back up again and having a bigger budget the second time around, and about players coming into improve and make money in the long term, rather than getting the best players for now.
