That's my concern too, I'd rather have somebody fit and ready to go. Anybody replacing Philogene needs to be quality and if they're high quality, we can't have them being injured.
I’ve no idea who he is, or anything about him, but he gets mentioned on here like Jesse Lingard got called a young up coming player at 26!
Palace handled him shockingly last season. Often leads to injuries when a player goes from playing senior football every week to none at all. He’d come off the back of an excellent loan and then was forced to play u21s football again. KLP, who I imagine we’ll be linked with at some stage again this summer as he’s not happy at Brentford apparently, body broke down when he first joined Brentford as he wasn’t playing regularly anymore
Palace won't care, they just needed an extra body and he's cheaper than going out and signing someone. I reckon most clubs are as bad, we certainly were last year. I hope KLP sticks it out, slowly but surely he seems to be getting to grips with the level so I hope he kicks on
We keep getting this "if he was allowed to send more Acun would" line. OK then spend money on the training facilities and other infrastructure? That isn't impacted by FFP and should still improve us on the pitch and with recruitment.
Tan has already addressed this. The type of investment needed to improve the training facilities to the necessary standard requires Premier League level investment money. So all finances have to be focused on getting the team to the Premier League.
Doesn't add up, does it? If we had a Cat 1 academy, we'd be producing more and better talent which in time would allow us to have a lower number of senior pros because we could flesh out the squad with the academy products and save us money. So why does Fleetwood have it then?
Oh ok so really Acun doesn't have a willingness to spend beyond FFP, it's just a line. Or he's willing to spend 5m beyond FFP not 15m? I'm not saying we should be spending 250m on a new stadium, I'm saying we should be investing in better facilities.
The newest cohort of scholars is very telling. Man United , West Ham, Southampton, Charlton, QPR, Liverpool Spurs and Sunderland released players all getting scholarships with us. We are miles behind as an academy overall, KLP Greaves and Matty Jacobs cohort has skewed the view of things.
I was pleasantly surprised when I read through the tweets, it felt like a noticeable shift to previous years as we're taking kids from sides with good academies but it does show how ours is lacking. The 16-18 age bracket is such a strange age for youth development and you see it with the England u17s. Some go on to be absolute superstars whereas others end up out of the game or at a low level even when they looked like gems at 16.
Unfortunately England Youth teams aren’t the best measure for it. Good players get in of course but it’s not the best of the age group as they don’t scower lower league teams. Ampadu was probably the best kid in the country in his age group at one stage. But England wouldn’t look at him because he was at Exeter, Chelsea did and he’s had a better career than nearly everyone who was picked over him at the time
That's understandable as the standard drops and it's hard to know how good they are. The likes of Chelsea don't really care as it's about hoovering up anyone with talent. The compensation figures are so low, they can afford to scattergun
Recruitment teams and agents around the world incredibly frustrated tonight after Baz’s new article. “Mr Chairman, Baz at the Hull Daily Mail has said they won’t spend much from the £40 million coming in, we can no longer try rip them off” - Some agent in Bundesliga 2
For a team with no striker surely McBurnie wouldn’t be terrible… just listened to the pod driving back from Stansted, Baz has a proper stick up his arse about the Giles situation, sounds like he might read the forum too the way he discussed the situation. You have to give them the benefit of the doubt for now like Burnsy says there has to be a plan surely…
That bit did make me laugh. It's the podcast where you can't criticise the owner, Baz certainly doesn't. There is no plan, if there was a clear plan, you'd come out and communicate it. The PR man would do an open and honest sit-down interview and calm everyone down. But when he's tried to explain things recently, he's ended up digging himself a deeper hole and having to reclarify e.g. the Pandur thing. If there was a plan we wouldn't be in this position and it doesn't seem like we're learning with another summer with a heavy reliance on loans, which means we'll be signing 10+ players next summer too. Baz annoyed me with the bit when he said signing 10+ players a year is the 'norm' at this level. It really isn't, it's just down to short-termism and **** planning.
I don't think 8-10 incomings is too far off the norm, but usually the majority of those are peripheral players that you take a chance on, with a couple that genuinely improve your first XI. Our issue is we're constantly churning our starting XI. It's why (I say apprehensively) that first summer where we ditched guys like Honeyman and Smallwood, rather than improving upon them but keeping them in the first team picture didn't make sense to me. We should have been improving the first XI gradually by shipping out the chaff, not selling off the first XI and replacing them all in one go. Boro for example last summer brought in guys like Silvera and Glover from the A-League as speculative signings, but also brought in Dieng and Latte Lath as permanent signings improving their first XI. They loaned Ayling in in January with the view to making it permanent in the summer which they've now done. We brought in Lokilo, Connolly and Allsop who we're now already selling or have sold/released, and loaned in Morton and Delap who we had no chance of signing permanently on top of that then bringing in Zaroury and Carvalho. Really we should have been targeting two layers of loans - ones we were looking to sign if they performed well, and star quality loans we had no chance of keeping but would 'top up' the squad. Not form the building blocks. I'd hope we're looking a signing permanent players to form the bulk of the XI with loanees and frees supplementing them.
