He can't be more than 90 mins from Portsmouth. I think recruitment will still depend on how much League 1 owners are prepared to dig in their own pockets to fund players. Matty Taylor won't be here next season, although there is nothing more I would want, whether we are in the championship or trying for the play offs again . After what he has achieved this season, clubs with a profile like Pompey, Peterborough and Sunderland have the buying power we can only dream of, and will buy him, offering a much higher wage which is the language Taylor speaks. We were never really in the market for a serious offer on Cadden, offering £250,000, when his club wanted £1million. With our reliance on a cycle of bring in loans, sell best players and then rebuild at the end of the season, unless we get to a point where a board member is prepared to seriously invest in the club, what would a season in the championship look like?
It's hard to get quite do much shite into one post!!
Let's start with the buying power of Sunderland? How much did they spend last season? Because according to transfer transfermarkt.com they didn't pay one transfer fee last season. Despite selling players for over £20m in the last 2 years, they've spent only around £4m on players (and most if that was pissed up the wall on Grigg). They are offloading players from their academy for peanuts having also released players on high wages. This is as close as you will get to a fire sale as SD desperately looks for a buyer to bail him out.
Then Peterborough. They rely on selling big and reinvesting in saleable assets. They're pretty good at it to be fair, and its a model that we are looking to emulate. However, the way the season ended and the uncertainty in transfer values means that they will get a fraction of what they were hoping to bring in. There is no way that they would outbid us for a player who has only one decent move left in them.
Portsmouth have a fighting chance. They were interested in the summer, and are not too far away. If neither team go up it'll be a straight fight between both clubs, but one that I think we'd win. If we go up then MT signs for us 100%. If we don't and Pompey do then he'll probably still sign for us as there are questions about his ability to cut it in the championship.
The Chris Cadden deal didn't go through because Columbus Crew got greedy. We offered £500k but they wanted a million. A further offer was made that I believe was around £600k and also where we would pay to extend the loan until the end of the season. Both were turned down and we stepped away rather than play stupid games.
However, we then showed intent by looking to pay for Stephen O'Donnell despite him being available on a free in the summer and paying a hefty loan fee and big wages to bring in Will Grigg. I said this in January, and both have since come out to confirm this. The money was very much there but our (responsible) owners refused to P**s it away.
The investment, and several million would be classed as fairly serious, is already there. We have a model that brings in young talent to develop and sell on, so we may well sell players this summer. But if you honestly think that plans aren't already in place to add to our squad then you're more deluded than I thought.
Anyway, as has been said many times before on other threads, "you can't teach stupid!"
