The model has to stay as it is. Outside of ticket sales, how else does OUFC make money? We’ve signed ‘one for the future’ with Rob Atkinson in the window and I fully expect and hope we see another few Mark Sykes, Gavin Whytes, Cameron Brannagans etc join us in the summer. We’ve been a conveyor belt for young players to kick on and that’s the way it has to be for us. It works, it generates profit and as long as you have more hits than misses, it keeps the wolf from the door. If Brannagan, Dickie et al are going to be sold this summer, I’d hope that the scouts and management team are already having conversations with youngsters to replace them.
Absolutely agree - I’ve been a vocal supporter of the model for a very long time and used to stick up for it when other people used to flip a nut. It’s exactly what we need to do and what I think every club should look to do.
So long as it is maintained through reinvestment.
We sold Roofe and COD for around £4.5m in 2016, and we then signed Johnson, Ledson, Rothwell and Nelson to name but a few that summer, for the best part of £1m. Although we stupidly let Nelson walk away for free in the end, Johnson alone fetched us £3m, while Ledson’s fee and Rothwell’s compensation fetched the best part of another £1m. Whyte might have been undersold at £2m odd but given he cost less than a tenth of that, it’s another win for the model in principle. Dickie and Brannagan were brought in a couple of years back and need to be sold, although with 12 months left on their deals this summer we won’t get what we could and possibly should have for them. But they’ll still make a profit versus outlay.
What is key is that the reinvestment continues. We’re down to the last two or three pieces of silver at present, and this summer we need a few more. Maybe Atkinson will turn out to be a gem, maybe he won’t. Ditto Moore. For every Roofe and Johnson there is a Hemmings and a Hanson. You can’t get it all right. But you do need to keep trying.
This summer we need a few promising permanent signings to call our own - assets that we can develop and sell - to continue to be remotely sustainable, and hopefully competitive in our division along the way. There’s no reason not to do that - Whyte, Fosu and Baptiste have brought in some £5m between them since last summer and therefore even with annual losses to offset and the fees we did pay for a few (Fosu initially, Moore, Agyei’s compo etc) we should still be very much in the black. We should certainly have a bit of a nest egg ready to reinvest, especially when you add in cup runs that are worth an extra half a million or so. In theory the disappointment of the way the January window was handled should at least leave us in a good position put things right between May and the end of August. We can’t change the past, but we can certainly presume that’s the plan for the future.
What we don’t want is a situation where the board are happy to sell off what’s left of the silver and not commit to properly reinvesting, because they’re sat waiting to see if they’re going to get their land development or not, and in the meantime they want to let it keep itself going and also recoup some of the previous outlay while they wait to see the outcome. If they were to be theoretically saying “We will give it another year and by then we will know if it’s likely to happen or not, and if not then at least we can cut and run and know that it paid for itself for the final 18 months or so, and that we cashed in all the assets we had available”, then it would leave us in quite the precarious situation. Considering the players are the only assets the club has, I find it strange that so many people think it’s weird to worry about the stockpile running low. I find it really fascinating that several people seem to be going “Don’t worry about the amount of assets that the club has, just trust the board, they’re good guys” while at the same time those people are also some of the first ones saying “We need to be sustainable!” Yes, we do, which we can’t be without a healthy stable of sellable assets in the here and now. What’s the point in talking about the stadium situation 24/7 when even if it got the green light today it would take several years to complete? How do we survive in the meantime? We need players that we own, and when we sell them they need to be replaced. That’s really, really important.
The model is most definitely not to be feared, so long as it is properly managed and maintained. You sell a hot dog, you buy some more buns. I’m looking forward to what should be a really busy and promising summer transfer window as a result.