General Replanning 2020

wonder if the board have plans in place for a replacement manger? .....the attrocious timing of their decision to cash in on two young, fit players & the boards lack of ambition demonstrated in their failure to bring in suitable/any replacements could conceivably result in Robinson looking elsewhere & moving on to pastures new?:unsure:
 
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.

With the transfer window showing that there is a gulf between us and a group of six or so who will be trying to squeeze into the two automatic spots, I’m hopeful we can end the season on the good note but am more prepared that we’re in all likelihood going to be in League 1 with a A420 derby to look forward to. There’s no shame in that. There are some big clubs in the division this season – Ipswich, Sunderland, Portsmouth and some sides that are really gathering pace like Coventry, Peterborough and Rotherham. Before a ball was kicked, I predicted us to finish 14th so we’re up on that I suppose.

As others have alluded to, the stadium is the albatross around our neck. No revenues from it c. £500,000-750,000 taken just for playing there every couple of weeks. It’s crippling for a club of our size. DE jumped ship when he knew that his resources wouldn’t stretch to sorting it out and Tiger et al are now in the same boat. Stay, go, play elsewhere – whatever happens, Oxford United will struggle beyond this level unless it can be sorted.
 
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.
 
Pretty much agree with all of the previous two posts on the thread from unification & RyanioBirdio.

If you look beyond a lot of the white noise on these boards or the knee jerk reactions from ‘Paul’ on RadOx regarding the merits of Jamie Mackie or Dan Ageyi, and the dissecting of every utterance from Robinson or Zaki.

What’s really important is the sustainability player trading model that had been successful under Eales, and more recently Tiger has continued , and that means further investment in younger players this summer. Dickie and Brannigan almost certainly won’t be here next season, big shoes to fill.

The other source of young players is of course the academy, investment has been impressive, we need a few more Baptiste’s to break through.

It looks as if Tiger has reached the same point as Eales regarding his ability to fund the football club in a higher league. Sorting out the stadium to the the clubs advantage is a key factor in being remotely competitive in the Championship.
 
The trading model works - if I was being hyper critical I think we have under sold in the past and mis-managed contracts in the final year...we will have the same with Dickie and Brannagan in the summer. Tbh, I think it should be club policy if players show no sign of signing a new contract with 12 months remaining then sell. The Dunkley/Rothwell/Nelson thing is poor all round.

To add to previous comments, acquiring an actual analysis department with more than one guy and a director of football is imperative if we are committing to this model. You can’t half a**e it. There are teams in our league far ahead of us in this regard and it’s pretty clear which ones. I don’t think paying a couple of analysts, for example 40/50k each (pretty optimistic!) to unearth the next Whyte, or pluck a player out of a prem academy for peanuts and sell for millions. Likewise a dedication DoF...surely whatever you pay is more than returned by having a sensible experienced negotiator?
 
The trading model works - if I was being hyper critical I think we have under sold in the past and mis-managed contracts in the final year...we will have the same with Dickie and Brannagan in the summer. Tbh, I think it should be club policy if players show no sign of signing a new contract with 12 months remaining then sell. The Dunkley/Rothwell/Nelson thing is poor all round.

To add to previous comments, acquiring an actual analysis department with more than one guy and a director of football is imperative if we are committing to this model. You can’t half a**e it. There are teams in our league far ahead of us in this regard and it’s pretty clear which ones. I don’t think paying a couple of analysts, for example 40/50k each (pretty optimistic!) to unearth the next Whyte, or pluck a player out of a prem academy for peanuts and sell for millions. Likewise a dedication DoF...surely whatever you pay is more than returned by having a sensible experienced negotiator?
You can build an entire recruitment department made up of a mixture of analysts and scouts, of several people, for less than £200,000 a year in wages. That’s the equivalent of one player on less than 4k a week, which at L1 level these days is fairly common. Only these people are charged with working exclusively for you, full time, on finding talent to buy, develop and sell for a profit while serving you well on the pitch. Subtract the initial fee for Gavin Whyte and the sell-on that his former club will have received from when he was sold on, and you could pay for this entire department for over half a decade without another penny coming in. A decent DOF would cost you another 100k or more a year just for their salary, maybe even double that these days, but again, they’re probably going to be more than worth it and more than pay for themselves via the deals they get done. This has been asked for already - Steve Gallen was specifically identified for that very role. “He can get players on loan from Arsenal for £500 when we would have to pay £5,000, purely because of the relationships he’s got with their recruitment team.” That was an exact line from Karl Robinson while he was stood in the projector room at the training ground nearly 18 months ago. Again, we have no assets but the players, so this is an incredibly key area. You could sell 5,000 season tickets at an average price of £300 and the revenue would be £1.5m. One player sale done right makes more profit than that. People can talk about spending other people’s money all they like - this is generating money. If people want to call for and buy into claims of sustainability, this is a very positive way of doing that.

Feed the model. Just remember that when it takes a dump, it needs to eat again.
 
The trading model works - if I was being hyper critical I think we have under sold in the past and mis-managed contracts in the final year...we will have the same with Dickie and Brannagan in the summer. Tbh, I think it should be club policy if players show no sign of signing a new contract with 12 months remaining then sell. The Dunkley/Rothwell/Nelson thing is poor all round.

Maybe so, but we may have put each of those player up for sale but were offered peanuts (quite likely with Nelson who was coming back from a long term injury), why would we take it?

There is a balance to be struck between the value of the player to the team vs the sale value. Did we have a better season last year because Nelson was in the team? Would we have been better off with the "small" amount of money and had to find another centre-back?
 
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.
Entirely correct. This is what Peterborough have done successfully for a number of years. They also sell any player who is entering the last 12 months of his contract and is refusing to sign. But..... for the model to work, you have to re-invest. Unless you buy the story that Tiger 'bought' Dickie and Brannigan for the club before he acquired OUFC (really?!), then he has sold (my maths may be a fraction out) c. £6m of players and has invested c. £300-400k. And that's being generous. Dickie and Brannigan will both be off in the Summer. We will be left with a squad where most of the 'talent' has been sold, with a Board that blinked when it had the chance of success. It has been done to death on this, and other, threads... but the sale of Fosu and Baptiste on deadline day was quite ridiculous, and spoke volumes. Tiger can bluster all he likes, but you really have to question what his long term plans are for the club.
 
I don't think we have too much to lose this summer. We all know it's likely that Dickie and Brannagan will be off (and maybe Eastwood too), but if we stick at our model, we have some decent players still on our books.

Stevens, Long, Moore, Atkinson, Ruffels, Hanson, Gorrin, Sykes, Henry, Forde and Agyei will all probably be here next season, some contracts depending. It's an ok XI, would be good if we can get Taylor in on a permanent deal. I'm not sure about Hall or Napa's future, but I think Hall's a decent backup option and Napa will probably be loaned out.

I think Mousinho probably has another year in him, but I can't see Mackie continuing for us as a player, but maybe in the backroom. Also, Thorne's playing for free and is out of contract in the summer, so if he proves his fitness and form then I'd like to see us sign him if we can afford him (not on pay as you play, but certainly with a performance incentive incase an injury strikes).

I do hope we don't sign a bucket full of loan players, but if we get in four we wouldn't need so many new permanent players in. In the past couple of seasons we've been signing players too late in the window. For loans that's allowable as we're going to be getting loanees from Premier League clubs who'll be playing preseasons without players at the Euros, but for permanent players we have to try and get them in asap to integrate.
 
Stevens, Long, Moore, Atkinson, Ruffels, Hanson, Gorrin, Sykes, Henry, Forde and Agyei will all probably be here next season, some contracts depending.

Whyte, Baptiste, Fosu. Previously Lego, CoD, Roofe. Etc. All sold for values north of £1M.

They above players highlighted are decent, but how many of them are likely to attract bids in that range?
 
Whyte, Baptiste, Fosu. Previously Lego, CoD, Roofe. Etc. All sold for values north of £1M.

They above players highlighted are decent, but how many of them are likely to attract bids in that range?

At present the only one anywhere near that would be Gorrin, and don't really think that's reality.
 
This is potentially controversial but from what I’ve seen I would suggest that the model worked far better under Mapp and Slippery than it has done under KR and Tiger, like others have said, it felt more of a production line in the nicest possible sense under the previous stewardship

We need to have a serious raid of the Premier League academies youngsters this summer
 
Unless you buy the story that Tiger 'bought' Dickie and Brannigan for the club before he acquired OUFC (really?!), then he has sold (my maths may be a fraction out) c. £6m of players and has invested c. £300-400k. And that's being generous.

When DE sold the club he wrote into the deal that he wanted the money back from the sales of those players he brought into the club. This did not include Dickie and Brannagan. Also, their deals was done at the same time that DE was finalising the sale of the club, so wasn't looking at spending anymore.

So, Tiger did fund the purchases of Brannagan and Dickie (really!!), along with Hanson, Whyte, Sykes, Gorrin, Moore, Fosu, Agyei, Forde, Atkinson and a number of youth players.

Do you honestly think that these players have cost a (generous) total of £300-400k? We spent that on Hanson alone!!!

And what do you think our operating costs have been over the last 2 years? Including arbitration, training ground and paying of DE, Tiger and co. are several million in the red despite these sales.

So it's one thing to criticise the transfer window, or the business model, but making up the figures only undermines your point.
 
When DE sold the club he wrote into the deal that he wanted the money back from the sales of those players he brought into the club. This did not include Dickie and Brannagan. Also, their deals was done at the same time that DE was finalising the sale of the club, so wasn't looking at spending anymore.

So, Tiger did fund the purchases of Brannagan and Dickie (really!!), along with Hanson, Whyte, Sykes, Gorrin, Moore, Fosu, Agyei, Forde, Atkinson and a number of youth players.

Do you honestly think that these players have cost a (generous) total of £300-400k? We spent that on Hanson alone!!!

And what do you think our operating costs have been over the last 2 years? Including arbitration, training ground and paying of DE, Tiger and co. are several million in the red despite these sales.

So it's one thing to criticise the transfer window, or the business model, but making up the figures only undermines your point.
Do you really think that Tiger has a long-term 'vision' for this club?!?!
 
Reading different views on player sales and recruitment it’s quite interesting.
I know we have to sell to survive but the thought that the Championship is a target I think is well of the mark, up until the beginning of January we seem to be everyone’s darling ie “ the best team to visit or a team definitely on the top two.”
Unfortunately that shop has now sailed as has probably a play off finish, is that down to the two players sold at the eleventh hour? Of course not we should have plenty in the tank to cover that scenario. Alas we don’t seem to have the cover, 2 positions we required in the January transfer window a striker and a full back we’re not fulfilled could/ has that cost us a chance for a playoff place? Possibly.
I’ve said it before and to some that might be seen a monotonous.
if we sell every transfer window to survive that’s all well and good but it shows a bit of a lack in ambition which Tiger, Zaki, and NMW have been harping on about all season.

people will right we are building a side for the future, IL kept on saying every fans forum I have a 5 year plan, ive forgotten how many years he was with us but I’m sure after his first “ 5 year plan “ 5?year haelapsed.

Could we survive in the championship probably not, would we have gained better sponsorship and investment definitely in which case if managed well the extra sponsorship and investment would and could have been used for us to make an effort in which to stay in the championship, this in turn would lead to better sponsorship and investment. But until someone is prepared to take a chance we will never know.
 
Back
Top Bottom