Town boss Paul Jewell has revealed that the Blues could make their first summer signing as soon as next week. The Town manager says the club has spent the last few months quietly working on recruiting the players he needs to make the Blues more competitive next season.
Jewell said: "There are deals going on where the owner is talking to other chairmen that we’re trying to keep as discreet as possible about. There are deals in the offing, shall we say.
"I would say that some aren’t a million miles away but my experience in football is that once you start saying a deal is done, something comes along and kicks you right in the nuts.
"You’ve got to be careful. I’d rather be sat here and say ‘listen, we’ve signed two players today, this, that and the other’ than say ‘I think it’s going to get done’ because as soon as you think it’s going to get done, something happens overnight. But we are very hopeful of maybe completing a deal next week.”
The Blues boss says Town securing their divisional status relatively early has meant that work on the summer transfer dealings could get under way sooner than might have been the case: "I don’t want into rush anything, but the beauty of what the lads have done this season is that we know we’re going to be a Championship team next year and we’ve been actively trying to do that for quite some time.
"These things take time. In my experience, if you can buy players with a clear head, it’s a lot easier than buying them in the transfer window when the clock’s ticking and you end up getting players for the wrong reasons.
"If we can get the players that we want, we’ve done our homework and it’s been a bit of a long process.”
Jewell says that process began the moment he arrived at the club in January: "The identification of where we need to be better for next season has been going on since we got here. Once you know where you need to improve, you go about trying to improve that with players, clubs and agents.
"We’ve been working really hard behind the scenes trying to put things in place to get people here for next season. For that to happen, you need a little bit of luck, you need to be a little bit ahead of the game in some aspects and have a good scouting system.
"We’ve got a lot of targets that we’re looking to bring in, we’re obviously not going to get all of them, but I think it’s important that the supporters know that we’re not thinking ‘we just need one or two players to have a chance of being better next season’.
"We need four or five quality players to go straight into that team on top of what we’ve already got.”