Blues CEO Mark Ashton has spoken about how the club goes about identifying and assessing potential new recruits.
Much has been made of the strong team spirit and close-knit nature of the squad over the last couple of years and Ashton, speaking to Life’s a Pitch TV, says it’s vital to bring in the right individuals.
"I think character is a huge part of it,” he said. "You guys [Life’s a Pitch TV’s legends-in-residence Terry Butcher and Russell Osman] will have played in dressing rooms where one bad egg will cause carnage, and we haven’t got that, we genuinely haven’t.
"We do a lot of research, we do a lot of media research. We look at a lot of social media, who they follow, who follows them, who their friends are, what their movements are, what type of lifestyle they live.
"And then we talk to people who have played with them, people who have coached them, clubs they’ve been at, teams they’ve been in. That grows more and more so you almost have a dossier on them.
"It’s a growing part. With social media now, you can do much more due diligence. The character assessment of the player coming in is absolutely key.
"[Manager] Kieran [McKenna] obviously leads on the technical, tactical side and there’s report after report after report.
"There’s more and more data that can be viewed now. But with data, for me, it’s always a balance. It’s a balance between the objective and the subjective. Data’s only part of it.
"We’d never sign a player just on data. The data will lead you to a player, or a lot of the time the data will tell you who not to sign rather than who to sign. It’s only very small part of it is the data. A lot of it is still on the eye.”