| Season of Struggle 17:46 - Apr 26 with 2750 views | itfcsuth |
A season defined by our mistakes, both on and off the pitch.
A club is defined by its recruitment/squad building - and something we had done so well, but ultimately when we needed it most, to bridge the gap and uphill battle of the PL, we needed to identify really good players at really good prices - we didn’t get it right.
We can dissect it until the cows come home, but it’s far from complex, we simply didn’t build a good enough squad, and despite KMc incredibly abilities, even he could not perform this miracle.
We go back to the Championship, but we have hopefully learnt a lot of lessons about how to bridge that step to PL.
I’m excited to see how the summer unfolds, how we now reset the group a little and build for the next phase of the journey, which is to ultimately be a top 10 self sustainable PL side.
Players need to depart, players will arrive, with KMc remaining, it still excites me the journey ahead to our ultimate ambitions.
COYB! |  | | |  |
| Season of Struggle on 20:31 - Apr 28 with 495 views | itfcsuth |
| Season of Struggle on 14:41 - Apr 28 by jayessess |
This was my take: https://bluewhitenotes.beehiiv.com/p/new-post
I think ultimately even if we had somehow managed to put together an adequate squad to survive, the injury record would have relegated us anyway.
The big challenge for us is that you're looking to build a £250m squad from £125m spending. You either need it to be half done already or you need pretty much every transfer to be 50% under their true value. [Post edited 28 Apr 14:53]
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That’s a cracking read, only just got round to reading it but that’s a really enjoyable read!
Interesting regarding the comments in terms of the significant upgrade in individual quality than last time we were in the Championship - of course they are significantly more expensive, but im not convinced some are actual upgrades on what was already in house. | | | |
| Season of Struggle on 21:04 - Apr 28 with 464 views | jayessess |
| Season of Struggle on 20:31 - Apr 28 by itfcsuth |
That’s a cracking read, only just got round to reading it but that’s a really enjoyable read!
Interesting regarding the comments in terms of the significant upgrade in individual quality than last time we were in the Championship - of course they are significantly more expensive, but im not convinced some are actual upgrades on what was already in house. |
Thanks!
Definitely question marks over some of the new signings, but I do think sometimes it's tough (for me anyway) to fairly evaluate them relative to the promotion squad. We've all seen Nathan Broadhead, Cam Burgess, Wes Burns, Luke Woolfenden, Conor Chaplin and Christian Walton play brilliantly for us over two seasons, but always in teams that had a lot of pitch and training time together, and who could collectively punch their weight.
Think it's difficult to judge everyone's relative merits with everybody playing in an out-gunned team that really only came together late August, with some of these lads getting a lot of exposure to brutal opposition and some getting mainly cameos.
But I think a lot of them had excellent seasons as individuals in the Champ before, which is why we bought them. |  |
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| Season of Struggle on 21:21 - Apr 28 with 443 views | SuffolkPunchFC |
| Season of Struggle on 20:18 - Apr 28 by itfcsuth |
It’s not easy, it’s easy to pay big fees and wages to get Championship players down to L1, but this was the reversal of that - this is when you earn your crust in the market.
It’s a tough task, to identify real talent and undervalued prices is the art of good transfer dealing - but to suggest that it is not possible, imo it just lacks any knowledge of the wider footballing world, and the transfer markets. |
No one is saying it’s not possible, but the route you are proposing requires networking/contacts built over time (especially for top tier recruitment), comes with huge risk and those ‘uncovered gems’ often need time to develop. None of that fitted the situation we were in on being promoted, and it’s naive to believe otherwise.
As I said, it’s easy when you’re managing it like a video game … |  | | |
| Season of Struggle on 21:31 - Apr 28 with 431 views | jayessess |
| Season of Struggle on 21:21 - Apr 28 by SuffolkPunchFC |
No one is saying it’s not possible, but the route you are proposing requires networking/contacts built over time (especially for top tier recruitment), comes with huge risk and those ‘uncovered gems’ often need time to develop. None of that fitted the situation we were in on being promoted, and it’s naive to believe otherwise.
As I said, it’s easy when you’re managing it like a video game … |
I also wonder if talent ID is actually not the main thing we're lacking here. I'm sure it's easy enough to get the vital statistics for any league you want and sending a scout, watching a video won't be beyond our wit.
But look at Wolves, they're stacked with Portuguese and Brazilian players because they're hooked into a network of agents who will put them in contact with players, persuade potential targets across the globe that a move to Wolves is a good way into elite European football. Finding players who fit the bill is only half the battle. [Post edited 28 Apr 21:33]
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| Season of Struggle on 21:58 - Apr 28 with 393 views | Crawfordsboot |
| Season of Struggle on 09:16 - Apr 27 by Churchman |
Of course we didn’t have infrastructure in place to recruit effectively from abroad. We barely had a domestic scouting network three years ago. It takes time and investment to build this sort of thing in the way say Brighton have done it.
The idea of buying domestic talent is actually sound. You have a far better chance of integrating domestic players and if any footballer can be, they are a known quantity. Recruiting players at that level requires several things. A lot more money than many seem to realise. £20m is squad player/punt level for most PL clubs.
What ‘enough quality’ could we have bought with our budget, given that recruitment rarely has 100% success rate? Should we have paid £43m for Onana who was brilliant against us? Shame he put Teflon gloves on for the rest of the season.
If you say buy two midfielders like Newcastle have, even if you splash £100m on the two how are you going to pay them? Will they want to play here for a relegation threatened club with primitive training facilities and tie themselves to it? If you pay them say £150k a week, how does that work with the rest of the squad and how committed will they actually be?
If you are asking me if we fell short in recruitment I’d say yes. With the gift of hindsight, I’m sure some decisions would have been different. Midfield, which was abject, and an additional striker to name two areas. But it’s easy in the armchair, Fantasy Football and FM24 or whatever to find solutions. Bit harder for real, just as it is in real life.
In terms of needing to sell where possible to balance the books, what are your sources; what are the figures? Your post has such certainty to it and I’m genuinely interested to know how much of a financial hole/FFP hole we are in as that will affect what price we get for players under firesale and of course recruitment. [Post edited 27 Apr 9:25]
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Good to read a rational well argued observation rather than critics after the event with no real attempt to reconcile things back to financial reality.
We had not much over £100 mill to assemble a squad to compete with established premiership squads that had £100 mill plus just to top up their squads with two or three quality players. An almost impossible task for McKenna given the miracle he achieved by getting us to the prem with the squad he had.
If we get promoted again next year we will be starting from a much stronger base. |  | | |
| Season of Struggle on 07:19 - Apr 29 with 293 views | Leaky |
| Season of Struggle on 18:23 - Apr 28 by portmanking |
No, it is you that's the naive one. To think that a club that's been in League One and criminally underfunded for 10+ years would suddenly have global knowledge and contacts on par with your Brightons and Brentfords. Laughably out of touch. It simply doesn't happen overnight. Unless you're a Bloom or Benham that has access to the cold, hard data. |
Didn't we have acssess to Blooms Analytica in the Championship, however it was stopped on our promotion to the Epl as were then a rival. |  | | |
| Season of Struggle on 07:31 - Apr 29 with 271 views | Nthsuffolkblue |
| Season of Struggle on 07:19 - Apr 29 by Leaky |
Didn't we have acssess to Blooms Analytica in the Championship, however it was stopped on our promotion to the Epl as were then a rival. |
Isn't that the set of signings (once we were promoted) that is being criticised? The data had been supplied to identify signings for the Championship but was not available for those we were getting for the Premier League.
I still think that anyone who thinks Szmodics, J Clarke, Philogene, etc are not an upgrade on Harness, Sarmiento, Jackson is deluded. Let's not forget they were not brought in to replace Broadhead, Chaplin and Burns as they were all kept on. Of course, they were considered the best we could get and expected to play ahead of them. At the moment they haven't outperformed those players but they weren't available for most of the Premier League season so we will never know whether they would have done any better. That is the biggest issue. None of those players (old or new) stayed fit long enough to show what they could do and never played in a settled side. |  |
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| Season of Struggle on 10:09 - Apr 29 with 247 views | Swansea_Blue |
| Season of Struggle on 14:41 - Apr 28 by jayessess |
This was my take: https://bluewhitenotes.beehiiv.com/p/new-post
I think ultimately even if we had somehow managed to put together an adequate squad to survive, the injury record would have relegated us anyway.
The big challenge for us is that you're looking to build a £250m squad from £125m spending. You either need it to be half done already or you need pretty much every transfer to be 50% under their true value. [Post edited 28 Apr 14:53]
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That’s a great reading of the situation and a brilliant read. I really enjoyed that. The intensity stats are nuts and it makes you wonder where the upper limit is. It’s no wonder there are so many injuries. |  |
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| Season of Struggle on 21:02 - Apr 29 with 181 views | jayessess |
| Season of Struggle on 10:09 - Apr 29 by Swansea_Blue |
That’s a great reading of the situation and a brilliant read. I really enjoyed that. The intensity stats are nuts and it makes you wonder where the upper limit is. It’s no wonder there are so many injuries. |
Yeah, and possibly explains why we've had some better performances from players who haven't racked up huge amounts of minutes. They just have more in the tank! | |
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| Season of Struggle on 18:50 - Apr 30 with 67 views | Tractor_Boy333 |
| Season of Struggle on 19:35 - Apr 28 by itfcsuth |
We don’t need to bring in seasoned premiership players - our two best players this season in Delap & Cajuste are far from seasoned.
You need to bring in quality at the right price - a Cajuste for £10m is the perfect model example. Hutchinson, Philogene, Clarke & Greaves for £80m probably is at the other end of the spectrum - it’s vastly overpaying. |
Decent players with Premiership experience would have seen us close a lot more games down when we were in winning/drawing positions.
Teams like Everton came to Portman Road got ahead and just shut the game down.
No Delap and Cajuste weren’t experienced players but buying players without that experience is much more of a risk and probably explains why they weren’t all successful.
Surviving the first year after promotion is not about playing good attractive football it’s about grinding results holding onto 1-0 or 1-1 and keep accumulating points something we just weren’t able to do all season. | | | |
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