Town general manager of football operations Lee O’Neill has revealed that the club refreshed its scouting set-up over the summer as part of wider restructuring, which also included redundancies following relegation from the Championship.

“An area that we’ve looked at and developed and restructured which I wanted to give you a little bit more information on is the recruitment area of the football club,” O’Neill told shareholders at last night’s PLC AGM.

“Again, not a lot of people will know a lot about it but just to give you a little bit of basic understanding, we’ve restructured our recruitment from the first team all the way down.

“I don’t want to give too much away about how we do that, but the process now is that we have four full-time members of staff that look at national recruitment across the UK and Europe.

“They’re full-time looking for the next group of talented players that we can bring to Ipswich Town Football Club.

“That’s an investment into the area on where we were a few seasons ago and how we look at both the full-time recruitment staff and the part-time recruitment staff to help profile the type of players we would like to want to bring to the football club and that Paul would like to use in the team.”

Dave Bowman, who has been the club’s chief scout since 2012 but operating under the job title director of football, remains part of the recruitment structure, despite having taken on a role working with former Town boss Mick McCarthy with the Republic of Ireland squad in March.

Regarding wider changes which took place in the summer following relegation, including 14 redundancies, O’Neill added: “We needed to make some changes from last year in the restructuring process that we went through during the off-season.

“And this was to look at overhead savings. We had to make some redundancies, to look at some savings operating through this season.

“That was [partly] enabled through some of the players and their contracts having relegation clauses in their contracts for this season.

“Last season we obviously sold Martyn Waghorn and Joe Garner and that helped to generate some funds and further sell-on fees that we received for Tyrone Mings and Adam Webster [and Kieffer Moore and Matt Clarke this summer].

“It’s important to highlight that those fees in particular are spread over a number of years so it’s not necessarily straight through into the cashflow at this moment in time.”

Reflecting on the re-establishment of the Community Trust in September, O’Neill said: “We really do want to engage with the community, listen, learn and try and move things forwards together.

“Around that engagement, we’ve now got 800 players that are registered as part of the development and recruitment strategy in the local area.

“One of the initiatives that was addressed last season was when a number of other professional clubs were in and around the local area looking to get involved in what we do, because over a period of time you would have seen that in Ipswich, Suffolk and East Anglia there are a number of good young players.

“So we attacked that head-on and made sure that we are at the forefront of being in the local schools and the community to help and engage those local clubs and make sure that we do have fans for the future.”

Photo: TWTD

ArnieM added 16:51 - Dec 17 Hopefully this will mean we will be kicking scum outta our County .... and better still begin to encroach into the Darklands ourselves.
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herfie added 17:04 - Dec 17 Interesting insight. We must hope that the recruitment restructuring exercise earns its corn, by unearthing quality/potential to bring in. Constraint on any success in doing so will obviously be ME's willingness to meet prevailing market prices. Reading other output from last night's meeting suggests that - understandably given our current position? - fiscal prudence will remain the overriding mood music around the club. But I think that's something most of us have accepted whilst ME remains the only show in Town.

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ArnieM added 17:22 - Dec 17 I honestly don't think new owners would be prepared to fund the Club to the level it would require to get us to the “ promised land” . No one makes money out of a football club ( unless you're the top 0.5% ) but even then owners are pumping billions in before they get any return. It's no coincidence that clubs like Arsenal and Liverpool are now courting the Far East ( where the big bucks are). I think the game as a going concern in this Country is a ticking down clock now . Bit like the planet really . You can only continue to asset strip it for so long .

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aloanagain added 20:34 - Dec 17 800 players. Wow think of the changes we could make with all of them. Support the team. Whichever one plays.
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runningout added 21:16 - Dec 17 To be blunt our scouting has been almost non existent. The Balkans should be a destination. Seems obvious
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Razor added 10:14 - Dec 18 I think Holland is always a fruitful hunting ground----stating the obvious I know but I would like to think we have some form of representation there?
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