Did we sign in the summer that have left us this season? Lopata, Dallas, Shepherd, Lofthouse. Anyone else?
TBF, I don’t think any of those were expected to feature regularly in the first team this season anyway.
The worrying thing is two of them have been in and around the squad when been fit most of the season.
If that's the case then why'd they waste budget on em when they could have signed actual players that could have contributed to us going up? They are cheap punts they hoped would plug gaps of top level departing players so they didn't have to spend money. And they've all not worked. The only one that was clearly signed as a project was lofthouse as we had several in his position already.
Cant wait for in 2 years time when folk are moaning were selling the best right back below the premier league for peanuts
Just sums up the dismal recruitment strategy Until it changes we will continue to languish in league 1
Fair point. Initially he wasn't as he was announced as for youth side. But as they failed to get anything else done to cover he's been forced into first team way sooner that anticipated.
we have actual players that can contribute to us going up, my opinion is that those 4 mentioned weren’t expected to feature much this season, they’re development players and they will have cost little. If any of them would’ve nailed a regular first team place then even better a bonus even. If going out on loan helps to ‘better them’ so be it
We needed to sign more than what we already had to get us over the line. Not add a load of cheap punts that could be useful down line. Quality over quantity needed to be the key theme this season and they went scattergun again for cheap gambles.
We also needed bodies for the U21s, which exists to provide/use ‘further down the line’ players isn’t it?
Bar shepherd who stepped up from many many levels below, these are not signings made for the long term benefit of our youth team. And we should not be spending chunks of the budget signing first team players from national league sides to fill that side. Dallas is 24 Lofthouse is 23 Lopata is 22 These are not kids with little game time. These are players with many many games at national league level and in some cases efl experience. These were not bought/signed purely for the u21s. And they would not have signed here if that was the promise to them.
These are the same kind of players if someone else signed and were successful there would be people on here and social media giving the board hell about not signing. currently they aren’t looking great but these are the kind of players we should be signing in my opinion.
Oh I don't mind them doing things like this every now and then but strengthening the first team should always be the main priority. This summer in my opinion we brought too many of that type of signing in at the expense of not adding enough to the main squad to give us a real chance of promotion. At least this January they've changed their focus and done a few to try and add quality to the first team.