Just Saying

Did not Harewood & Scotland contribute that season & to be honest your list of experienced players says it all . Please remind me of how many premier league starts has Crainie had since he left us & would you prefer him back instead of our current players ?

 

I thought last year we had created a very strong L1 team rather than a championship one and nothing I’ve seen so far as changed my mind. Let’s just enjoy the ride and the good vibes for a bit and worry about the future when (or if) it’s happens.

I like the recruitment strategy and think it’s our only way forward. The contract side of things needed tweaking and if we went back up we would have to look at the wages side to compete.

Onwards and upwards

 

Agree with the majority of that apart from the assembling a good league one side .
Comments from both sets of fans have stated were well above league one standard and especially the Bradford fans who’ve been in the league awhile and most are saying we’re a Championship side and best team they’ve seen in this division for a long time .

 

Is that the same Akinfenwa that a certain poster said would score 17 plus goals in this league? I think a charity of my choice will benefit nicely from the £50 bet we had, although I don’t expect to see it......hopefully I am proved wrong.

 

But I don’t want to & I’ve not put that I want to? You’ve lost me.

Dougall’s only 25 anyway, he’s hardly deviating from the clubs recruitment strategy. If he has a couple of good seasons he’ll be in the prime of his career & commanding a big fee.

Surely the idea should be to only be signing a few each year so that in the meantime you’ve developed a core of 24-30 year old, good footballers & each season there might be a couple you move on who aren’t up to it & a couple who get sold as we’re getting good offers for them.

Just got to avoid a nightmare scenario like last summer where we had to replace virtually a full team in one window

 

We sign completely different types of young players now though.

For Potts, McGeehan, Bradshaw, Moore, Lindsay, Pinnock, Jackson etc we’re a big step up & they look hungry to play for us.

A lot of the list of young players above such as Pedersen, Mellis, Jennings, Etuhu, Cwyka & Nyatanga had been at bigger clubs than us & had at least to me questionable attitudes & were all on the way down career-wise where as the list of current ones are all on the way up.

 

Short answer regarding Harewood and Scotland. No
My post was quite clear that it was a list of all players which made 10 or more starts that season, as one of them only made 4 starts for us and the other hadn't played for us for 3 years by that point then neither of them made my list.

I'm not sure how the list of over 25s I provided 'says it all' really. In fact it says very little as for every over 25 there was a younger player equally as bad if not worse

 

I'm not arguing against that. I've always said there are two kinds of players, those going up and those going down.

My original point was that our plan is aimed at league 1 recruitment and the players being good now doesn't prove that the policy was correct in the league above. The relegation shows that it wasn't. My opinion is that we didn't deviate from the plan when our circumstances changed (ie promotion) and it ultimately sent us back down again. Hopefully if we gain promotion again we will make alterations to our criteria to reflect the hat we are in a harder league where its harder for players to jump up from non league.

My reply to red CB was simply that you can't just say old players a re **** and young are brilliant. You can't say that young are **** and old are brilliant either. The mixture is what's important and that mix has to change slightly when you are in a higher league.

 

I do not know what you are carping on about , age does not come into it , you were on about us signing experienced players , well Mowatt is an experienced Championship player but is still very young , experience is number of games , not age . i am saying that we have signed older experienced players who have failed miserably & please enlighten me again , how many premier league starts has Cranie had since he left us ?

 

12 more than us. Why? is playing 12 Premier league games the sign of a bad player these days?
Age is a huge factor in our current recruitment policy. So big a factor that Patrick himself mentioned it several times. Not sure why you are arguing against that and now claiming its nothing to do with age but I really can't be arsed with it so I'll leave you to it.

 

This is everything wrong with our recruitment strategy perfectly summed up by someone in favour of it.

In a couple of years Dougall will be in the prime of his career. I agree, most players are at their very best when they're 27-31. But we won't sign anyone over the age of 25. We won't bring in a player when they're the best they're going to be. We bring in players much younger. Not to get the best out of them, not to keep them with us when they reach their best, but to make money when they're getting to that stage. We don't want them when they're at their best, we want a profit.

And it works. We've made huge profits recently by adopting this method. And got relegated. And spent a fraction of what we've brought in. And I'm struggling to understand what's in it for the fans when we dismantle good winning teams by doing this and the profits are not reinvested.

 

.Cranie has not made 12 Premier starts at Huddersfield but likewise I cannot do with arguing with you , you make a list of players without making a point , so I agree with you , I cannot be arsed & I will leave it with you .

 

Undisclosed fees all round too just to keep supporters from knowing the truth about how much money is vanishing into a black hole

 

We've always done it because we've had to. It's been the only way we could survive. Hopefully, going forward it's going to be a slightly different story.

 

You've got a very different memory of the history of Barnsley FC than I. For the majority of the time I've watched Barnsley, I don't remember us only signing players 25 years old and younger. And the primary purpose of signings was always what they would add to the team, not for how much we could sell them at a later date. That doesn't mean we didn't sell players, but they weren't brought in with profit in mind. They were signed with football in mind.

 

I didn't mean the below 25 policy. Merely that we've always sold our best players to survive. The under 25 policy is, I believe, an attempt to work that system for maximum profit.

 

I agree entirely.

 

We signed Matt Mills last season....

But all joking aside, what would you like to see instead? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion. And others actually.

 

Concentrating on what's good for the team, not what will make money.

I have no problem with signing young talented players, who would have? But I have no problem with signing 28 year old talented players, or 30 year old talented players. We probably wouldn't make any money on a 30 year old if he played for us for 3 years and was 33 going into the last year of a 4 year contract. But I'm of the opinion we sign players for what they can give to the team for the length of their contract, that's what we're buying, not for how much money they will make us when they're half way through it.

We're always going to sell players, we always have and we always will, because there will always be bigger clubs who can tempt our better players away. But signing players with the intention of selling them, where the primary factor is profit, is not my idea of what a football team is about.

 

What’s in it for the fans?

I’d say given the skewed nature of the Championship due to the extent of the parachute payments what is in the policy for us Is sustainability and a platform. It will be an incremental process and maybe 2 steps forward and 1 step back but I don’t see another option or route to moving forward.

The rules of the game have changed. Whilst historically we may be a Championship club we are now a top 6 L1 bottom 4 Championship club. The only way out of that cycle is investment. This investment as far as I can see isn’t going to come from us the fans so it has to be generated by the club developing young talents seems to be the way to do that.

It’s true to say most players are at their best between 27-31 but someone like Hourihane may never be as good for anyone else as he was for us. Even if he is I’m happy to have seen him develop from a talented player and develop his potential to be an outstanding one.

There are few players these days that commit long term. These days we would lose Glavin or Redfearn or Banks after 18 months. Life changes we have to change with it.

If a player comes along who ticks the boxes like Hammill we have gone outside the policy so it’s not as if we will stick to it if the right player comes along.