When love Breaks Down - Player Trading and its failures

To be fair it's a hard league to get out of, took sheffield united 6 seasons, Ipswich 3 or 4 and Sunderland 4 wih much bigger budgets than ours. With those players we should have sold when values were high same with some of the players we have now.

 

To me, the biggest flaw in the trading model is that almost all clubs from lower Championship down are doing it. Even with clubs like Chelsea hoovering up plenty of players, there isn’t enough transfer activity to sustain a trading market of 50-60 clubs.

Why not just focus on coaching and let the transfer window take care of itself?

 

im not convinced anyone would give us more than a couple of hundred grand for any of them.

 

Connell and phillip especially after the duff season but I'd say many players have gone backwards

 

Recruitment team and academy living on past glories, Morris, Hourihanes, Kitchen, etc for the recruitment team. Stones for the Academy. Sadly their lucks now run out.

 

Good post. I think we have been left behind now in the footballing hierarchy. Not because we don't have much money to invest but we seem to have lost the ability to punch above our weight. The spreadsheet model and the ‘sign young and hungry players’ has been done better by other clubs. We havent found a way to progress and differentiate. Im not sure players see us as an attractive career option or even stepping stone.

We have developed some bad habits in our trading model that we need to break. Can’t help but think we missed a chance to progress in not appointing and experienced footballing person to director of football and eventually diluted the role. One thing we are significantly lacking at the board table is a footballing experienced person.

 

The sad fact is that we’re not allowed to have good players because if they are any good someone will pay them more than we can afford.
Some will say “pay them more” but the truth is we can’t as that would put us in trouble - a position I don’t want us to be in.

 

Excellent post. I have a few differences of opinion on some of the players you've listed, but on an initial read I'd say that I agree with about 90% of what you've written, and it sums up our current predicament very well, as gloomy an outlook as that is.

This is the crux of the issue for the club at the moment. I'm 100% caught in the apathy trap at present, and it's becoming very easy to not bother with the 50 mile round trip to Oakwell on matchdays, simply because the experience of the last 12 months doing so has been so utterly miserable on the whole. I'm already likely to move to a flexi ticket approach next season, rather than continuing with a season ticket, as it no longer makes financial sense to keep buying one. The on-field offering is helping to crystallise that thought process.

I've had times previously when I've been furious with the decisions taken by those in charge of the club, and one occasion that has resulted in me withdrawing any financial input into it, which ended when Conway and Lee were removed from the Board. I can't recall a time where I've had such a prolonged feeling of "meh" as to what the club are doing on and off the pitch and, as you correctly point out, I think that's a bigger issue for the club when it's clear that there are several thousand others with similar sentiments, judging purely by the announced attendances vs the eyeball scan of the empty seats in the stands.

 

The players we sign has changed, now we're signing the likes of 27 year old Cosgrove and linked with Neil Ennis who's had one good season. Instead of the young and hungry we've gone the opposite way.

 

What does that look like in practice?

 

Paying more for a better quality of coaching staff rather than spreading a salary budget thinly across several departments, particularly player recruitment.

 

Have you not seen the balance sheet we are already in trouble