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

 

The whole 'moneyball' and player trading model has seen us gradually decline, ever since the summer of 2016, when we failed to extend any contracts for the promotion winning team. It's seen us view potential signings in complete isolation, rather than making improvements or filling gaps in the squad as needed. It has led us to having many players farmed out on loan, the academy being undermined as we sign predominantly young players in, and in many times a completely lop sided squad. A raft of number 10's signed in 2017, 4 right wing backs last season being prime examples.

The only exception to this was the behind closed doors season. We had a very strong coach who knew exactly what was needed, a CEO with a football background that could work with him, and of course some money. In fact, we were probably one of very few clubs outside the Premier League still spending transfer fees that year. And it nearly got us there. If only we'd had Val for the full season, we might have got top 2.

Sadly, we followed that up with as disastrous a summer as you could imagine. Then after a bit of a rebuild, we reverted to type after Wembley. The idea that we could use the same data as available to every other club to recruit 'smarter', and therefore be able to replace a £10m back three with a mix of French lower league and UK non-league players reeked of arrogance, and belief that the club knew better than any conventional wisdom. Add to that the off pitch stuff like fanatics and Hex, then it's difficult to think the Board are anything other than useless.

My wife wants us to go to Oakwell on NYD. I'm meant to be the Barnsley fan, and I'm struggling to be enthused by the idea.

 

I'd put much of the responsibility for both of those at Khaled's door, who's now thankfully no longer part of the club. With the benefit of hindsight, he was an absolute disaster as CEO from start to finish, albeit a 'nice bloke'.

You hit the nail on the head identifying that Dane Murphy was the catalyst for much of what happened during Val's miracle season with us.

When you have remote ownership, the CEO role is pivotal.

 

I said at the end of last season we needed a 2004-style clear-out. That really laid the foundations for what Andy Ritchie and Rick Holden did in 2006. Of course we need the right head coach too, I'm really not sure Darrell Clarke is that man.

 

Agree with this.

Even under GG we were better.

Personally, I feel we now have the best CEO in years with Flatman.

Mladen has to have another summer to see what he can do.

 

This is my concern too. I fear we're about to invest a transfer window into a Head Coach who, regrettably, has shown no aptitude for player development in half a season with us, and the benefit of a full summer's pre-season with the squad.

If I look to who has shown improvement over last season, the only player I can think of is Jon Russell, brought about by a change to a more attacking midfield role. I'd have also argued that Barry Cotter was our outstanding player in the early part of the season, but he was then frozen out of the squad by Clarke and only brought back in recently when the situation was desperate.

Cotter, Craig and McCarthy are three squad members he's seemingly alienated so far. He's also been too slow to drop players when they're performing poorly (e.g. Slonina) and his track record of substitutions over the season have probably cost us more points than we've gained from them.

I'd love to be proved wrong by him, but I have huge doubts that he's the right person for the role, based on the evidence I've seen so far. I don't think his role is under threat currently, but I think he's very much a coach who needs to have players recruited who fit the specific mould he wants, which is not how we go about recruitment at BFC, where the head coach only has limited impact on recruitment.

I fear we're either going to go into a transfer window breaking the model to recruit 'Clarke players', only to be left trying to unravel that situation when he inevitably leaves by, at the latest, the end of the season, or we're going to continue with our existing recruitment model and bring in more players on a general recruitment basis whom he then struggles to develop or build a rapport with. Neither route fills me with a great deal of optimism.

 

I think the OP is right and what he is identifying is a strategic issue beyond one manager or any single player. I agree but I'll add a bit more. I can not get past the broker for our current owners being here appears to have been Conway. He sold them on an idea of making money by player trading. I think the football on the pitch is secondary to their goal. From this ethos the following consequences have (inevitably) manifested:
1. An over reliance on stats driven signings. I would imagine Shepperd and MDG for eg had very good stats for the level they were playing at. The doesn't translate to them being necessarily good at our level.
2. We sign players who we think might be good signings to make a profit on whereas the first consideration should be what is required for the team, hence a glut of centre halfs and one left back.
3. We offer long contracts and keep players hanging around on a couple of flashes of talent. I think this is FOMO. Hence Benson, Marsh and (my personal opinion I know - Jalo)
4. Our occasional forays into non stats signings aren't great - we've lost the experience/expertise, hence Cosgrove and DKD, the latter although decent in his own right doesn't fit in the present team.
5. I don't know for sure, but you can be forgiven for thinking there is interference from above in playing formations. If you employ a manager, let them get on with the job
6. They've been overtaken by events. If a player doesn't quite make it, there is no longer a market in League One (beyond about 6 clubs - who wouldn't want them if we didn't) and nothing below that
However, the greatest problem is they haven't followed their own system. Selling Kitching for what they got was good business. However, a large portion of that money should have gone into signing better prospects. Instead we get Shepherd and Lopota for next to nothing, who aren't at this level. Both of which are sapping wages without contributing anything.
They also don't follow it like other clubs do with player contracts. They've let too many run down, eg Kane. Conversation should have been with a year left, are you re-signing? No- okay sell. This is what most other clubs do.
They are in a downward spiral and I'm not sure how they get out