According to his interview in The Star

@Loko the Tyke the big difference in approach has been the level of fees paid in the last three or four years. Admittedly nowhere near other championship teams but a significant step up to previous policy.

The concern has to be that the money came in for the likes of Pinnock, Roberts, Mawson, Lindsay and Moore but it’s hard to see where the £10M+ spent will be recovered. There was similar turnover under the previous regime but very few came for anything like £1m. You need to go back to the signings of Sheron and Hulme for that level of incoming fee. In fact thinking about it very few of our bigger signings have been a success based on expectation (Ward/Hignett excluded).

The use of data is not unique to Barnsley, every club uses it to varying degrees in their recruitment approach. As always on here it’s either one side or the other the truth is somewhere in the middle.

 

But this is where we diverge. If the objective of the owners is to build value by making profit on players sales then their strategy is not working.

COVID hit transfer fees to clubs below the premier league but spending in the highest league continued unabated. As a championship club looking to trade players the natural purchaser has to be top flight to maximise value.

If the owners are not adding value through player sales, operationally the club is losing money, what are they going to do and why are they here?

 

I think the other thing to mention is that the alleged on the field ambition of our owners has been to stabilise us in the championship. There are games to go and strange things have happened before, so it can't be ruled out that we'll survive, however unlikely given the first 2/3 of the season, but by the simple measure of the table, that will be a failure. And as a result, their "strategy" is a failure.

It would be a failure at any time given it was their aim, but to be straight on the heels of a season at play off level, it feels more criminal than failure.

 

Why do you think that is? Is it our scouting system or just that the big premier academies hoover up all the prospects in the entire North ahead of us? Or something else?
I wonder if a lot of white working class English kids simply don't play anymore?

 

I am particularly looking forward to the publication of our Accounts for season 2020-21. The club will undoubtedly have lost money heavily and the resolution of the Angus McDonald disagreement with Hull City will be a heavy charge on top of those losses. It is my theory that there was very little spare cash for incoming transfers, especially as there were few outgoing ones. The compensation for Ismael's departure to West Brom may simply have funded the payment of existing debt, leaving very little to fund the purchase of replacements of those who left. The transfer fees for Iseka, Benson etc may have been bargain basement, rather than the unconfirmed numbers reported.

 

I have a few suggestions and theories Wakeyred.

Tom Wooster joined Manchester United 14 months ago. Previously James Bree Tom Clare Jordan Clark.... all turned down that move to Manchester (City and United).

When you read things like that happening it doesn't look good on the academy.

Should be a easy sell to keep the better youth at Barnsley

 

I think there is always the pull of the big club - and I'm sure they make the hard sell to these kids parents, but there are counter argument to this. My friend was a scout for Burnley and helped run academy training in Leeds for them. When parents would say they're signing for City or Utd he'd say - thats fine but be aware that they probably won't even play competitive games at the academy level as they will be one person in a hundred that's on the books - they most certainly won't get the same attention and one-on-one coaching you get at a smaller setup and this can effect their development and ultimately their chances of making it professionally, and finally if you think your son is going to be as good as Wayne Rooney at football, by all means sign for Man City, because thats the only way he's going to get first team football with them, meanwhile you'll get farmed out to other random clubs for experience and you just don't know what the quality of coaching is there and how that will work out - stay with us and you are much more likely to get the first team and if you're good enough then sure, the premier league awaits and you'll inevitably get transferred.

 

Whatever we paid for Oulare in wages was ridiculous 8k a week was quoted for sitting on his fat ass. Summer trading was low but other than Gomes, who has taken a long time to come up to speed we may as well have not bothered.

You run a football club & you have a leader & captain in midfield that you cannot retain. You "do nothing" to quote the Specials & sign 4 players, non of which are ready to even start the season. I can't say "Conway Out", as don't have the money. I think we will find out their model of being a football puppy farm will work better for them in L1, or ever L2. They have no knowledge of the championship & are not willing to pay for it.

 

Don't they have more knowledge of the championship than any other league?

 

Have the filing dates returned to normal? I'd guess so, and if so (unless they'd rather take a fine), they should be filing within the fortnight.

 

I believe they have, and early March is when I expect to see them.

 

Never has so much excitement built on the release of a football club’s accounts. This even eclipses the long awaited set from S6 when they sold the ground and tried to back date it.

I’m going for a loss of around £1m with no payment to the Crynes.

I really should get a more interesting hobby

 

Another reason the head coach is bad

 

Won't it be the Struber fee (c. 2m euros?) that is in the 2020/21 accounts and Val in the 2021/22 ones? There's also the Jacob Brown income for 2020/21's accounts too, say £2m, plus whatever Ostend paid for McGeehan (maybe £3-400kish). Together with the cash from player value amortisation (£2.5m in 2019/20 as a rough guide) that probably outweighs the outlay on players, the main elements of which were fees for Frieser, Helik, Brittain, Kane, Kitching and Morris and the loan fees for James and Dike.

It will be interesting to see, if it is indeed evident, how much more of the McDonald costs are to come in 2020/21 and whether/how Conway's £500k play-off 'cost' materialises. There will also be some Covid costs too. So it looks like a loss but I'm thinking in the £1m to £1.5m range purely because it would seem difficult with bigger losses to see how they didn't go overdrawn with only £770k in the bank at the start of the year.

However, I will be interested ('cos I'm that groovy kind of guy!) to see how the debtors for transfer fees figure moves. One of the notable things from the 2018/19 accounts was how these increased by £2.5m and then stayed at the higher level in 2019/20, suggesting to me that not only do we not obtain the size of fees for players that many of us feel we should, but we may also give the receiving clubs longer to pay than they give us! However, realising some of the cash tied up in these debtors may also provide some cash offset to a (bigger) 2020/21 loss.

Lastly the treatment or non-treatment of what will be the next £1m for the Crynes to follow the £750k will be intriguing. There will have been no payment but surely they can't just ignore the matter and/or the court case in the notes to the accounts?