The Summer 2018 Transfer Window Rumours and Deals

[Craigy1881 79]

I think i'm personally more intrigued by who the first proper exits from the club are going to be.  That seems to have gone all quiet after the initial flurry of rumours about Windass, Tav and Morelos.

[trublusince1982 243]

1 hour ago, Gaffer said:

You're not honestly expecting that are you?  Why would we risk the future of the club by spending more than we have, and therefore repeating the mistakes of the past?  I never want us to go down that road again.  We nearly lost our club because we spent more than we could afford.  Never again hopefully!

When did we spend more than we could afford? Pretty sure the debt like all businesses was being managed. It was a tax bill that took us down

[buster. 4,808]

33 minutes ago, trublusince1982 said:

When did we spend more than we could afford? Pretty sure the debt like all businesses was being managed. It was a tax bill that took us down

The tax bill came from a wreckless approach (volume) to using EBTs and the ensuing risk that came with that. Hence, we (under Sir Duped) were committing to more than we should and 'Gaffer' rightly IMO calls it a 'mistake of the past'.

[Gaffer 1,665]

We cannot spend more than we earn.  That's got to be a basic principle we stick to, especially if we ever want to reach a point where we're not reliant on rich directors to fund us.  As long as we rely on rich guys like DK and the others, we are placing faith in their motives.  I do trust DK's motives, but we need to become self reliant to remove that risk in future.

[Crimson Dynamo 128]

22 minutes ago, Gaffer said:

We cannot spend more than we earn.  That's got to be a basic principle we stick to, especially if we ever want to reach a point where we're not reliant on rich directors to fund us.  As long as we rely on rich guys like DK and the others, we are placing faith in their motives.  I do trust DK's motives, but we need to become self reliant to remove that risk in future.

Sadly this appears to be something we are doing consistently at the moment. 

 

I fully concur that we need to move to a position where we are self funding and sustainable. 

 

I fear that will now be some time off. As we lost perhaps our best opportunity to achieve this when we were in the lower leagues.

[Gaffer 1,665]

9 minutes ago, Crimson Dynamo said:

Sadly this appears to be something we are doing consistently at the moment. 

 

I fully concur that we need to move to a position where we are self funding and sustainable. 

 

I fear that will now be some time off. As we lost perhaps our best opportunity to achieve this when we were in the lower leagues.

And yet we still have a large number of our supporters suggesting we should be spending tens of millions on the team.  We just don't have it.

[craig 5,195]

13 minutes ago, Crimson Dynamo said:

Sadly this appears to be something we are doing consistently at the moment. 

 

I fully concur that we need to move to a position where we are self funding and sustainable. 

 

I fear that will now be some time off. As we lost perhaps our best opportunity to achieve this when we were in the lower leagues.

Which is exactly what Celtic were doing, for the most part.  They weren't spending much at all because they knew they would win the league at a canter.  Which meant they could sandbag cash until we got back into the top flight.  We should have been doing similar, though with the necessity of ensuring promotion.

[DMAA 3,603]

1 hour ago, craig said:

Which is exactly what Celtic were doing, for the most part.  They weren't spending much at all because they knew they would win the league at a canter.  Which meant they could sandbag cash until we got back into the top flight.  We should have been doing similar, though with the necessity of ensuring promotion.

To be fair to the board I think the short term approach they took was largely approved of by our support and still is today. They need absolute success and they need it yesterday. So if that means signing Sandaza, Boyd, Alves, Barton etc then that’s what we’ll do. Signing players primarily with investment and the longer term in mind is not worth the risk. Building a team with 3 years time in mind is unthinkable. The irony is that you’ll often get better results today when you do this, as the likes of Leipzig have discovered and as we have discovered inversely with almost all our expensive veteran signings over the past few years delivering awful value for money. 

Edited June 6, 2018 by DMAA

[Darthter 542]

7 minutes ago, DMAA said:

To be fair to the board I think the short term approach they took was largely approved of by our support and still is today. They need absolute success and they need it yesterday. So if that means signing Sandaza, Boyd, Alves, Barton etc then that’s what we’ll do. Signing players primarily with investment and the longer term in mind is not worth the risk. Building a team with 3 years time in mind is unthinkable. The irony is that you’ll often getter better results today when you do this, as the likes of Leipzig have discovered and as we have discovered inversely with almost all our expensive veteran signings over the past few years delivering awful value for money. 

It's about finding the right balance....you plan for the long term with signings like Morelos & Rossiter, and bringing through players like McCrory, Barjonas & Beerman.  The shorter term is taken care of by signings like Alves, Dorrans & Krancjar.  The middle term is taken care of by players like Bates or other such players that can come in & improve, but will likely not last very long before being moved on.

[buster. 4,808]

49 minutes ago, Darthter said:

It's about finding the right balance....you plan for the long term with signings like Morelos & Rossiter, and bringing through players like McCrory, Barjonas & Beerman.  The shorter term is taken care of by signings like Alves, Dorrans & Krancjar.  The middle term is taken care of by players like Bates or other such players that can come in & improve, but will likely not last very long before being moved on.

Within a business plan, you can understand the need to overinvest in the football operation for several years and justify it if there are those who will commit that money. Pretty much what happened from 2015,

 

As you say it's about finding the right balance because the 'overinvestment' can only go on for a limited amount of time.

 

With that in mind, it should be partly aimed at the development side and then on the first team squad. Unfortunately, the year we played 'our joker' and committed to a figure close or at 8 figures is when we made a horlicks of it, both majority of players and management team. (That said, if we were to get say 6M or so for Morelos those mistakes would be mitigated).

 

No more 'institutional failure'................This is why Mark Allen is getting more of a say and we can only hope he does well.

 

If we spend relatively big this summer, we need to get it right.