Rebuild summer 2024

People often cite the difficult second album for bands, but for footballers sometimes the second season is easier?

Hinton, Lescott, Elliott, Walker and Campbell were much, much better in their second season (mitigating factors such as change of manager, but some of them were actually playing out of position).

For Brown, moving to a new city, not knowing many people, the effect of the court case, being partially blamed for the fall out with Her Game Too, all that must have an effect.

I must admit I thought he was being signed as Collins replacement. Who knows, maybe he was told that, the £1million bid did not come in and he was then told he was going be a squad player.

All great for your confidence.

I suspect if he is here this time next season he will have accumulated many more goals and assists than he has currently.

Pretty much the model now in most teams below the championship I think , most teams seem to have quite a bit of a shake up in the off season. 

Haha! Think he’s been playing injured for a few weeks now which may be good timing as I’m not sure he gets back in with our new superstar!

Someone posted similar thoughts on Twitter yesterday and specifically mentioned the capacity in the squad is taken up by loans and we shouldn't have them. Because Pl teams vacuum any talent at such a young age it forces all clubs to take loans and all clubs in our league do it.

Top 6 clubs with loans:

Bolton, Stevenage 5 loans in.

Portsmouth, Derby, Barnsley, Oxford 4 players.

P'boro have 3.

What causes our continual rebuild is 2 fold. Not having a DOF with a good scouting network which is built into the club where young talent is monitored, signed and developed. Giving contracts to older players or with players with low appearance rating due to injuries.

Peterborough have a good model to follow. Players in the last year of any contract are transfer listed, a player is signed to the TL players position and he is either phased out or sold, JCH as an example. On top of that they recruit a youngster to the same position and develop them seeing whether he has what it takes to replace the player that's next in line.

That model works well for developing players as well as increasing transfer revenue. Any transfer revenue that is made is then reinvested straight into the squad.

It's no surprise that of the top 6 they have the least amount of loans (3) and that one of them, Mason-Clarke is a loan back after selling him to Coventry this window.

It's a model that took Brentford and Luton to be prem and will be successful for us if the club had the vision to develop it.

If you look at some of the recent signings we have made (Not including the Jan Window) we have given deals to players which have an average appearance of 22 games per season across their careers and they have been signed as what would be classed as first choice players.

When that happens what it means is that you are pretty much guaranteed not to see those players for over half a season for the duration of their contract, regardless of how talented these players might be when they do appear.

The likes of Wilson, Grant Ward, Hunt, Rossiter, Friend are all good players, but aren't consistent enough or fit enough to be reliable. Would any of these players sign for P'boro? No.

Ian Atkins had a motto of only signing players that had played 30 games a season 3 times in 4. The side that Trolls inherited hardly had an injury for 2 years. Teams that get promoted do so because their first choice picks play together so regularly that their unit becomes unbreakable, reliable and it builds the team momentum.

If we want to be successful we need a change of approach and hopefully MT, using his knowledge from Exeter can drive that change with us.

Last season Plymouth won the league with a lot of loan players starting most games. They signed 2 of them on permanents this season and another returned on loan. This season they have a lot of loan players starting again.

We signed Thomas, Taylor and Connolly after loans and we tried to sign Gibson but he choose to go to Plymouth instead and has been one of their best players this season.

I agree developing your own players is key as well. We signed Conseh with a view to doing that, Jed Ward has started the last few games.

But there is no reason, why you can't have a lot of loan players in the squad as well. A lot of clubs sign them on permanents after, as their clubs want to cash in while they can and don't know if they will make it

We all remember how important Anderson was when we went up. But Taylor, Connolly and Thomas all played a role for us and are now our players. Even Spence got some key goals against Walsall although he did nothing else apart from that.

Last season Bogarde did okay for us and returned this season, although he was disappointing.

If he's the only bloke in the room he'd have one with his own shadow.

Only when it’s something I feel passionate about. Topper changes his opinion like the wind 👍🏻

But can we afford a shift or do we have to gamble on potentially injury prone players and loan signings? Just look at this window we paid a big transfer fee for a DCM and the only other signings were loan players.

There's also the pressure from fans to be successful, so we can't bring in many of the likes of Gordon hoping that he can develop over a couple of seasons.

MT will do well to sign up to a dozen 20+ year old L1 standard players who have no prior injury issues. So far the one he has signed has cost us £300K in transfer fees alone.