aggi wrote:I'd argue that the type of signing that has been extremely successful for us has been the investment signing.
Fletcher, Austin, Trippier, Mee, Ings, Vokes, Barnes, Keane, Gray, Tarkowski,Pope,(Hendrick to a lesser extent), Taylor - we signed at least one promising player in their early twenties pretty much every season. That was good for the team in that we had players who'd been trained in the tactics ready to come through and good for the finances because we made a lot of money on them.
Taking the view that we can't afford to do that might work in the short-term but we'll come unstuck eventually.
I would agree with you - that sort of signing has been successful for us. But firstly, the market has changed a bit, as we've discussed. And secondly, it's not the case that we've stopped adding players to the squad who revitalise it from beneath and might turn a profit: whilst no-one would claim last summer was a roaring success, Gibson in particular was of that ilk (25 when we signed him) and still might be (as you rightly point out, some of those players have previously come through after a bedding in year); it's also only July this year and there's 5 weeks till the window closes, so we may very well do that business again; and in any event, I'm not sure we can exclude from this conversation players who come up from within like Dwight McNeil - and who knows, there might be another one or two in the system.