Jambo wrote: ↑Fri Sep 02, 2022 10:13 am
I don't think this can be emphasised enough. Yes, making a profit on players this summer was always going to happen given the sales, but we also made money in January, when we were in a dire situation and needed 2-3 quality new players to give us a fair shot. Relegation was NOT inevitable.
You are correct, it wasn't inevitable but I'm sure SD has said somewhere recently that he thought we had enough to stay up and we know that our budget (even when we had £80m in the bank as someone has quoted) would not have bought 2-3 quality new players that would have given any greater guarantee to avoid it. The players we had were experienced and I think the expectation was that we would hit some traction as we had done in previous seasons at that time of year.
15 new signings sounds great on paper but a third of them are loans, including some of our best performers so far - THB, Tella, Maatsen - so they might need to be replaced again next summer. It's early days but it looks like some of them are going to play very little part this season, despite fairly big sums being paid out to sign them (McNally being the obvious one at £2m here).
Think its been astute in what we have here - the quality of the loans will help us. It will help our other players too over the season for sure. I think some of the loans will have options to buy.
Also lots of things could happen at the end of the season - No reason why they may not get loaned again to us for another period if they have done well for their development.
No reason why VK can't buy replacements with the future budget that he has.
The players we have bought like McNally will have continued to develop this year, the squad will all have another season of experience and will better understand the system and will have demonstrated capability to play that system and we may be better positioned to refine the squad and know what we need. When you are doing this for the first time, these loans with a bit more quality and proven pedigree at playing to the level or higher than we are at buy you time.
I agree we needed new ownership but I think there are some short memories. The Garlick/Dyche partnership went stale in the end as the taps were turned off but they delivered a debt-free club that finished in the top 10 of the Premier League twice, plus a European campaign. Pace has a long way to go to achieve anything like that, so let's wait and see.
Again you are right in terms of there was a lot of success over the last 10 years and I don't think anyone has a short memory of that from what I read on here. The last few years though have really been difficult because of the previous ownership/manager (by saying that, it isn't forgetting the good that they did).
We only had a debt free club because, we didn't invest back into the squad as was really needed.
The prudence shown was right, to a degree, as you see teams spending loads of money on ineffective signings.
The owner wanted to exit whilst the stock of the club was high but couldn't find a buyer probably as quick as they would have liked. Due to this, it probably became harder to spend that cash in the bank. It's like selling your property, you prepare it for sale and don't try and make the property worse whilst you are selling.
If a cash rich owner had been found and wanted to take on Burnley without debt, they would have presented themselves in the period of time that the club was on the market for.
It became clear in the end that the only willing buyers who would offer the money required would only buy through a leveraged buy out.
I don't think for one minute that had Garlick been committed to being the owner for years to come, we would have maintained the levels of cash we had. We would therefore have done more in the transfer windows than we did and I think the relationship between him and SD would have been better given this given the priority to the chairman would have been less about devaluing his asset because it was less profitable and be more focused on having a healthy squad that could compete over the years rather than allowing to age.
However when you have ongoing discussions around selling and buying and the valuation of the asset is very much now aligned to the financial health of the club, it naturally made it harder to spend that money.
I don't agree with your final bit about saying Pace has to achieve all the things that the previous regime has to be appreciated/recognised for doing a good job.
Also think assessing the window as a whole needs to take into account the departures. We certainly sold Pope for cheap, probably sold Collins for cheap, and given some of the fees for other players going around (Morgan Gibbs-White, Chelsea offering £50m or whatever for Gordon) perhaps McNeil too. Yes, they all financed the necessary rebuild, but £10m for Pope was an absolute joke and hardly the sign of some master negotiator businessman.
It's also strange to see Pace getting so much credit when he appears to have taken a relatively hands-off approach and left it to VK. Which is fine, but we still don't know how a lot of these lads are going to adapt to the Championship. Let's see how we're going in the grind of mid-winter. VK says a lot of the right things about being here for the long haul, but if we're going well when sacking season really gets started he will get offers for sure too.
Burnley just seem to be a club that don't achieve the high values. There was also clearly an agreement in place with Pope to say if we went down, we wouldn't put barriers in his way to continue playing at the highest level. We don't know what other interest there was. Whether we value Pope at £20-30m as a Keeper. There are 20 clubs in the top flight in this country. To a degree, you are between a rock and hard place in terms of the money you can get unless you can generate a bidding war. I don't see this as a failure of our negotiations as such but more about trying to honour a commitment to a player that has served us well and find a win-win.
How much do we know about the hands on approach?
I don't know but I have seen him being around Barnfield a lot in the videos and we know that he has certainly been active with the cheque book for signings etc. He appears to be as hands on as you would want someone at that level to be. I find it really impressive that he has allowed VK and his team to influence the signings -That is what we should want. It's like saying that you want the chief exec of Centrica to influence the design and build of a boiler. You put trust in your organisation to recruit the people you believe can make the right decisions and support them. How you can see this as a negative, I don't know.
