Redcar Red, I totally agree with your assessment of the transfer situation at the moment, maybe things will start to move along when players return next week. I also think NW has things going on in the background that the club will be playing close to themselves and I would not be surprised if a player out of the blue turned up, maybe more than one. In today’s market, patience is the name of the game for MFC, which is even harder for the fans with so much misinformation and speculation going about.
Come on BORO.
All Clubs will be trying to hang onto their best Players and those that they do sell or have to sell will want top dollar for their asset just as we would. Likewise negotiating with the Player and his Agent in the current environment is not going to be easy with all the uncertainty going on in the world around us especially as the Player will likely be looking for a pay rise.
Boro have joined the race for Ipswich forward Gwion Edwards, who has entered the final year of his contract at Portman Road,
OFB
Boro have joined the race for Ipswich forward Gwion Edwards, who has entered the final year of his contract at Portman Road,
OFB
I hope its the egg and spoon race!
@redcarred. If MFC are involved some one is bound to end up with egg on their face! 😃😎
It should be all quiet on the transfer front. It's a buyer's market and it would be folly to rush in and flash the cash.
Given the awful season we have just had and the inconsistency of most of our players, I don't see any big money coming our way. We certainly don't have anyone who could walk straight into a Premier League team, and given the way in which Burnley caught a cold over Ben Gibson, it's unlikely that any other club will want to undertake that kind of gamble with another of our players any time soon.
Tav and Fry will certainly generate some interest, but they are not yet £8-10 million pound players and we should hang on to them for anything less. Similarly McNair, Saville and Britt won't fetch the money we paid for them or get better contracts so there may be less movement there in the short term than we might hope
In the lower divisions all too many players will be finding themselves in the situation of Marcus Maddison, a sought after £2million player only twelve months ago, and now playing non-league football in order to stay fit, while he desperately seeks a club.
As in wider society there will be too many players seeking too few jobs at greatly reduced rates. Football needed a reality check, but this will be brutal and there will be large numbers of pros at our level more deserving of pity than envy.
Cash will not only be king, but an increasingly scarce commodity as the majority of clubs outside the Premier League, deprived of gate receipts, struggle to survive.
Only fools will be rushing in with large amounts of cash at the moment. I hope we do not fall into that category. It's been one of our major failings in the past. Do it again now and we may not have much of a future.
So it's boring at the moment. But perhaps that's how it should be.
Warnock should be prepared to work largely with what he has.
@lenmasterman Another good post and a very truthful assessment IMO Len.
The UK's Private Sector, of which Football Clubs are part off, will probably see devastating reductions in employment numbers. This section of business that generally makes up the UK GDP and pays for the Public Service Sector could struggle for a longtime to come. In fact it may never return to how in was post Covid.
Eventually the Government will not be able to borrow anymore money and Public Sector cuts could follow including tax rises. Football outside of the EPL, well you do not have to be an accountant!!
@pedro we may see the return of semi professionals, Plumbers, Teachers and Firemen during the week and Footballers on a Saturday afternoon!
Tumbleweed
Careful, the recruitment dept will be looking for him.....
” Who’s this tumbleweed character, is he a foreign player”
I would keep my powder dry and wait until the greed of players and agent's turns to panic as they realise the financial climate has changed.
I would not be paying a transfer fee at the moment, there may be no need.
This could play into Boros hands as SG has always bankrolled our club.
Not sure that a lot of our rivals will with no gate money coming in.
I cant see many championship club breaching FFP going forward. 13m per year with very little income.
Careful, the recruitment dept will be looking for him.....
” Who’s this tumbleweed character, is he a foreign player”
He may be on the recruitment teams radar
A certain centre forward of ours is keen to tumble rather than rumble, he has been known to stumble. While the Boro attack crumble.
Seriously, I have not been impressed with any of the rumours and links. As more and more targets opt for other clubs I breath a sigh of relief.
Only Junior Hoillet raised my eyebrows but he is inconsistant and not getting any younger.
Lower league players are a risk and the lad from Wigan is hardly prolific for 2m.
There seems to be more talent in the click bait sites that quote " 10 out of contract players Boro could sign"
Maybe the " recruitment team" should have a look at these. Save the hard yards.
I am not seeing anyone linked that are better than Clayton, Ayala, Friend, Shotton, Roberts.
If we are not going to upgrade on these players then we may as well have them back on reduced wages and let NW try and shape them into a winning team.
@billy. Good post and I agree with you that none of the names mentioned have set my pulse racing.
The Wigan guy would have given us varying options up front but as you say he is not prolific and hasn't scored more than our current incumbents. Most of his goals have been at a lower level and whilst he had a relatively good season last season with 10, he needs to prove he can do it consistently. I can think of plenty who have been one season wonders.
The Northampton lad sounds promising and I am slightly disappointed that we haven't pressed that one home given our dire need to rebuild the defence. Sometimes you need to bite the bullet, waiting too long could be even costlier.
I also agree with you regarding the out of contract players but I don't see us having any luck with them.
GF spent sometime after the last home game sitting in the dug out and looking around the stadium and I suspect reminiscing in the knowledge that he had probably played his last home game for us.
I have an uneasy feeling in my water that we shall see, yet again, another underwhelming performance on the recruitment front. 😎
@k-p-in-spain I think as Len outlined above finances in Football are an unknown quantity and without any quantifiable income coming in any time soon are probably about to get a lot worse. No doubt there will be some in the game like Ayala (who has priced himself out of Swansea even talking to him) with heads up derrieres and others like Maddison who realise that things have changed.
I think a lot of Clubs will have underwhelming transfer windows until reality hits home to Players and their Agents alike. Apparently Moore was wanting £25K a week, if true that's ridiculous and most of us would have gone mental had we agreed to that. Its leaking from Northampton that they are now looking for something North of a £1M for Goode. I'm guessing that there are other CB's out there for that sort of money that are a lot better. Indeed we may even have two of them in Stubbs and Woods, their only drawback is a lack of years and leadership qualities but we may have to go with them.
Towards the end of the window we might see some loosening of expectations and therefore some movement.
Can't say I'm bothered about missing out on Moore. I think RR's right in that there'll be a lot of brinksmanship over the next few weeks. I mean Goode may do what he says on the tin but is he actually any better and more experienced than Stubbs? I honestly don't know.
We are looking for battle-scarred Championship veterans rather than more Dijksteels. Dijksteel may come good in the end but bear in mind that we paid £2m for one of the supposed stars of league one and he has struggled to make a step up. We can't afford to keep on doing that.
Personally, if we could negotiate paying say £10K a week in wages for the likes of Gibson and Hugill on loan then they seem like Warnock players, you know they would put in the effort and that they (Hugill in particular) can claim to be in the top tier of Championship players. Of course their clubs want to sell them but who in the Premier league is going to buy them and who in the championship is willing to pay them £40K a week? We might find that there are a lot of premier league loans of that type available next year as clubs find they can no longer shift the players who are surplus to requirements.
In some ways I feel surprisingly optimistic about next season. I actually feel that our squad is pretty strong with some gaps, the club's finances are probably ok compared to most and Warnock seems to have a good sense of how to build a team.
If we are going to proceed in the same old way in the market, then we will get what we have been getting for some time now.
I want to be surprised by every buy or addition to our squad that our manager makes. No chat, no speculation, no bluster, no nonsense. His First signing was like that, so let's keep to that method. It was interesting that some people at the club started grumbling that they had been sniffing around the deal. Hhhm! The present tribulations of football (self inflicted) should be a perfect background for a real hands on dealer, though, as ever, no over age players, no difficult players, no recovering players, slam your ear to the ground and act quickly when striking gold, and that may be the most difficult thing to do.
Give the academy kids a go. Fans love the local youngsters to perform. Forget top six which in my opinion is unrealistic, I’d settle for 10th to 14th. At the moment I’d be more concerned about a second wave of coronavirus in the winter.
Give the academy kids a go. Fans love the local youngsters to perform. Forget top six which in my opinion is unrealistic, I’d settle for 10th to 14th. At the moment I’d be more concerned about a second wave of coronavirus in the winter.
You sound like Woodgate, Ken. Up the Boro!
Maybe look at it this way:
Stojanovic
Djiksteel Fry Hall Coulson
Spence Wing Howson Browne
Tavernier
Fletcher
Sub in Saville, McNair, Assombalonga, maybe even Friend and Johnson as you see fit.
Is that a worse team than we fielded last season? Ok, maybe a bit with no Ayala or Randolph (for the first half a season). Roberts made a pretty big impact in s small amount of appearances.
Then swap Woodgate and Keane for Warnock and his team.
I’m thinking we’re better than last year even with only the one new signing.
Any new players are a bonus.
One player I would like to have back, if we could afford him would be Patrick Roberts.
I’m not scaremongering but although football is not a contact sport like rugby it is disturbing to find out that 8 members of Hull FC have tested positive for coronavirus this week. It would appear that it was caused although not confirmed that a child of one of the Hull staff was admitted to hospital probably with the virus and the father contacted it on visiting him or her. As a parent one can understand the father of a child being worried about the hospitalisation of his child and no criticism should be levied on him, but it has caused chaos in this weekend’s fixtures and resulted in Hull’s last opponents also having to postpone this week’s match.
Whether this could happen in football I don’t know, but one thing comes to mind-it is imperative that children are aware of what coronavirus means albeit I understand how difficult it must be to keep young children indoors. However we have several instances such as in Aberdeen of more sports players deliberately flouting safety regulations. Most people have been sensible but it only takes a few irresponsible people to flout the government’s guidelines and chaos can ensue. We’ve come this far in fighting Covid 19, but I would hope that particularly the younger generation of footballers are mindful of what could happen if a second wave of coronavirus should occur this winter and put the whole country back to square one. We need to react as a nation to come together as most of my parents generation did during the Second World War.
I hope this doesn’t sound too dramatic but I’m becoming concerned for old people having to face a second wave of coronavirus more than I am about sport being played behind closed doors for another season.
I imagine the easiest way for Championship clubs to cut the wage bill would be to return any on-loan Prem players to their home club. We’re this to happen en masse it could have an interesting effect on the finances of clubs such as Chelsea whose policy has been to stockpile young talent. It may see a further flooding of the market as Prem clubs release these players as their contracts run down and result in a further depreciation of players wages.
Also, in AV’s piece in the Gazette on the new financial reality for players and agents, NW is quoted saying ‘Division 3’.
While making me smile and wonder if younger readers understood what tier he was referring to, it also indicates how old school NW is in his thinking.
There are elements of old school football which don’t appeal. Racism, abuse, misogyny, financial misconduct and more which I hope football will eventually rid itself of. However there are elements of old school such as under-complicating the game, and being bluntly honest in media interviews, I’m happy to keep.
During his short-lived tenure NW seems very much in the 2nd camp.
In my compilation of football statistics especially concerning Boro I still use the original formula of First, Second, Third and Fourth Divisions. In totalling historical results I ignore points gained because more matches were played with 2 points for a win, so I only show numbers of matches played, won, drawn and lost, plus goals for and against.