KentVillan

A lot of people are talking about suggested spending limits for this transfer window (£100m or £150m or whatever). I think that's too simplistic. Spending £100m on 23-year-olds with lots of potential to improve is different from throwing cash at established talent. It's an investment. We only need one or two of those players to become targets for Champions League clubs, and we've more than justified the original spend. What we were doing before was signing older players on the cheap and young players on loans. It makes your overall transfer spend look much lower, but that's money you'll never see again - the older players can't be sold on, and any improvement in the young players is a gift to the parent club. So once you take age into account, I think most of our transfer fees sound very sensible.

I don't see how we can sign Kalvin Phillips without offering him and Leeds more cash than is sensible. They're favourites for automatic promotion, so from a footballing perspective, he might as well stay for one more season. This feels a lot like Spurs coming in for Grealish. Yes Leeds will have a price, but it'll be **** you money.

Well if someone offered £1bn for McGinn I would sell him tbh. Thanks mate, you've just made us FFP compliant to do whatever the **** we want forever.

Not all of them will, no, but we seem to be building a squad with good depth across each position, rather than relying on a few big money signings to carry the team. So long as a decent number of these signings manage to step up, we'll be in good shape. There's a long history of players performing well in the Prem immediately after a good Championship season. It's usually players from foreign leagues who take longer to adapt.

Moneyball is about buying below value and selling above value. The raw figures are irrelevant. If we think McGinn is worth more to us today than £50m then we won't sell him, regardless of the 1820% profit on offer (you missed a zero ). That still fits the Moneyball model.

Agree £50m isn't enough, but I don't think we're getting fleeced at all with the players we've bought. The market has inflated, and all our big fees have been on young players who will have good resale value. Wait until the end of the transfer window and you'll get a clearer perspective on our spend. I expect there to be some really massive fees from the big boys, and plenty of £50m+ transfers from mid-table teams.

What we paid for him makes no odds. It's his value to us now that matters. In the current inflated market can we replace McGinn with that £50m? Not sure we can tbh. It's a bit like when people get excited about their house price going up by 50%. Yeah nice one, then when you sell it, you discover that all the houses you want to live in have also gone up by 50%.

Yeah agree we need another CB, but with Mings we can at least put a team out. We have no options at DM, unless you count Hourihane who will be so out of his depth it'll be painful to watch. Hope Kalvin Phillips is good enough.

Assuming Targett is done and dusted, Wesley gets his work permit, Mings eventually gets over the line, and Butland or some other GK is signed... Then our massive, massive priority should be a defensive midfielder, and I would like to see us push out the boat here, because it really could decide our season. Who have we been linked with? And who should we be looking at?

Nah. Buying the younger keeper gives you the option. Remember, we might outgrow him or he might outgrow us, but either way it will have been a sensible investment. Buying the older keeper means whatever happens you'll have to find a replacement.

Anyone who thinks £14m* is overpaying for a 23-year-old with proven Premier League quality specialising in one of our weakest positions is still living in the nineties. This is a par price for any half-decent player at this level. My only concern with Targett is he's already missed a whole season with a hamstring injury. Not an expert on this, but pingy hamstrings seem to be something that only get worse with age, and either lead to a lot of time out of action, or playing within themselves to protect it. I still think he'll turn out to be a useful signing, and we have Neil Taylor and Kourtney Hause as backup options if he does get injured, so it's not that big a risk. (edit: or £11m or £17m including add-ons... whatever it is)

In an attempt to get this back on topic, worth having a look through the 2018 transfer window: https://www.premierleague.com/news/667700 You can see some of the different strategies (or lack of) from teams that were in the mid-table / relegation mix: Bournemouth's best signing was David Brooks from Sheffield Utd for £11.5m, no Premier League experience. Burnley mostly bought players from the Championship. Their worst signing was Joe Hart from Man City. Fulham only signed players from top-tier sides, with the exception of Joe Ryan from Bristol. Disastrous. Leicester are probably a level up from these sides, but their best signing was James Maddison from Norwich for £20m, again no Premier League experience. Also, there aren't actually that many transfers between 2 Premier League sides. When they do happen, it's usually an out-of-favour player being dumped by the top sides. I suppose if you're playing regularly, the last thing you want to do is step down into a relegation battle. So I think our strategy of mainly shopping around the Championship and the more obscure European leagues makes sense for now, until we're able to attract experienced top-flight players who are moving out of ambition rather than desperation.

Is it a decent squad, or has a top class manager brought the best out of them? He's turned Ciaran Clark into a much defender than the one I remember. Anyway, if you were one of Newcastle's better players, now would be the ideal time to escape to a more stable club before things go downhill?

Is it just me or are a few of our rivals doing us a favour? Newcastle will be one of the favourites to go down now with Benitez gone. They're about to discover how much of a difference he made. Graham Potter is a really interesting coach, but that Brighton squad is old and was tailored towards Hughton's percentage football. I think they sowed the seeds for relegation last year, by letting Hughton buy his own men. It feels very similar to the Bruce -> DS transition, at a much more unforgiving level of football. Sheffield Utd have a great manager and did well last year, but everything about them screams relegation. Lack of resources, a style designed for the Championship... Billy Sharp is 33 now. I think the recent thing about the PL being the big 6 and everyone else fighting relegation will change a bit next season. I could see 3 or 4 tiers of teams emerging quite early on in the season. So it might be possible to avoid relegation just by staying ahead of 3 or 4 teams that have self-destructed, even if we struggle in most of our games.

While the LGBTQ Brigade (Birmingham Battalion) definitely won't investigate John Gregory's criminal fantasies against Dwight Yorke, whether they happened 20 years ago or today, I'm also intrigued by what angle you think the West Mids Mental Health Police would be taking here.

Last season the discussion was framed around him being one of our star players. Now we're looking at him as a squad player. Yes, we're stepping up a level, but the bar is still probably a bit lower for a PL backup striker than a Championship striker leading the line for a team chasing automatic promotion. Kodj has a better record in the Championship than Ashley Barnes, for example, who is the same age as him, and that's someone who's managing to start regularly in the PL now. Not saying he's going to set the world on fire, but most of the teams we're up against have about 3-4 specialist strikers in their squad, and Kodj seems at a comparable level to a lot of the 3rd choice players. Have a look at teams like Burnley, Bournemouth, Watford. They all have someone who is a 15-20 goal player in the Championship.

We'll have no players left if we go down that route.

I think Kodj is a team player in terms of his attitude, but he's not a natural team player in a footballing sense, hence the disagreement in this thread. I don't see him as the type of player who can play anywhere in the front 3 or behind the striker, setting up goals, doing defensive work, creating space for others. It just isn't his game. That's why he's struggled a bit under DS, because DS wants a striker who is more than just a goal threat. Still think he'll do some useful stuff for us next season. He plays without fear, and he doesn't mind feeding off scraps. Could be a bit of a wildcard. (And has just scored against South Africa)

The transfer market has gone the way of all financial markets -- information is much easier to source, aggregate and analyse, so finding a unique edge is harder, and the size of any edge you find is smaller. So I'd be surprised if our scouting network starts pulling loads of rabbits out of hats. It's more likely that we'll just go for consistency, finding good fits for the playing style, minimising injury risk, avoiding expensive marquee signings, and structuring contracts well so that we don't bleed cash on failures like Micah Richards. That would already be a huge step up from the old regime. In the financial markets, you'll get the odd hedge fund manager who has a good run of form, like Neil Woodford, and they're seen as some kind of superstar stock picker. Then when they try to replicate the success, all it takes is a few gambles to fail, and they look like mugs. Same story with scouting. There's no magic formula. Steve Walsh at Leicester discovered Kante, Vardy and Mahrez. Got sacked by Everton trying to pull off the same trick. Everybody has access to the same data, the same videos, the same tips. What we can sell to incoming players is a happy dressing room, a big stadium and fan base, a manager who plays good football, and a financially stable, well-run business. We might be the only relegation-threatened team that offers that, so I reckon that's our edge more than any kind of fancy scouting network. But it's unlikely Suso's going to unearth some kid playing second tier football in Albania who turns out to be the next Pirlo.

Yep, and GK isn't the kind of position that you necessarily need a full pre-season with anyway. I think some of the other transfers we'll want to act quickly so that we can work with the players properly before the season starts.

The height thing has come up because people say Steer at 6'2 is too short for the Premier League. Which is bollocks. The problem with Steer is he hasn't proved he has the ability to step up a level, and it's a big risk going into next season with a questionable keeper who can't be replaced until January. I do think we're going to spend a lot more time defending set pieces next season, and extra height will be a useful attribute, but not the be all and end all.

A "huge mistake" or just not quite the player people thought he would be 5 years ago? There will be at least 5 worse keepers in the PL than him next season. He'll be better than Forster, Ryan, Hennessey, Dubravka, and whoever ends up in goal for Sheffield Utd, and you can argue about most of the rest. Don't see this as a big risk. Don't think his injury is hampering him now, although it might have delayed his development a bit. Only a huge mistake if we pay well over the odds for him IMO.

Outside the elite clubs (none of which he has played for) I'm not sure things are always as advanced as you think.

Yep totally agree. Would love him to sign. He's proved on his rare outings in the Premier League that he can compete at that level, and he was superb for us last season. But I think we need plenty of cover, as I don't see him as a 40 game a season player.

Thanks for the extra info, interesting. I'm not really talking about the major injuries, but about the fact he often seems to pick up niggles (which make you more vulnerable to major injuries, anyway). Seen several Bournemouth fans mention this point - that he often looks like he's carrying a knock when he plays. Was worth it to drag this thread off announce Mings.