Scouting Department / Summer Transfer Window

ShootersHillGuru said:

Quite honestly I don’t think either Olaofe and Apter will feature for us if we retain our Championship status. We have to be looking to sign some players who are already championship quality. Players like Clarke and Bell. Knibbs I think would be a useful Championship squad player and a starter in league one. JRC possibly. Jury still very much out on Charlie Kelman but it’s undeniable that he’s been at best disappointing. For all of those players it’s which league we find ourselves in that will define their Charlton futures. Whoever decided that we put all our eggs in signing league one punts made a pretty big mistake in my view. Our meagre transfer budget wasn’t spent wisely. Of course that’s with the benefit of hindsight but nonetheless it’s not worked out. Lots of speculation that our future transfer dealings might include some foreign spice off the back of Sichenje signing and the link before Christmas of Fukuda but that’ll be on the back burner again I would think should we be relegated. I’m hoping that we can persuade Liverpool to loan us Chambers next season because he looks to be a good player. In my humble opinion we haven’t really started to build the foundations of a Championship squad. I think we’ll be looking at turning around best part of a dozen players in and out again in the summer to give us a good chance of avoiding another relegation battle. Basically it’s about what league we’ll be in. Ipswich’s fate might work for us with Clarke. Definitely surplus should they go up and should they fail then they might want to upgrade him in any case. 

The thing is, I don't think we put all our eggs in the L1 punts basket, I think we had a small budget and had to identify sufficient players to cover ourselves within that budget. Realistically you are going to need to sign players from the division below or on free transfers to do that while not being able to offer the highest wages. Below is our squad, with summer signings in bold and January additions in italics. If you remove the signings then it's a pretty stark indicator of just how much business we had to do. 

GK - Mannion, AMB, Kaminski, Brooks
RWB - Apter, Bree, Clarke
RCB - Ramsay, Burke, Sichenje
CB - Jones
LCB - Gillesphey, Bell
LWB - Edwards, Chambers, Fevrier
CDM - Coventry, Anderson, Coady
CM - Docherty, JRC
CM - Carey, Knibbs, Berry
CF - Leaburn, Godden, Dykes 
CF - Kelman, Campbell, Olaofe

We lost Small due to an expired contract but other than that we didn't have anyone wrenched away from us. We allowed the players who weren't good enough at L1 level to move on - Mitchell, Watson, Ahadme, Taylor, Chuks - and that left us with two keepers, neither of whom Jones initially felt were good enough to be number 1 in L1, no RWBs at all, one defender for each centre back spot, one LWB, four centre mids and three forwards, one of whom we knew was going to be injured for at least the start of the season even if we didn't know how long he'd end up being out for. Leaburn is also very injury prone. That's 13 players and two of them are backup keepers at Championship level. We made 10 signings by the deadline and it still didn't give us sufficient cover for every position; we didn't have a spare LWB and there wasn't proper cover for Jones, especially given Burke and Ramsay were all but guaranteed to have spells out. Since the summer we've had to replace Bree, had to sign two players to cover Edwards because Bell can't be risked at LWB, had to get proper cover for Coventry and had to sign a more experienced target man. And these were essentials to fill gaps again rather than add ons for a full squad. A lot of this is the knock-on effect of going up so quickly.

With that in mind the summer transfer brief was to sign a Championship number 1, get two RWBs in, at least one of which should be a left-footer who can provide goals and assists playing higher up, someone who can cover Ramsay and Jones, a better LCB, two attacking midfielders as Berry is 33, another central midfielder to compete with or replace Docherty, two strikers and a LWB. We didn't even get a LWB as we'd reached our limit and there weren't any free players who were good enough. Hernandez and Roussillon proved that nicely. Joe Bennett was considered and he now plays for Walton & Hersham. Not every signing is going to work out anyway, but on top of that you have to add that the small budget was being spread so thin across so many signings. I don't think we just set a strategy of the best of L1, I think that's what you can afford when you have to do that much work. Birmingham spent the equivalent of almost our whole budget on Furuhashi and he's scored 1 goal for them (and that was against Wendies so does it even count?). I think we've done alright given the limitations, we've managed to add some experience to the squad who have essentially no resale value but got them cheap - Kaminski, Bell, Burke, JRC - and then spent more on younger players who we intend to improve over their time with us and probably sell on later. You gamble on every signing you make, a couple haven't worked out so far but we'll see at the end of the season.

If we stay up then the summer window will be the interesting one. We'll lose the loanees and maybe Dykes, Godden and Berry. That should leave us with 21 players and the chance to spend the budget on fewer, hopefully better players and moving on the spare player we think is least suited to the division. You'd hope that would be Gillesphey out and someone in there, an improvement in the Docherty/JRC space, ideally Clarke back and then an assessment of Apter and Olaofe to see if they have anything to contribute at Championship level for us. This summer was always going to see us have to stretch our budget further than a team should at this level. We could have done better in some spots but right now I think overall we've put together a competitive squad at the very least