The Daily ITK Discussion Thread - 11 August 2011

yes but players have contracts with set basic wages being paid, so if they don't want to leave and are happy not to play there isn't too much you can do if their contract is live.

Montasura said:

What I saw was indeed a young striker with bags of potential, but whose end product wasn't great and would not have complimented our system particularly well. Would he have been better than the dross we had/still have, yes. But you are kidding yourself if you think he would have been the answer to all our prayers. He would arguably have improved us, but it was not a cockup of epic proportions.

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Certainly not the answer to all our problems at all, but we're clearly having great difficulty finding any strikers at all that would improve on our current lot. He certainly would have done, and he has a bit of bite, which is something none of our current strikers have.

I thought it was an obvious mistake at the time, but said it would have been a fair enough decision if we had a striker we thought would suit our system a little better lined up for the summer. We clearly didn't.

Montasura said:

What I saw was indeed a young striker with bags of potential, but whose end product wasn't great and would not have complimented our system particularly well. Would he have been better than the dross we had/still have, yes. But you are kidding yourself if you think he would have been the answer to all our prayers. He would arguably have improved us, but it was not a cockup of epic proportions.

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Suarez has looked excellent and I would expect him to look even better this season after settling and a pre-season.

Suarez could of been our Tevez no problem, I honestly believe that.

Berglad said:

It's not just the wages of our targets that is a problem, it's the wages of our current players that we are trying to sell too. They don't want to take a paycut to leave to go to Blackburn, Stoke, Newcastle, etc, just like Adebayor or RM players want to take a paycut to come to us.

The likes of Crouch, Bentley, Keane, Defoe, and Jenas are probably all on around 45-60K a week (Palacios and Hutton maybe 30ish?), and it's tough for smaller clubs to afford that, especially given most of them are at/near the 30 year mark and they haven't been performing well recently. Given that the players also have to give up London, it'd probably take increased wages to tempt them into leaving too.

We're part of a shrinking middle class in football so it's tough to attract the stars, who all want to go to the handful at the obscenely rich clubs where they can make 2-3 times the money, yet we can't sell our average players to most other clubs because they are dirt-poor. It's also difficult to pick off upgrades from small clubs who WOULD want to come to us because those clubs are now expecting the exorbitant transfer fees being paid by the likes of Chelsea, Man United, Liverpool, Man City, Real Madrid, Barcelona and now PSG and to a lesser extent, Malaga.

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:hump: Very good post! I believe this is the situation, and if you understand that, you also understand that marquee signings are not easily done. Have faith and patience!

the thing that strikes me most is that last year we WAS in the cl and the only 'marquee' signing we managed to secure was vdv at the very last minute!, so what can we realistically expect this summer.

Agent ITK linking us with Higuain.

Ronaldo is more likely to leave than Higuain.

The fans would riot if he left.

I just want the season to start now..I really fancied getting off the flyer against Everton and getting some confidence in. I was hoping that PAV or JD would knock a goal or two in and turn the focus back to football and away from this transfer spec and lack of strikers but even that is not going for us and we are straight in the deep end.
Are we going to end up with the Redrov situation, when we sell one or two of our strikers and not replace them. However much I don't rate Crouch I would rather keep him if he is not going to be replaced..same with Robbie. My fear is we sell and are left with JD and PV...and no one else.

Mr Pink said:

Suarez has looked excellent and I would expect him to look even better this season after settling and a pre-season.

Suarez could of been our Tevez no problem, I honestly believe that.

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Well he didn't have a pre-season as he was at the Copa America. Although he looked really sharp there, i wouldn't be suprised if he burned out before the end of the season.

13VanDerBale13 said:

the thing that strikes me most is that last year we WAS in the cl and the only 'marquee' signing we managed to secure was vdv at the very last minute!, so what can we realistically expect this summer.

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Well, I surely don't know, and I guess no one here really knows. That's why I think we should have faith in DL and HR, and give them the time that is probably necessary.

isn't it about time we re-signed darren bent?

Goldman said:

Well he didn't have a pre-season as he was at the Copa America. Although he looked really sharp there, i wouldn't be suprised if he burned out before the end of the season.

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Good point - but even better :wink:, but yeah could well feel the effects later on in the season.

Sort of think we need to get our finger out very quickly now as come deadline day we could be bottom with no points!

CAS_GG said:

Sort of think we need to get our finger out very quickly now as come deadline day we could be bottom with no points!

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Thats very possible.

agrdavidsfan said:

:lol:

Oh well no new signings then hope jd,pav,crouch start scoring

And sorry luka for not matching your ambition and trying to convince you to stay!

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have to agree with this we look out of our depth not like a team who mean business

Can't believe that we have not made any real signings so far. I say 'so far' as I am sure that come the 1st September we will have a couple of major signings.

Completely understand where we are as a club - we need to lose some of the squad, we need to recoup some money and then we can look to purchase (just a shame no-one is buying up our fringe players), but it is frustrating as a fan to see the likes of Liverpool, Man U and even Sunderland strengthening. On the other side of the coin, they are the only clubs who have really spent in the market this summer.

Trying to keep positive as I believe in the club - I am sure that we are working hard to make things happen. Problem being that Levy as a businessman needs to ensure that he gets the best deal for the club, whereas I am sure that Harry just wants the players in, but nevertheless I still believe that we will be in a strong position come the end of the window.

Shame that things have gone quiet on Diarra. I hope this happens. To have him and Sandro would give us a world class defensive midfield pairing and would provide a superb platform for our more attack minded players to cause chaos for the opposition.

In terms of strikers, I would love to have Ade, but again it has gone a bit quiet on that front. We all know this is where we need to upgrade. Harry knows this, I just think it is a matter of time. I believe in POTL, and believe that something major will happen - unfortunately we all have to bide our time.

I don't think the wages from the extra players are as big a deal as people are making them out to be. Even with them we are running at a very healthy wage to revenue ratio. I am contemplating paying the 600 pounds to get the D&T report, but if go back to school I can get it for 60 pounds. So the numbers that I last remember are a few years old and we were around 42% then (that could be wrong and stand to be corrected) and I would imagine we are still 50% or under even now. Although without CL next year that might start dipping over the 50% mark if we don't clear some. Overall, you should be under 60% and we are well under that.

The big thing is that we have a 28 man squad (I believe that Livermore, Walker and Rose are U21, but correct me if I am wrong). So we have to get rid of 3 by season's end no matter what, whether an actual sale or a loan (although with those we might be forced to pay some of the wages). Add to that, we want to add at least one forward and are pursuing a midfielder and we have to move up to 5. I don't know who allowed Bale and GDS to age a year, but they really hurt us with that one :wink:

Now logically, we can see that Hutton, Keane and GDS are the most likely to go. Bentley will probably have to be a loan (with us picking up some wages), would be my guess. I hope I am wrong. So of those, only Keane is really saving us a large chunk on wages (unless we can move Bentley outright), but that will still help some. So if we get rid of them, we have room for a forward. But if we add anybody else, it becomes tricky. We get rid of Bassong as he seems to want, then we are deceptively short at center-half with our injury record to CB's. Niko is another option, as he deserves to be a starter for someone, but if he goes, having just noted Bentley and GDS as most-likey exits, we become thin on the flanks (especially as we won't have Pienaar back until October possibly). But since we have brought in a forward under this scenario, we have 5 and we need to get rid of 1 of them as we can't have 5.

So this is just me thinking as I type, but you see how much more complicated it is for management than simply switching Palacios for Diarra. In fact, CM and FB are the two spots we don't need another player. So adding one there, really does throw things into an even more complicated situation.

I think we all feel frustrated that nothing has happened. That's natural, and I don't begrudge anybody feeling it. And I realize (and agree) that some of these outs should have taken place earlier. But as it stands, they didn't. And this fact makes transfers more complicated at the moment. We want to pare the squad, but we don't want to risk being thin in any area or overstaffed in another. So let's try to understand that's the squad size is an issue that does cause us problems. Hopefully these ITK are right and we move 3 by tomorrow and can start thinking of actually having space for someone.

Mr Pink said:

lets try and be positive and acknowledge we have the best squad in years, and just maybe we'll improve it the before the window closes.

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If not we'll go backwards

Cant help thinking we've cocked up here, with this waiting game.
We're chasing similar players to the Scum - even more so now, as they are desperate.

(Diarra excepted)

Once again we'll have to wait while a CL club has first picks.

Sorry but I cant see any team or squad improvement this window

We have to remain positive and i truly do believe before Aug 31st we WILL have one or two new faces to improve the squad even if we manage not to shift any. We are in a better postion than Arsenal who are about to lose their 2 best and creative players of the sort of calibre they cannot replace!!

sparx100 said:

Can't believe that we have not made any real signings so far. I say 'so far' as I am sure that come the 1st September we will have a couple of major signings.

Completely understand where we are as a club - we need to lose some of the squad, we need to recoup some money and then we can look to purchase (just a shame no-one is buying up our fringe players), but it is frustrating as a fan to see the likes of Liverpool, Man U and even Sunderland strengthening. On the other side of the coin, they are the only clubs who have really spent in the market this summer.

Trying to keep positive as I believe in the club - I am sure that we are working hard to make things happen. Problem being that Levy as a businessman needs to ensure that he gets the best deal for the club, whereas I am sure that Harry just wants the players in, but nevertheless I still believe that we will be in a strong position come the end of the window.

Shame that things have gone quiet on Diarra. I hope this happens. To have him and Sandro would give us a world class defensive midfield pairing and would provide a superb platform for our more attack minded players to cause chaos for the opposition.

In terms of strikers, I would love to have Ade, but again it has gone a bit quiet on that front. We all know this is where we need to upgrade. Harry knows this, I just think it is a matter of time. I believe in POTL, and believe that something major will happen - unfortunately we all have to bide our time.

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Awesome post, makes 100% sense and is exactly how I feel too.