Deal or no deal? - Summer 2022 Transfer gossip!

[GhostoftheBok]

Evatt said in January that we pushed to get some of those deals done in order to avoid bidding wars in summer. This shows that he and Markham were right and the board was right to back them early. Obviously, there was some bullshit there as we also did it because we were worried we'd go down without reinforcements (Evatt could never admit that), but there was also a lot of truth.

You could thus argue that any first choice players we get in this window are a bonus; but that won't get us promoted. Recruitment is king etc etc.

Every time we miss a player it makes us a little bit less likely to achieve our goals for the season.

[BWFC_Insane]

Every club in England even the very very richest ones will miss their top targets many times. You have to get on with it. It’s a proper test of the manager and recruitment teams. This summer was always going to be toughest because it relies on pure judgement of Evatt and his time rather than just bringing in what we can.

The fact is that if we don’t go up this season I think it’s a big disappointment considering the squad we have even now as it stands.

[GhostoftheBok]

Every club in England even the very very richest ones will miss their top targets many times. You have to get on with it.

That's not really the point.

What matters is how often it happens, comparatively, and how you do vs your rivals.

If you average out over 5-10 years then there are two factors that dictate how well clubs do. Wage spending and target acquisition. The two are often related, for obvious reasons, but the clubs that defy the wage spend division tables are the ones with high target acquisition.

We don't have high spend for this level, so our target acquisition needs to be excellent for us to RELIABLY have success.

That means we might not get the most prized players in the window, but we absolutely need to get the ones that most fit our needs.

Every first choice target we miss is a bigger deal for us than, say, Ipswich; because we can't just go and spend money to match the quality of the target we lost.

Recruitment matters.

[Bruce Rioja]

Every time we miss a player it makes us a little bit less likely to achieve our goals for the season.

More so when we miss out to the likes of Milton Keynes. Like you said earlier, that 15 point gap just got a little wider.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Every time we miss a player it makes us a little bit less likely to achieve our goals for the season.

More so when we miss out to the likes of Milton Keynes. Like you said earlier, that 15 point gap just got a little wider.

If Nixon's right that Twine is being chased by three Champo clubs, that'll spike their guns a whole lot. Sure, they'll have money to replace him, but it's hard to replace 20 goals and 13 assists.

[GhostoftheBok]

If Nixon's right that Twine is being chased by three Champo clubs, that'll spike their guns a whole lot. Sure, they'll have money to replace him, but it's hard to replace 20 goals and 13 assists.

Will be interesting to see how teams view Dapo's best role going forward and whether any of those who miss Twine see Dapo as another option.

In the meantime, I wonder if there's been any follow up on the chatter that we spoke to Woodburn's reps. That lad's career really has gone fully off the rails.

[Worthy4England]

Every time we miss a player it makes us a little bit less likely to achieve our goals for the season.

More so when we miss out to the likes of Milton Keynes. Like you said earlier, that 15 point gap just got a little wider.

If Nixon's right that Twine is being chased by three Champo clubs, that'll spike their guns a whole lot. Sure, they'll have money to replace him, but it's hard to replace 20 goals and 13 assists.

And I guess that's part and parcel. Could've sworn I read somewhere Sheff U offered £2.2m for Big Ric. I assume we've upped his salary too over 3 years...So we could've had money, but chose not to...

[GhostoftheBok]

And I guess that's part and parcel. Could've sworn I read somewhere Sheff U offered £2.2m for Big Ric.

Definitely didn't happen, that one. Not sure where you saw it (I think I saw people discussing it on Twitter), but Sheff Utd didn't have Rico on their list this summer.

[GhostoftheBok]

I don’t think Marc Iles was trying to hint anything with the 23 number. Couple of younger ones there so I’m told. So if it’s 21 we expected (not sure which ones got longer rest) then I suspect there aren’t any new additions there as of yet.

He thought he'd noticed something interesting, but you're right that there are no new lads in the mix.

[TANGODANCER]

Neymar, Messi, De Bruen and Ronaldo have all declined invitations to play in League One . This means that potential Champions and promotion candidates, Bolton Wanderers, may have to go with the words of the new Four Seasons club song " Let's hang on to what we've got". This despite the club fat man with a flag, dropping a solid hint his sister in law had seen had seen Gary Cahill in a Karaoke bar in Farnworth with David Wheater...

Seriously, I'm of the mind that there may be a grain of truth in the "what we've got" element. We've always known that we were the poor relations and that Carr's Pasties can be bought on distant shores like er, well, anywhere and not just in Bolton and the new club motto, "Service my Car" actually relates to Cars and not Carr's. We do have a solid, decent side and once we accept that backward somersaults are not absolutely necessary in a wing-back, we might start concentrating who to leave out, rather than select; an option we haven't had for a while. As ever, time will undoubtedly tell. Meanwhile, COME ON YOU WHITES...

Amen..

[Worthy4England]

And I guess that's part and parcel. Could've sworn I read somewhere Sheff U offered £2.2m for Big Ric.

Definitely didn't happen, that one. Not sure where you saw it (I think I saw people discussing it on Twitter), but Sheff Utd didn't have Rico on their list this summer.

It almost certainly won't have been twitter! thought it was BEN or MEN...but now you mention it, buggered if I can find it.

[TANGODANCER]

Can't find anything on Big Ric anywhere, but:

Sheffield United have had a £2m bid accepted for Wigan's Antonee Robinson
twitter.com/SkySpo...

[BWFC_Insane]

Every club in England even the very very richest ones will miss their top targets many times. You have to get on with it.

That's not really the point.

What matters is how often it happens, comparatively, and how you do vs your rivals.

If you average out over 5-10 years then there are two factors that dictate how well clubs do. Wage spending and target acquisition. The two are often related, for obvious reasons, but the clubs that defy the wage spend division tables are the ones with high target acquisition.

We don't have high spend for this level, so our target acquisition needs to be excellent for us to RELIABLY have success.

That means we might not get the most prized players in the window, but we absolutely need to get the ones that most fit our needs.

Every first choice target we miss is a bigger deal for us than, say, Ipswich; because we can't just go and spend money to match the quality of the target we lost.

Recruitment matters.

We will be up in the top 6 for football spend. I know there are a couple we won’t compete with but still. We aren’t the paupers of this division.

There is no need for lots of excuses before we even start. A manager has to deal with these things over the summer. It’s a normal part of football. But this summer is a test. We knew that. Improve a good side is always harder than build something from scratch.

It’s a test of Evatts ability to work the market. And of course you have to expect a number of targets slip away as these players will have competition for them.


I doubt Evatt is panicking and he already has a lot of key ingredients. Fossey is a blow. Perhaps though his fitness this season will soften that blow. But it’s a blow because I thought he would be back and I don’t think we can come very close to finding a player as good. Other than that I think there are centre halves knocking round who would be good for us. Iredale helps the LCB already. We still need that key midfield player with a physical presence.

[GhostoftheBok]

We will be up in the top 6 for football spend. I know there are a couple we won’t compete with but still. We aren’t the paupers of this division.

There is no need for lots of excuses before we even start.

It's quite the opposite of making excuses. You're focused on Evatt. I'm not. It's not the 90s or 2000s anymore. Recruitment isn't just down to the manager. I really rate Markham (and have heard good things about some other guys working on our recruitment) and they have to overperform for us to have a better-than-average shot of the automatic spots.

Saying "It happens to all teams" is excuse-making. You either get the manager the players he needs or you don't. If you don't then the manager has to overperform. It's a recruitment team's job to get the squad to a point where the coaching staff should expect success, rather than success being due to amazing coaching.

We are a long, long way from having a failed window. There are loads of players who are very good for this level and I trust Evatt and Markham to find what they need, but at the minute there's been more failure than success and that's noteworthy.

I'm hoping to see a genuine shock or two. Evatt has talked the team up, as he likes to do, but we need to improve. If a couple of the players we get in are not a level above anyone we have then the automatics will be an incredible achievement, rather than a reasonable expectation.

[BWFC_Insane]

We will be up in the top 6 for football spend. I know there are a couple we won’t compete with but still. We aren’t the paupers of this division.

There is no need for lots of excuses before we even start.

It's quite the opposite of making excuses. You're focused on Evatt. I'm not. It's not the 90s or 2000s anymore. Recruitment isn't just down to the manager. I really rate Markham (and have heard good things about some other guys working on our recruitment) and they have to overperform for us to have a better-than-average shot of the automatic spots.

Saying "It happens to all teams" is excuse-making. You either get the manager the players he needs or you don't. If you don't then the manager has to overperform. It's a recruitment team's job to get the squad to a point where the coaching staff should expect success, rather than success being due to amazing coaching.

We are a long, long way from having a failed window. There are loads of players who are very good for this level and I trust Evatt and Markham to find what they need, but at the minute there's been more failure than success and that's noteworthy.

I'm hoping to see a genuine shock or two. Evatt has talked the team up, as he likes to do, but we need to improve. If a couple of the players we get in are not a level above anyone we have then the automatics will be an incredible achievement, rather than a reasonable expectation.

The club and its position and need to be sustainable is something Evatt has bought into. He has said so many times we can’t afford to overpay. He knows it. I think that this sort of window is where you test your manager and recruitment setup. Allardyce found the same. Easy when we were building. Once we were top 8 it was hard to find and attract the improvements on a budget. But I think this is the first test of Evatt and the broader setup as Iles wrote yesterday. Let’s see how they do.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Evatt on missed targets:
https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/sport/2 ... er-window/

We signed heavily in January, so there was never going to be that huge amount of maintenance we had to do in previous transfer windows. We are improving all the time and it has been a gradual process. Yes, Jack (Iredale) is the only player we have signed from a different club but we have Traff (James Trafford) returning, Rico (Ricardo Santos) – who is as important as any signing – renegotiating his contract.

Have we got every number one target in other positions? No. But that is the reality of football. I have said many times, we are never going to try and out-spend our rivals or put the club into risk or doubt any more. We value every player we look at and if the valuation increases beyond where it should be then we will walk away from deals. I am never going to put this club at risk because it is not how we do things. We are smart, strategic, and we are going to be patient in this window.

We had all our ducks in a row and we thought we were going to get who we wanted, but things change in football and we have to be able to adapt and overcome.

Ilesy also says "Evatt maintains there is cash available for new signings, and a loan deal for Liverpool’s Conor Bradley is expected to be sealed soon."

[GhostoftheBok]

The club and its position and need to be sustainable is something Evatt has bought into. He has said so many times we can’t afford to overpay. He knows it. I think that this sort of window is where you test your manager and recruitment setup. Allardyce found the same. Easy when we were building. Once we were top 8 it was hard to find and attract the improvements on a budget. But I think this is the first test of Evatt and the broader setup as Iles wrote yesterday. Let’s see how they do.

We knew (or at least most on here seemed to agree) months ago that this would be the toughest window in terms of getting what we needed. That's not the trouble. The trouble is that we misread the market with our valuations. Evatt has said (in a piece published today), "We had all our ducks in a row and we thought we were going to get who we wanted but things change in football and we have to be able to adapt and overcome." They believed they had these deals at their valuations, but they were wrong - however you look at it that's an error by the recruitment team. They shouldn't be realising that they can't meet players' demands at this stage, that should have been figured out some time ago.

That also makes it less likely that their fall-back planning is budgeted properly and increases the likelihood that they will need to take risks as the summer progresses - going for players we've not worked on and analysed for months to ensure they fit.

We might well have success in the market. However, we are saying quite openly that it has taken us by surprise and that is always, always a bad thing for a department.

Evatt also said we are "smart, strategic and going to be patient in the window"....which would seem to indicate we don't have actionable targets in at least some areas. That, again, is clearly a bad thing. If a manager needs a centre half and a right back and you miss the first choices then you can recover, but you'd always want to be able to move rapidly for that recovery. To miss a target and then have to hit the pause button to see how the market evolves is many things, but it isn't strategic.

Again, this doesn't mean there's any need to panic or we've had a disaster....but we don't look to be in the territory of well-planned back-up targets. Bradley is one where our interest seems to have come about in the past 4 weeks, rather than the 14 months we devoted to assessing Tucker and the 8 months we spent trying to sign him. I like the look of the kid, but he's not the sort Evatt and Markham would usually hang their promotion hopes on. He's much more Xav than he is Morley. A very talented risk.

You don't want a summer based on luck and I'm concerned we are seeing signs that that's where we may be heading. Hopefully we see some long term targets arrive soon to assuage that concern.

[GhostoftheBok]

Ilesy also says "Evatt maintains there is cash available for new signings, and a loan deal for Liverpool’s Conor Bradley is expected to be sealed soon."

It'd be better to keep our powder dry than overspend. I'd rather fight the good fight and not go up this season than take any kind of risk with the club's long term finances. 80/20 Markham's contacts come through and we give Evatt a fighting chance.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

When Evatt says "we're going to be patient" it feels to me like a reaction to him having said "We want our business done by June 16th" and then that target being missed. It's also directly contrary to the notion that we've lost patience with, say, Fossey.

Clearly it's horses for courses - it's possible to be patient in one position and 'move on" in another. RWB is a position almost universally acknowledged to need strengthening ASAP, so it makes sense to draw a line under him – I'm sure we won't block the agent's number. In other positions, we can probably wait a while. Still six weeks till the season starts.

It's a relatively slow market this summer. We may be waiting to see who, on our monitored list, shakes closer to the exit – stuff that is out of our control. No denying it's a blow, if we have indeed been stalking Tucker for 14 months, to suddenly find he's northophobic, although that may be cover for him preferring the MK project. The alternative is that they're offering him more money, which fits in with the determination to stay within our means.

And that's the other thing. It sounds like we more or less agreed terms, theoretically, on Fossey in January. I daresay we're not offering less than then. Negotiations don't take place in a vacuum, and we're still, for now, in a seller's market. You have to imagine Barkuizen, for example, won't still be waiting in a campervan at Pride Park come mid-July.

[GhostoftheBok]

Regarding getting players to hurry up, that's not really compatible with lower budgets. Players will shift rapidly for money if they think it will go away, but if our offer is likely to be something they can get whenever they want they will happily sit and wait to see if another club (in this case Derby) really will line their pockets with gold.

Evatt clearly felt we could and would have most of our business done by now, so the question is what made him think that. We can't know from the outside, but it'll be something the recruitment bods will have to pick the bones out of. You'd typically have pretty regular assessment meetings during a window, so it'll get looked at. Oh to be a fly on the wall...

Derby's situation is bonkers and I imagine that if Barky were 24 he'd be here by now (or at Rotherham), but at his age you go for the money and he'll have to assess when to cut that chord. I'd think, as I said earlier, his fairly unique set of traits will make him worth waiting for; assuming Derby's silly money offers to players aren't inflating their sense of worth. God forbid players think they're valuable....that way madness lies.

From the usual "natter over a beer" stuff earlier in the closed season it did seem like Bolton were well placed with some players if we wanted them. Suddenly we're not and that kind of change is usually a sign that the financial package the club offers isn't what the player and his people were expecting (Juan Pablo Sorin territory).

Maybe that's a sign that we feel the market is target rich and we can afford to chance our arm; but that would be a very, very odd move with a player like Tucker (young, quality and potentially very valuable). It's surprised a few and I'm left wondering if Ian has again bought into his own myth - this time about the amazing pitch he and Markham have put together. Did they think they were so persuasive players would take less money for the chance to work with them? I have lots of questions.