Chief executive Paul Barber has continued his tour of the media lately, and explained that one great myth in the game of football is that free agents are cheap options.
Speaking to the Official Site Barber rubbished thoughts that suggested a free transfer would leave a clubs budget unaffected and further that there’s no such thing as a no cost deal in the game today.
‘One of the great myths in football is that free transfers are cheap options. It doesn’t necessarily work out like that because sometimes a player or his agent expects a bigger signing fee. It’s always the total cost of a player that we would look at. Free doesn’t necessarily mean free – or even cheap – that is for sure.’
Barber goes on to explain that a player budget is often made up a number of related, but different, totals. They are the transfer fee itself, the wages of the player, signing on fees, bonuses and latterly the agent’s fee itself.
‘We always look at the total costs of any transfer and then we divide those costs over the length of the contract to establish the cost each year to our player budget.’
With all that said, it just adds a further importance to clubs doing their homework on signings and absolutely minimising risks when it comes to somebody not being able to settle, somebody not fitting the dynamic of the club of the dressing room, or when taking risks on players who just might not be able to adjust to the league despite their talent.
And helping individual players settle and perform also relates to the overall balance within the squad.
‘As ever, we`re trying to establish a balance between experience and youth, pace and strength, attacking and defensive qualities, and an ability in the air or on ground. The manager is looking for all those different qualities on the pitch and the trick is then to blend those players together as an effective unit.’
And looping back to our strengthening so far this summer, Barber feels that we are on course to do just that and he’s obviously hoping for an entertaining, enjoyable and successful year ahead of us.
‘We feel that the players we’ve brought in are a combination of all those things, experience, height, goalscoring ability, speed, agility and so on. We know the areas in which we didn’t perform as well as we had hoped last year, but we’ve also got a lot of quality in the squad that wasn’t available to us last year; players who are now fit, back out on the field, and looking really good.’
He went on to mention the likes of Solly March and Dale Stephens who were only available towards the end of last season, as well as Andrew Crofts who has had a horrid time with injuries of late.
‘These are high-quality players who will add a lot to the squad as it stands, let alone any new additions that we bring in.’
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