The BWN Transfer Window Preview

I’m a sentimental man. I didn’t want Greg Leigh and Kyle Edwards to go in the Summer, despite both having been ephemeral presences in our first team over their time here. I will happily spend all day defending our fringe players from the Long Discard List Brigade and even in darker days I baulked somewhat at the glee some showed during the Demolition Man Summer. I wanted to see the best in most of our players long before we had much reason to emotionally invest in any of them.

So think of this as the loyalist’s transfer window preview. Elsewhere there will be more plentiful and more detailed suggestions for who we should sign and how lavish we should be with the budget. But this right here will be the case for a quiet window with a few judicious acquisitions, rather than the balls to wall “Mark Ashton must attack the window” stuff. Sure, the financial realities of promotion mean that pretty much any spending we could conceivably finance is ultimately a good investment if it pays off. We’ve also got some serious assets (Davis, Woolfenden, Hirst, Broadhead) as a fall back if we fail and need to right ourselves with the FFP gods. Moreover, the 0-0 draw with Queens Park Rangers was hardly an advert for our squad depth.

But the Golden Rule that should govern any football club’s transfer business at all times should be consistency. Go about your business methodically, be detailed, maximise your value for money in every transfer and don’t let context blow you too far off course. A big transfer that is outside the longer-term plan and doesn’t work sits on your balance sheet for too long to get too free and easy with your dice rolls. With that in mind, here is my official January 2024 Transfer Preview.

Squad players: Look, I’m going to get this out of the way right at the beginning. A lot of fans approach the transfer window like a Detox Retreat. They make long lists of guys who “just aren’t good enough” and must be “purged” as soon as possible for the benefit of the wider organism. It doesn’t work like that. There’s seldom a huge advantage to be gained in revolving your 21st to 25th most important players. Doing so is often expensive and time-consuming and the difference in quality is seldom enough to offset losing the outgoing player’s greater knowledge of your system. You want to make a dent when it comes to promotion chances, it’s about recruiting guys who start four games in every five. Successful transfer windows are rarely about who you want rid of, they’re about who comes in. 

Verdict: Not a priority

The main issue confronting us in the January transfer market is how the hell you upgrade our main starting players on our budget. Our lads are currently playing like a £150m Premier League squad. Actually, reading the league table they’re playing approximately 9 points in 24 games better than that (sorry Leeds). You look at our regulars and the scope to improve on them within budget is far from obvious.     

Vaclav Hladky: You are kidding me, right? Vas’s shot stopping might have dropped from stellar to “just good” of late, but he’s still the best footballing keeper in the league and his confidence on the ball is key to how we play.

Verdict: No-one.

Harry Clarke/Brandon Williams/Leif Davis: The thing with our group of full backs is that whilst you could make the case for adding more depth, when all three of them are here and fit, you only have 180 minutes of full-backing to give out every week. Davis is the standout left back in the division and will play every minute available. Clarke is an asset we want to develop and his Kyle-Walker-esque athleticism means he has a very high ceiling. As Williams plays both sides, it’s hard to imagine we get much value from adding to the group here, unless something significant has gone wrong and explains Brandon’s recent dip in form.

Verdict: Hopefully no-one and Williams gets back to where he was in September.

Woolfenden/Burgess/Tuanzebe: Axel had a bad day at Elland Road but still feels like a good project, doesn’t he? You need to do these things as a mid-budget Championship side, take on potentially elite players in a bad moment as fixer-uppers. So far, mostly so good, he generally looks up to match speed (in truth, sometimes he even looks like the match speed is too slow for him). If we trust his fitness enough to see us through those January games, I can’t see that we’ve space for another centre back. Burgess has been almost flawless all season and you can’t really recruit to cover a month-long absence. Realistically, a signing at right centre back means abandoning either Tuanzebe or Woolfenden as projects (and Woolfenden is turning into a serious player). Meanwhile, a signing at left centre back means tossing aside the work Burgess and the coaching team have done over the past two years and displacing the guy who seems central to organising our back line. Seems like too much to lose to me.

Verdict: Probably no-one.

Morsy/Luongo/Taylor: There are two reasonable assumptions here. The first is that Sam Morsy will play every single possible minute in the deeper of the two pivot roles and that anyone else will be filling in during the 2-5 games he might be suspended for. The second is that Jack Taylor was signed for a reason and is being queued up for Massimo Luongo’s spot at some point, which for me doesn’t leave much space to recruit someone into. The question therefore is how good a player can you get to be Morsy’s understudy? You aren’t going to find a squad player who replicates his “intangible charismatic aura” but might you find a ball-winning midfield with a bit more dynamism than Dom Ball? It won’t be a young loan player, because no-one will send their budding Championship-ready defensive midfielder to add a little wear and tear to the padded seats in our technical area. It might conceivably be a battle-hardened veteran who is kicking his heels in someone’s reserves, but again you wonder how much better they’d be than Dom Ball. Looking downwards, is there a lower league midfielder for whom sitting on our bench would constitute a bump in status and wages? Well, there are only a handful of youngsters currently winning loads of tackles and spinning their way out of the press in League One and we probably own the best of them already – Idris El Mizouni. I can’t see what business we do here that looks significantly better than that.

Verdict: People might not want to hear this, but I think we’ll struggle to do better here than recalling El Miz.  

Burns/Broadhead/Chaplin/Hutchinson/Harness/Jackson: Let’s take the non-striker forwards as a block, shall we? Objectively speaking, Broadhead and Chaplin are currently producing numbers akin to £8m+ players. To find players nailed on to produce similar that is what you’d probably need to spend. As we discovered during his absence, Wes Burns is probably more important to our shape than any other player, bar maybe Leif Davis. It seems unlikely that most signings would make an instant dent in the starting three. For fourth and fifth starters, per minute Harness and Hutchinson both post good numbers and demonstrate a good understanding of their roles in the system.

What are we talking about here then? Well, modern substitute rules mean we routinely use 5/6 players across these roles every single game, so there’s a case you could make to a player – you could reasonably expect to play maybe 10-15 games worth of football between now and the end of the season and if you are really special it’ll be more. The obvious thing to do here is pursue a loan deal for a Premier League youth who was beyond our reach in August – Jesurun Rak-Sakyi, for instance. Outside of that box, I wonder if we’d consider a couple of Championship talents who have bossed this division before and are only now coming back to form and fitness – Callum O’Hare and Chris Willock, approaching the end of their contracts at Coventry and QPR respectively. There is some strengthening to do in this area of the pitch and whilst the right Premier League loanee might work out, I wonder if what ultimately makes a real difference is being able to bring proven performers in.

Verdict: Look, if a spectacularly good Premier League loanee, like Amad Diallo, becomes available to us, then you’ve got to make that happen. It probably won’t though. You might instead pick up a less standout player like Rak-Sakyi (should he be fully recovered from November’s hamstring injury) and slightly re-arrange Hutchinson’s minutes. Otherwise, I think this is a case of boxing clever and finding players already half-way out the door of another Championship club, who might fly below the radar for our immediate (better financed) competitors.  

Hirst/Ladapo/Scarlett: George Hirst, as I’ve said previously, is a magical bit of recruitment. After he notched another assist against Norwich I thought, if you could clone him and just bring George Hirst Jnr on as a second half substitute, you would. Well, probably for four weeks or more, instead of one George Hirst, we now have zero George Hirsts, which is tremendously inconvenient. I have a lot of love for Freddie Ladapo and frankly, if he does nothing more for Ipswich Town Football Club he deserves every ounce of appreciation we as a fanbase are capable of giving him. Sadly, it looks very much like a move away is more or less already agreed and frankly, with Dane Scarlett also disappearing, the timing isn’t great.

Because Tottenham can’t send him anywhere else, I figured Scarlett was going to be here for the rest of season. At times Dane looked vaguely like he was about to cast off his shackles and be the impactful young striker that we definitely need – the option that terrifies defenders after 65 minutes of George Hirst tossing them around like rag dolls. There was an excellent cameo against Birmingham, there were a lot of shots at goal, which is always a great sign, but he clearly wasn’t quite the option to change games for us right now. He also looked bloody miserable the whole time he was here, even when Ed Sheeran visited the dressing room. Clearly a massive amount of work to do up front then, because we’ve gone from three options, to almost zero options. Fingers crossed that some of that work is already done and that we’re somewhat close to coming to an agreement with Fulham over Jay Stansfield.

Verdict: Well, I might have been tempted to be a bit more conservative here, but this suddenly got a lot more urgent on Boxing Day. Got all my fingers and toes crossed for Stansfield, who gives us a good option as a 9 and 10 if needed. If we get Stansfield in, between him and Hirst you’ve got two who you know compete well at this level. Stansfield isn’t quite the physical monster that Hirst is but offers enough technical ability that you can work the play through him, enough pace that you can send him in behind. That gives you more flexibility for a third striker, allowing you to pick up a very young player without having to rely on them too much (someone like West Ham’s Divin Mubama) or look overseas to someone who might not have an instant impact, like Cincinnati’s Brandon Vazquez (he might also be more of a stretch (or even impossible) target, who we’d be foolish to wait on in other circumstances). Let’s not get too over-excited here mind, we know that everyone in the division is looking for this player, getting another two of them is a tall order!

Any Other Business (AOB): In August I would not have predicted that we’d move Greg Leigh on and bring in Brandon Williams. I suspect McKenna wasn’t actually sat there thinking we absolutely must upgrade our reserve full backs, but a player with Premier League pedigree came along and was open to the move, so we went with it. I reckon there will be at least one deal done in January where some genuine career peak quality, rather than a youngster looking for minutes, suddenly becomes available to us in an unexpected way and we move on it, just like Luton Town went for Marvellous Nakamba last January. That could be anywhere on the pitch, because the player is simply too good for us to ignore. If West Ham suddenly decide that they fancy getting circa 20 per cent of Danny Ings’ wages off the books or Burnley think Michael Obafemi needs some football, something ludicrous like that, then obviously you have to go do it.   

Verdict: Strikes me as a very much an “as and when, if opportunity knocks” sort of thing, but mysterious man, come fire us to promotion.