Yes, an utterly lame headline. But it’s too warm to think properly and besides – the song’s chorus wouldn’t make a bad chant…
Well, it’s all been happening since the last update, hasn’t it? The fixtures are out, so are the new kits, and we’ve even signed some players.
Not actual new ones, needless to say, but at least we can put a starting XI out now.
So, welcome (back) to AFCW Alistair Smith, Steve Seddon, Joe McDonnell, Sam Hutchinson and Marcus Browne.
We know what we’re getting from all of them, so no need to delve into their past, and remember that Craig Cope (PBUH) did say he wanted to keep as much of the promotion winning squad together.
Getting Smith, Hutchinson and Browne signing up again is good business, in truth. The latter two are definitely L1 level players, although the jury is out on Smith playing in the third tier.
Browne definitely feels like we’ve done well to get him, because if anyone was going to turn down our offer and head to Bradford it would be him.
But then, remember that he had to do the PFA training camp thing, so perhaps he knows that by committing to us, he’s got guaranteed football next season?
I’m half-expecting Romaine Sawyers to be photographed in front of the West Stand this week.
As somebody elsewhere put it this week, we were building for L1 as far back as January. They might be joking, of course, but are they…?
Seddon returning is an interesting one, although people remember THAT goal at Luton but not much else.
It’s easy to forget he had a second spell with us, where he was so unmemorable he went back to his parent club at the beginning of January.
That was in the Covid behind-closed-doors season under Glyn Hodges though, so that’s probably not a fair comparison.
McDonnell? I just hope he’s a) either improved significantly since he was last with us, and/or b) he’s our second choice keeper.
Bayes knows him, perhaps thinks he can get better use out of him as our #2 (McD was wearing 20 on his training top) and most importantly – he’s cheap.
I do expect us to get a decent youngster on loan before we go to Spain though. I certainly hope we do.
Apart from the goalie, they’re not the worst additions we can make. And if you’re talking about experience in this division, these are who we should be signing.
One suspects these are the low-hanging fruit, and we’ve been picking them while nobody is paying attention.
As it stands, apart from the ones we were never going to keep (Goodman) and the ones we didn’t want (Piggy and others), we’ve got a settled squad.
We still need more players, and better quality too, and this is where the bunfight begins.
In case you haven’t checked your calendar, July 1st is only a couple of days away at the time of writing.
This is important because it’s when contracts expire, and players start realising they don’t have a deal signed yet.
We’ll come onto finances later on, but it’s a case right now of holding our collective nerve, not rush into overpaying for what are still ordinary players and getting some good deals out of it.
There’s been relatively few transfers for clubs in L1 (and that’s so nice to write that sentence), and this might explain why.
Last week, Darragh McAnthony (Peterborough bod) gave a good insight into this, which applies to us and just about everyone else.
I don’t blame players (or more accurately, their agents) for trying it on in June. There’s still enough clubs who feel the need to get their business done before pre-season training starts, and they’re obviously willing to pay for it.
In our case, and presumably Posh’s as well, we don’t need to do that. Or if we needed to, we still couldn’t.
So now it’s waiting and seeing, who starts getting antsy and realising that more and more clubs suddenly decide they’re not interested in a player demanding £5k a week.
The PFA are doing their pre-season training camp from tomorrow, and I don’t doubt we’ll be there with a couple of pre-signed postal orders and a pen nabbed from Ladbrokes.
It’s done well for us, ask Hutchinson and Browne, although I expect that if we know about then so do many other clubs…
The club reminded us that it doesn’t have much money this week, and so it decided to launch its latest Begging Bowl initiative.
I won’t link to it, I watched that video and I lasted about 0.5 seconds before my cringe levels skyrocketed.
I couldn’t help noticing that the general reaction to it was more negative than positive.
Needless to say, the whole “we own our own club” shtick only comes out when it’s getting money out of punters, and I think our fanbase are getting wise to it.
Obviously, this from the DTB has been in the pipework for a little while, so it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest it got written after seeing a lot of the adverse comments over the Begging Bowl.
If you have any sort of idea about football finances generally, it’s nothing that particularly revelatory.
Granted, not being in profit isn’t that big a deal if you’re in control of the debts. And while some of what clubs owe is eye-watering, it’s ability to pay as much of it down that matters.
I’ll leave others to suggest whether we can pay off enough of our current debt if we had to. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Wages are the big killer. One could argue that £2k a week for L1 players is too much, and they’d be right.
But that’s been the case for at least a couple of decades, and anything like a salary cap just gets rejected from the PFA anyway.
Recently, James Woodroof said that we made about £850k on merchandise. Which sounds excellent, until you realise that the five signings we’ve made this week will likely take most of that away in their pay packets.
And these are players on the lower tier of L1.
I can understand why the club has gone for Begging Bowl, but it’s like asking for beer money when you need to pay your mortgage.
How the club deals with that seems to be the hardest thing. It’s clearly hoping that this new super-duper Football Regulator will come with lots of new powers that it simply won’t have.
Let’s face it, the Regulator is going to do fuck all. At most, it will likely ensure that current rules are enforced more tightly, which is as much as anyone should expect from it.
Although it won’t help some people’s expectancy that it should be subsided because it started on Wimbledon Common.
I expect funds will come from another round of Begging Bowl, yet another round of bonds, more initiatives that won’t touch the sides of our fundamental problem, and perhaps eventually another push for 50+1 about this time next year when financial reality finally hits.
It’s a consolidation period on the field, where you hope we do enough to be comfortable survivors in L1. It could be mayhem in 25/26 off it.
At least we can focus on the football itself again before long, and before I go – the new Lotto kits are out.
I’m no Gok Wan, but they’re a bit, well, yeah.
The home one doesn’t look too bad, though the previous couple of seasons were much nicer – the Umbro in particular.
The yellow one is the best of a not-particularly-inspiring bunch, but the green and black one? Some of our fans may have sensory issues that get triggered because of it.
I expect they’ll all sell very well, because our shirts always do. Why, I don’t know, but I did some work for Tempest’s parent company 20 years ago and the markup on football shirts was horrific even back then.
To be fair, the training top with Kwik Fit on it isn’t too bad. And perhaps they might end up being our main sponsors eventually?
Although if we start getting social media clips of our players doing their rendition of the adverts…