Getting very close to the window expiring now so time for a refresh.
Any errors or omissions please advise.
NAME / CONTRACT EXPIRY DATE
Players with contracts that run to 2015 or beyond (21)
Goalkeepers
Nick Pope 2018
Dillon Phillips 2016
Stephen Henderson 2017 - Signed on free transfer after having been released by West Ham
Right Backs
Chris Solly 2017
Loïc Négo 2017 - Loaned to Ujpest Dozsa for one season
Joe Gomez 2016 - Signed professional contract
Centre Backs
Michael Morrison 2016
Harry Lennon 2016 - On loan to Cambridge Utd for one season
André Bikey-Amougou 2016 - Signed on free transfer
Tal Ben Haim - 2015 - Signed on a free transfer from Standard Liege
Left Backs
Rhoys Wiggins 2018
Morgan Fox 2017
Right Midfielders
Lawrie Wilson 2015
Central Midfielders
Johnnie Jackson 2016
Jordan Cousins 2016
Yoni Buyens 2015 - Signed on one year loan from Standard Liege
Franck Moussa 2016 - Signed on a free transfer after contract expired at Coventry City
Left Midfielders
Callum Harriott 2016
Johann Berg Gudmundsson - 2016 - Signed on a free transfer after contract expired at AZ Alkmaar
Frédéric Bulot - 2015 - Season long loan from Standard Liege
Strikers
Reza Ghoochannejhad 2016 - Loaned to Al-Kuwait for one season
Simon Church 2015
Piotr Parzyszek 2018 - loaned to STTV for one season
Joe Pigott 2016
Igor Vetokele 2019 - Signed for undisclosed fee from FC Copenhagen
George Tucudean 2017 - Signed for undisclosed fee from Standard Liege
U21 Development Squad (12 + 1)
Zak Ansah
Rhys Browne
Kurtis Cumberbatch
Kadell Daniel
Harry Gerard
Tareiq Holmes-Dennis
Oliver Muldoon
Jack Munns
Harry Osborne
Levander Pyke
Tobi Sho-Silva
Terell Thomas
Dimitar Mitov (Academy)
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Comments
You could add Karlan Ahearne-Grant as another academy player in the development squad like Mitov. Has started some games for them while Cumberbatch and others have only made the bench.
I only included Mitov as he was on the bench so must have a squad number now. Not sure the other Academy kids have that yet. A much healthier situation to the beginning of last season as you want as many of your assets as possible signed up beyond the current season.
TBH is relatively old at 32 and Church may not be considered an asset by some ie we wouldn't get a fee and he isn't key to the first team. Wilson I would have thought has a better shout to be considered an asset but so far he's been on the bench.
Still, another reason why Roland is a lot better than Jimenez and Slater and an another example of the mess RD had to clear up after the terrible twins.
Does this mean his loan to Cambridge United has ended prematurely or is it possible that League rules allow him to play in our development team while being registered to play for Cambridge in the League?
As far as I can tell, Lennon has not yet made it off the bench for Cambridge which might have led to a mutually agreed recall or, alternatively, would explain why Cambridge would be happy for him to get some game time with us.
Thanks
No @Henry Irving, we wanted and ended up with all of the U23 talent signed on long term deals. Duchatelet was then able to offer contact extensions to 6 senior players (3 accepted, 3 didn't) and release 20+ players in May/June. This freed up budget to replace them with 10 much better and younger players.
One can call it a mess but may I suggest that it was a deliberate* strategy which was a major selling point for the club in 2013 which helped close the deal. "The club is in the Championship, the squad isn't very good but guess what, the lucky new owner gets to let most of them go and start again.
*deliberate as it was specifically mentioned in the sales brochure in summer 2013 together with the academy which now supplies c.1/3 of the 18 players that Peeters puts out every week.
Why on earth would we want all of last year's squad on long term deals? Two of the 20 departed players are on the bench in the Premier league - the rest simply wouldn't get into Peeters matchday squad as they weren't good enough to take us to the top six.
Source: the league table for 2013-14 and the season to date - today
As a result we are now top 6 and I've had the pleasure of watching CAFC four times now playing the best football in years!
Thankfully Roland came in but KM and RM said themselves at the VIP meeting that they wanted to sign up the "assets" that had been left to run their contracts down by TJ.
I know you struggle to understand that Poyet was an asset and Cook and the other fringe players weren't but an asset was what he was. Hamer and Dervite too. Maybe they would have stayed and been part of this new squad or they could have been sold to fund another Vetokele. Would another £2m have made the diiference in getting Delort or helping with FFP?
The fact is the current regime wanted to keep Dervite and offered him a big pay rise but he was offered more, and a longer contract, by Bolton.
Fact is the current regime wanted to keep Poyet and tried everything they reasonably could to keep him.
It would have been a lot easier and cheaper to sign them both up (and Yann and Dale) last summer but TJ and MS were in a financial mess. So no new deals not because it was a plan but because they couldn't afford any pay rises.
TJ and MS couldn't even pay for a half decent pitch, paint the steps or replace the bulbs that had blown in the floodlights. Anyone with eyes can see the difference in SE7 and what a mess the Valley had become due to the wilful neglect of post Kevin Cash TJ era.
That wasn't a strategy, it was a disaster wanting to happen.
Thankfully we now have RD, someone with his own money.
Thankfully we have KM, someone who saw throught your pal Steve Bradshaw and outed him PDQ.
Pretending the nightmare that was the last part of TJ regime was a "strategy" is like pretending that driving your car into a lake is actually a shortcut that you always intended to take and anyway the car needed a wash.
Though not it's purpose, it does also prompt a debate about how we got here. By accident or by design? Might we be better placed had the previous regime acted differently of more responsibly?
My own view, for what it's worth, is that the previous owners acted more out of necessity than insightful strategy, but that, nevertheless, we are probably no worse off today than we might have been had the Club been more proactive and aggressive with its player contract strategy last summer. Moreover, a case might even be made that be are better off than we might otherwise have been.
In reaching that conclusion, I'm very conscious of the fact that long-term player contracts can easily become a liability instead of the asset they are intended and expected to be. A very topical, though extreme example of this effect is Wolves's experience with Jamie O'Hara. In our own case, the deals awarded to Racon, Semedo and Youga, which were outsized given our budget and their relative value when we found ourselves in League One, were a significant encumbrance.
By the end of our first season in the Championship our previous owners had injected some £15.5m into the Club, i.e. that's hard cash. That's a significant investment by any standards, but it seems, for whatever reason, that the money had simply run out by then. As result, they had simply no option other than to find a buyer and while doing so to minimise the ongoing cash burn. Jimenez and Slater weren't the first owners of a Football Club to run into financial difficulty and they won't be the last.
The real question is whether we'd be better placed today had our owners been less cash strapped this time last year. There are three considerations.
First, how much would the Club's running costs have increased had new contracts been offered to and agreed by the likes of Hamer, Stephens, Dervite, Kermorgant, Poyet et al? There are a number of uncertainties here, not least whether the players offered would have accepted their deals. Poyet is a good example. We should also be wary of hindsight bias. I was a fan of Dale Stephens, but he wasn't a regular in our first season in the Championship. What if Bradley Pritchard, who had been a regular, had been prioritised? He's now in a battle to hold down a starting berth at Leyton Orient. Similarly, Dorian Dervite wasn't a regular until Jose Riga arrived. He's not starting for Bolton and they may yet regret the contract they offered him. A similar debate could be had about each and every player. There are those with strong views about some players, Yann Kermorgant, for example, but in my view at least the right course of action would not have been black and white.
Second, had the "right" players been offered improved long-term deals, increasing the Club's cash deficit and potential long-term liabilities, would this have increased player values and hence the Club's sale price and/or improved today's financial position? Frankly, I think it's almost impossible to say. Suppose that last summer we'd offered Dervite the same deal he was offered this summer. Would he have commanded a transfer fee? Not obvious, especially if he'd spent last season on the bench. I'd suggest that he's not in the same class as Tal Ben Haim or Andre Bikey-Amougou. He's probably also behind Michael Morrison. We may well now be "stuck with him" and it's far from clear whether that would have been a good thing. The case of Kermorgant is more controversial. His career at Bournemouth started spectacularly well, but he's already thirty-two and appeared injury prone while with us. There is no guarantee that we'd have been able to get another Club to pay him his elevated wages (he was, allegedly, already the highest player at the Club and by some margin) and to pay us a fee. I suspect that when he was sold to Bournemouth in the January window Roland took a bigger risk than he appreciated at the time, but it's not clear to me that in hindsight it wasn't a good piece of business.
Finally, the critical question is whether we are better or worse off today than we would have been had more players been on long-term deals when Roland bought the Club in January? In truth, there is no objective way to answer that question. We might now have Dervite at centre-back, or on the bench, and be without Ben Haim or Bikey-Amougou. I'd rather have Ben Hamer than Stephen Henderson, but no doubt we'd be paying him more and, let's not forget, Hamer wasn't everybody's favourite. And so on. What seems to be the overwhelming consensus of opinion is that we now have a much stronger squad than we had last season. It is far from clear that we could have retained, on acceptable terms, the very small minority of players who would have improved today's first eleven and/or received transfer fees for those seen as surplus to requirements. Diego Poyet is, of course, the major loss, but I've no idea of the story in his case. How hard did Chris Powell push for him as a special case? Was he offered a deal he turned down? Was it clear twelve months ago that he is the wonderful talent he now seems to be?
We are in much better shape today than we were during the Jimenez/Slater era (though credit to them for getting the Club back into the Championship and keeping us there) and we also have the benefit of having a number of exciting young players on long-term deals, Igor Vetokele being the best example. But the key is having the right players on the right contracts, not just any players on terms acceptable to them. Getting that balance right requires a combination of the necessary funding, which Roland has whereas Jimenez/Slater did not, with good judgement about the prospective value of the players. Let's hope that Roland's team gets those judgements right on average. While Vetokele appears to be an inspired signing, there is room for doubt that the deals offered to Parzyszek and Harriott, for example, will prove to be as successful.
As ever, just my perspective. Apologies for this post being so verbose. I hadn't intended it to be so long.
I think we are better off now. But IMHO that is despite TJ and MS not because of them. They got greedy and were asking well over the realistic value of the club. The time to sell was the summer after we finished 9th but the silly £35m price put off any buyers (and there were some interested) off so we then went into a downward spiral. Unwilling to spend as we wanted to sell and had no extra money to put in anyway so the value of the assets (the players) and the asset (the club) declined.
It worked out well because Roland picked up the Club at the distressed price of £10 + £3m if we stayed up. Brilliant deal for Roland and a sign of how desperate TJ and MS where to get out that they would gamble £3m on us staying up. RD comes out of that deal very well IMO, clever man.
What is telling is that Roland's strategy IS to tie most signings down with longer terms deals.
To continue the car trip analogy if you take the wrong route and finally only find your destination after getting a tow from a local garage you can call that a "strategy" or "taking the scenic route" but your passengers know you just got lost and they're late.
As we know, when Richard Murray consolidated ownership of the Club in 2010 he named the holding company Baton 2010 because his explicit intention was to fund the Club's losses for a limited period during which he sought a buyer to "pass" the Club on to.
I doubt he had the foresight at that time to anticipate that the process would repeat within three years so that his choice of name became even more apposite. But in that context, I'd suggest that Jimenez and Slater ran a decent leg overall, during which we made good progress overall, but that the handover to the next runner, who appears to be a very good "choice", was very messy and could even have led to very serious problems; the baton being dropped and the Club relegated. We may even have been lucky to avoid that fate.
The question is whether we'd be in better shape today, or further around the track, had that handover been better managed. I guess we'll never know, but had you told me that night in January 2011 when we lost 4-2 at home to Swindon that we'd now be established in the Championship with an exciting new team and, it would appear, an imaginative owner with ambition, I'd have bitten your hand off. If under Duchatelet's ownership we continue the progress we've seen since January, history may judge the previous regime a little less harshly than is the case today. If you win a relay race all runners get a medal, including those that ran a slower lap.
To use your analogy we were steaming along in the first couple of legs of the relay until the coach (Kevin Cash) left and then we floundered, dropped the baton and were about to be disqualified until a Belgian runner picked it up and got us back in the race.
How much further along we might have been if Roland had come in the summer when we had finished 9th we'll never know but I think we have been a lot further along with his plan than we currently are.
Having come up as champions and finished 9th, albeit in a very tight division, we were set to kick on with some sound long term investment. That didn't come until this summer so effectively that whole season was lost.
One season in a 109 year history isn't that long though. We carry on.
One other point is that SR mention last year us having 37 professionals.
If you count the names above we now have 36 players on the books and one more to sign today (so I hear).
But not all players are equal. This isn't draughts were all the players have the same abilities. This is chess where you might be willing to lose a pawn or even a bishop but you fight hard to protect your King and Queen : - )
Bottom line @Henry Irving all of the posturing and rhetoric above (perhaps myself included!) is around three players. I'm glad we agree that it's all about Hamer, Poyet and Dervite, who declined contract offers over the summer. So six players out of 37 offered renewed deals but 3 decline - that's 10% not getting a desired outcome. One can bang on about this and that but in my book that gives a 90% success rate in controlling the destiny of last summers squad. I don't know about you but 90% is an A*, not a fecking car crash. What cannot be denied is that Prothero was asked by the executive to get the u23 signed up on long term deals...Cousins, Harriott, Solly, Fox, Gomez, Piggott all assets, all appearing this season
Dale Stephens was an asset, we sold him - he didn't appear at the Amex either - not a Brighton first team player. And with us about to welcome Bulot (worth £2.2m on transfermarkt so can't be bad!) I can't see Stephens featuring much if he had stayed. And as for Kermorgant, well that shirt is still vacant and we play on with Tucudean and Church in the hope that a better player is recruited.
To speculate that if Duchatelet had come in earlier, last season would have been different is to ignore that the die was cast much, much earlier. It is my belief that last season would always have been a holding job since the majority of the squad being the one which secured promotion from League 1. They came in, they did a job with 101 points and they stayed up. I've seen every home game and a number of away games in that time and watched too much Championship football on Sky - we were a long way from a play-off contender. From a chess perspective the best option was to play for time, agree a draw and set the whole game up but this time with new pieces. Cheaper, better, Belgian pieces to supplement the ten or so worth keeping from the old set.
We took a very interesting route but we are no later than we would have been for there is no difference between finishing 7th and 21st. Anyone suggesting we might have finished higher than 7th last season is clearly out of touch with reality! I think we perhaps take a different view of the players who left. On blind loyalty grounds I don't rate them because they chose to go elsewhere. On technical talent and ability only Poyet and Kermorgant might make a difference to the season so far... there's an awful lot of noise about this but we have been fortunate to see the departure of a large number of players without any cost to the club.
So today we have a first 18 who can compete throughout this season made up mostly of academy graduates and new signings. They are good and there are goals there in Vetokele. There is also wealth and FFP headroom available to enable the Peeters to push on in the loan window and in January. The longer we can stay in the top six the more people will wake up to the new look CAFC...the bookies are shifting their odds after every game in favour of promotion and away from relegation. Let's see how we do against Watford and Wolves with this brand new set up. They've only lost once this season but then again they haven't visited the Valley yet!
http://staddickstics.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/new-age-movement/
The squad is getting younger and better at the same time. The open question is what will it take to make us top six contenders? Just for the squad to gel and gain age and experience or?
2015-16 may well be the best season for years if the club continues to secure decent players who are mainly u23.
@Stig your graph on another thread showing points against games was a great illustration of how far we have come in just nine months. It will be interesting to see what it looks like at the end of each month.