Doesn't really scream that there's anything immediate lined up at the same time, he could easily have picked up an injury in that time...
True, but if he was in their plans, you would have thought playing Bolton was the perfect game for him to show his ability. Obviously our financial situation isn’t good and we’ve wasted a good portion of it on Bayo to fill Mogi’s pockets. However whatever we have left, I would be more than happy to see us offer Villa a £2-3mil loan fee for Archer just to get him here. Bayo and Manaj are crap. Didn’t lay a glove on MK Dons. Had the opportunity to fight for their place and didn’t.
What's a typical loan fee? £2-3m seems a lot to pay on a player who almost certainly isn't going to be around next season, I seem to recall Getafe paid us £1m for Cucho, a player who had already had a year's experience in La Liga and who had already been capped by Colombia. Besides, I don't think Villa are so strapped for cash that they'll loan him out to the highest bidder, surely it's much better for them to get the best possible loan rather than worry about what is pennies to them
It is a lot, that’s why I suggested we do it. That way we will most certainly get him. After tonight’s showing I think Villa will be confident of him starting every game for us.
But what if JP ends up staying? They're not the exact type of player I don't think (JP arguably isn't even a proper striker), but ultimately, if he's at the club and is fit, he plays, and that affects the chances of Archer playing. Right now, if I were Villa, I'd probably prefer to loan him to a team where he's absolutely guaranteed to get games
They both need to go. They offer nothing. Fletcher and Penaranda much better alternatives. Truly dreadful signings.
I would go to a 4231/424 Bachmann Gaspar Sierralta Hause Kamara Choudhury Louza Archer Pedro Sarr Davis Bachmann Gaspar Sierralta Hause Kamara Choudhury Louza Sarr Archer Davis Pedro Something like that. Based on what we’ve seen, it’s guaranteed Archer plays every game.
Loan fees aren’t even that common, we made precisely zero from loan fees in our last reporting period and were apparently the experts on it. Imagine us trying to get a loan fee for someone like Andre Gray when he’s on £70k per week. Most of the time it’s just a question of covering part of the wages, and for PL clubs getting younger players valuable experience.
Having been at the game last night, I firmly believe we won’t score any goals with these two up front. Bayo is quite mobile and floats around the forward line, but his ball control is awful. How we saw him as a £5m player is astonishing. Manaj certainly tried but he is a severely limited player. His only role surely is as a late enthusiastic sub to unsettle a tired defence. The non-appearance of Davis was very worrying.
Totally agree with your assessment. These players should never have been signed. There is so much better out there, especially for £5m. Manaj looks like a League Two clogger and Bayo, like you said, has decent movement, but he's so weak. Reminds me of Jamie Moralee. Powderpuff shooting, pushed off the ball easily. I agree, not seeing Davis, even from the bench for this game is a huge red flag. Is he injured? We've made two loan signings from Villa who are injured!! How much more evidence do we have to see from the recruitment team that they are not fit for purpose. How many more mistakes do we have to sit through. Their incompetence has taken a decent Premier League side, turned it into a Championship one and hand-in-hand with that saddled us with huge debt. Toney £5m...no thanks...Bayo £5m...yes please. I'll say it again. Why is Giaretta still in a job.
Selling Cucho for £10m and buying Bayo for £5m is this seasons not spending £5m on Toney. Dumb as **** basically.
See, I can't get my head around that. How does a club with our sort of finances spend 5m on a player with no obvious attributes or track record? How much does Giaretta need to be involved with these Mogi special deals? It stinks to me. It's like once certain agent is involved, the transfer fees are just plucked from the air. We could have signed countless promising home grown players over the past 3 years, for 5m with massively higher ceilings and resale potential. How could we think that 5m on Bayo was sound business? How could that have been signed off?
I think the Bayo one, amongst a sea of bizarre signings, is up there as one the most bizarre simply because up to now we’d never spent a penny on players in the championship. When we finally do we spend £5m on this chump, makes absolutely no sense. In the PL I’d just see it as normal bad recruitment, but in the championship? It stinks.
Yeah, but off the back of Okoye, Kayembe and Kalu too. I mean, this was us splurging cash on utter shyte. Was Mogi involved in Okoye?
Bayo, Kalu, Kayembe, Okoye, Tufan, Rose. There were question marks about the price or sense for each of these deals at the time they were made. I'm all for a few cheap punts, and yes Dennis possibly balanced the books, but that money really should have been better spent. Ok Manaj is a free signing but like Fletch, his salary is still a cost. Manaj & Bayo cannot be the answer for cover when Davis isn't fit if we want promotion.
It would be interesting to see the real dynamic here. I wonder how much Gino actually gets involved. Basically Giaretta is supposed to be the expert in the room when it comes to player signing. SD is the man guarding the budget for Watford. SD is the CEO. He is the head of the company. He makes all the key decisions for Watford FC. Obviously Gino sets the budget, and probably has some sort of formal sign off at the very end of the process, but I'm thinking who is actually responsible for saying this is the player we are going to sign. Probably is a collaborative decision, but there is always a forceful voice in any group and I wonder who that is at Watford. If Giaretta goes after the window shuts, then we can see who is going to carry the can. It should be him, as he's proved to be useless. But, how much involvement has RE had in the early recruitments? I think what happens is they present a list of players and Rob would probably not know many of them. He may push for players he knows, but leaves the Bayo's and Manaj's of this world to the "experts". I'd like to think the recent loan signings are an indication they went too low on quality initially, as they are certainly upgrades on our earlier signings. It concerns me when I see quotes from SD. When AF questioned him about the defence, he thought it was good. He said Samir played in Serie A, as if that wins the argument. But for me, that gives an insight that he is impressed by where players come from and the level they played at before. That seems to take high importance. I do agree that is an indicator, but it's not everything. Maybe he struggled at that level, maybe he's now past it, maybe there are some character flaws. That seems to get overlooked. We have 8 days left to put it all right. Can you trust the decision making of the board? I don't think so, but we've just got to hope they get it right. If we sell Pedro, which looks increasingly likely, then we really have to invest in key areas. We need a clinical striker (hopefully Archer), we need a right wingback who is the level of Kiko, or equivalent to Kamara on the left and we need a creative midfielder who can link between midfield and the front line. On the 'would be nice to have' list I'd add a backup keeper who is better than Okoye and Hamer, and loan out Okoye plus a right sided CB.
Gino was first and foremost a scout, he joined Udinese as a scout. The transfer window is apparently “when he comes alive”. I think he has a lot more involvement in these deals than you like to give him credit for.
From what's been seen so far, neither of them appear up to the Championship. Both have enough history to suggest that they could be that level (Manaj at Spezia and Bayo's stint at Charleroi) and it does take time to settle in, but on first impressions they are absolute cack. Manaj seems an acceptable punt - free and I don't think we are likely to be paying him that much, but Bayo seems insanely overpriced to the point where there simply must be more to it. I'd like to know his wages. No idea is Okoye is a Mogi special. I have a feeling he wasn't, so just very poor judgement as it stands. Kayembe is a bang average lower championship midfielder. No idea why he cost £2.7m or why he was brought in to keep us in the Premier League. Rose was a total and utter lack of due diligence.
Yes, that could well be correct. I just wanted to pose an alternative theory. If Gino is truly the guy who is making the player lists, and Giaretta just does the donkey work of making the deal happen, and SD just updates his financial spreadsheet, then we're probably all the poorer for it. I've always maintained we need a good Sporting Director at this club. Someone who makes consistently good decisions on players. Sure everyone gets it wrong now and again, but we're getting far too many wrong these days and is hurting status, club morale and most importantly finances.
Rose was fine. We paid nothing for him and his contract was heavily based on appearances. He was a cheap punt with significant upside. that in hindsight didn't pay off. £2.7m is still pretty cheap for a bog-standard Champ midfielder (I think he's better than that), but he's never a PL player. Okoye and Bayo are bizarre. I'm not writing either off just yet, but given we could have got a PL quality player with lots of upside for the cost of the two of them, they do seem like illogical purchases.
Giaretta and Duxbury are nothing but yes men, somebody within the club is pocketing money from all these deals and loan fees.
...and "old man" Kalu ? I get that Okoye may be seen as a great prospect to invest in, given how well he did in the Dutch league last season, his size and his youth, but it seemed a lot to pay for a reserve prospect.
Leopards don’t change their spots. Giaretta messed up the recruitment the last time we were in the Championship, but got away with it because we already had the nucleus of a good squad. But what did he add to it? Murray. Garner. Perica. Etc He then wasted last summer, bringing in so many awful signings. Cheap gambles. No due diligence. Not enough PL experience. He made the already difficult job of staying up virtually impossible. Such bad recruiting that for the second successive season we ended up sending loan signings back to their clubs or trying to pay off players to leave. He’s left us with Rose still on our pay roll. And Kalu. And players like Gosling on crazily long contracts. And now guess what’s. He’s at it again. We could have been savvy and brought in some decent bargains up top. Instead we grease the palms of you-know-who and also bring in a journeyman nobody who never quite made the grade in Spain and Italy. Utterly incompetent dealings. Honestly I’d have preferred Abobe and Gayle up top last night to that shower. I will try to be balanced. We’ve brought in a few good players too and needed ones, such as Choudhury and Hause should he ever play. But the overall feeling is one of incompetence. A very low success rate, considering the high number of signings. I wish he’d duck off out of our club
They said on the audio coverage that Davis was ill. Probably the worst £2.50 I have ever spent. The Bayo deal is nothing to do with Giarretta really. We were siphoning off money to Bayat before him, and I am sure we will continue to do so once Giarretta is made the scapegoat for this season's failures. The recruitment team is not really the issue - it is the fact our owner is in bed with a crook.
Hasn't everything we've been told suggested that Gino is heavily involved in all transfers? I'm not saying Giaretta is good, more that he's pointless as all the failings you correctly point to are most likely the handiwork of our owner, not his stooges.
