To be honest, as much as I hate it as a fan, being so far behind Celtic and having a half season to focus on rebuilding and not competing with them is something we've needed for a while. I fear next season will be the same.
We don't just need to get a little bit better at player trading, we need to completely overhaul our approach. We saw what selling Bassey and Patterson for 30m+ and making the final of the Europa League did for the trajectory of the club -
nothing.
We need at least 2 Bassey's, Pattersons, Jefte's or Hamza's most seasons. Our recruitment needs to be mainly under 23 players bought for under 5m (ideally much less) and we need to accept for every Bassey (and hopefully Jefte, Hamza and Nsiala) transfer that does work out with a big profit, there will be transfers like Ridvan and Cortes where everything looks great on paper (those two both arrived with much bigger reputations as top prospects than anyone in the first column) but it just doesn't work out, we need to be able to make a profit whilst covering those losses - every season. (Hopefully it does work out for those players, there's still plenty of time.)
It's clear that the injury to Barron has forced Clement to play Rice, and he's now the academy player that we're building into the first team, we need to do that every season. Hopefully something clicks for Curtis, Fraser, Nsio or Stevens over the next 5 months and one of them can take that slot next season.
We have the following selling points we can use to get players here:
- Huge global fanbase
- Historic stadium
- Proximity to England
- Play in Europe every season, often after Christmas
- Play in a team that wins most of it's games (if you play in a team that wins more than it loses, then it's likely that your individual stats will be better than if you played for a team that loses more than it wins, improving your visibility on the various algorithms most teams use to find players these days.)
We are on paper not that different to Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord, Porto or Benfica - it's time we started competing with these clubs, in terms of the way we operate, instead of trying to go toe-to-toe with Celtic and losing because they have more resources than us.