23-03-2021, 04:49 PM
(23-03-2021, 01:30 PM)Pedalo_menders Wrote: "To me Sporting Director sounds like the sort of job someone with a Sports Management degree might apply for, not necessarily someone with playing experience and not therefore someone that I would want to be involved in the identifying of players to be recruited."
Are you deliberately being obtuse? Of course if you hire someone unqualified to do the job, it's going to fail. It doesnt matter what structure you have.
"Unless your are arguing that players should never be allowed to go into the last year of their contract (in which case good luck with moving the likes of Downing)"
Again, you seem to want to apply some sort of rigid rule to all players? No. You need to look at the balance of the squad, which areas need continuity, match that up with when players contracts are renewing and ensure you dont have all your best defenders leaving at once.
Burgess's contact was allowed to run down to a stage where he was free to talk to other clubs. This is the point you are missing. This shouldn't be happening with specific players you want to keep. Obviously we dont want to keep Downing so you can let his contract wind down.
Similarly, if you have only 1 1st team starters contract in 1 area of the pitch renewing in 1 window, you can take the chance of letting it run down and maybe see if there are better alternatives. However what is happening is that several players in 1 area of the pitch all have their contracts running down and every single one of them can start looking for offers.
If you take into account the squad planning I mention above, you look can see you are heading for trouble if you dont tie down the right players early enough.
My whole point is that they would not be unqualified to do the job if the Sporting Director role was an administrative role. Which is may well be. We know roughly what a Director of Football does, but we do not know what they envisage the role of Sporting Director to cover. There must be a reason they have chosen to call it a Sporting Director and not a Director of Football, which is far more common parlance.
And Burgess, or any other player, is always free to talk to other clubs in the last year of his contract. So I repeat, are you saying the club should have a policy of never letting players that you choose enter the last year of any contract. How are you going to make that happen when a player wants a new challenge at the end of his contract ? But more to the point of this thread what difference would having a Sporting Director make to this ? He would have to follow the current policy of the club just the same as Jackett & Brown & Catlin have had to do. You can disagree with that policy if you like but I really don't see why you think that having a Sporting Director would suddenly fix it to your satisfaction.
Me? I'd rather the club was run sensibly when it came to finance, we know only to well the results of the opposite of that.