Despite a summer of inactivity, Lee Johnson is expecting a few new faces to arrive on Wearside this coming week after the club have tabled bids for half a dozen players which are a mixture of loans, transfers and free agents…
REBUILD
“What I do know is that the work that goes on behind the scenes. Obviously I’m a part of that. It’s been a tough summer. Like I said to you before, historically, we’ve been left with nothing. We’ve got our football nous if you know what I mean. Obviously there has been a big data drive and that data is developing day by day and showing some really interesting characteristics for in inverted commas ‘my baby’ if you like in terms of my philosophy.”
DNA
“Because the individual DNA profile is going to have to be merged with a metric that I find fits into the style of play so that is interesting and that has flagged up probably six or seven players that we didn’t know just from the old football nous side and in fact, one we’ve bid on, so that’s quite interesting. We have actually got, four or five current bids on the table for various positions so it’s not like we’re not moving.”
FEES
“You always look at the transfer market. Are they affordable? Are they accessible and are they available? So you don’t bid for somebody unless you feel they are affordable accessible and available and obviously it depends on transfer fee, agents fees and at the moment I think agents have been pretty unrealistic with the climate to the levels of percentages they want. Inevitably as time goes on and the player starts getting a little bit anxious about ‘the other boys are training’ and all his mates are training and he’s not, things start to reduce a little bit so I’m confident in the majority of positions in our list and in our actions but obviously it’s one thing acting on it and getting it over the line.”
THREE ARRIVALS LOOMING
“What I would say is myself, Kristjian, Jamie, Luke Cole, James Young and obviously Stuart Harvey, we’ve been 7am till 11pm all summer thrashing all these out. I need a holiday. I would say you look at what type of bid you can make, you can make transfer, a trade if you like, you’ve got a free agent that’s on the market that’s been released and you can do a bit more with that one. You can get them in, you can give them a thorough medical, you can run them and have a look and then of course you’ve got loan bids. There’s two or three of those. Probably more than that to be honest, actually pending, so not a million miles away on probably at least three signings so I’d expect definitely two to come through the door next week.”
