That's the thing. You can buy cheap from L1/L2 and use academy products but the gamble there is that you can spot which ones come good and which ones don't. Brentford's success has been based on being better than average at assessing those kinds of players and successfully embedding them in a squad. That kind of thing takes years of monitoring and, aside from the guy who finds all the players in London, we show no sign of doing that. Our transfer policy has tended to be "who did really well last season, lets make an offer." There's also been a sense that even when we have tried to unearth players that the club itself isn't joined up in how it handles the players.
With Scott, we are potentially going down a more coherent route but that is going to take 3 years minimum to embed while we are a club and fanbase that expects promotion immediately. Wilder is also a manager who is in it for promotion and is not interested in spending 3 years in the Championship while we get our act together. So there is all kinds of tension.
Wilder's strength is in making players who are good enough do better. He's not very good at improving star players or developing young players. Gyokeres is one of the best strikers in the Championship and looks to be on an upward trajectory. He would probably score 15-20 goals for us in a full season but someone like Forss seems more like the kind of player that Wilder would improve. Coventry don't want to sell and Gyokeres doesn't want to move to us. Larsen seems like a better fit to me; he would see us as a step up and he wouldn't cost the same amount in fee and wages, leaving us enough in the kitty to possibly chase two other £5m deals. Obviously he may struggle to adapt to the Championship so that is the gamble you take. If our past recruitment was better then you would feel that you could rely on the rest of the strikers while Larsen adapts. Given that the rest of our strikers are Forss, Akpom and Watmore's left knee that is a risk.
Frankly I would hate to have to make this decision.
Good post.
Yep, hard to match Brentford, especially with us being in the North East. It would be hard to find young lads and get them to come up here, if they had other options near where they live etc. Peterborough have a decent record of finding them too. It takes years to build up that mind. We did pick out a couple in Jones and Spence though, but the rate is seemingly less than one a year (who make it to this level).
It's all about balance I suppose, but a team like us is absolutely crying out for a star striker, as far as the first 11 goes, and the fist 11 is very strong other than that. Forss may step up, but it's a much bigger gamble than Gyokeres. We do need some backups though, especially in centre mid with Tav gone, that's a big hole to fill. McGree may be able to fill Tav's spot, but we need to then fill McGree's etc.
If we got Larson along with a 5m gamble I think I would be equally as happy as getting Gyokeres, as I've got some faith in Forss, and expect Watmore and Coburn to do better with this years supply. I can't see any of those getting more than 15 goals mind, but if we stay solid it might be enough.
We got up in 15/16 with strikers like Nugent scoring 8, Rhodes 6 and Kike 4, which is some doing, but we only shipped 31 goals that year and had Stuani on 7 goals from playing wide, and Ramirez got 7 too. Suppose we would need Crooks, McGree, Giles and Jones all getting 25-30 goals between them, and keeping fairly tight at the back.