If you're a crap team, not likely to get promotion and don't have any money then you have to (should) take risks on lower level/ cheaper players. Then you have to be excellent at picking them out, and then you also need to convince them to come to you, and not the other 10-20 interested teams. This should be us in some seasons, but shouldn't be in others. This isn't a season where it should.
There may be the odd one or two who are almost proven in league one, but they're going for 5m plus, and we would have little chance of attracting them to the North East. The chance of success needs to be more than three times that of someone for 15m (and the 15m player has a chance of being much better than this too), so you would need to buy three of them, which is spending the same money. You can only play one at any given time, so you end up backing up one which pays off, with two who will be terrible, not good enough for the squad. We don't need backup strikers, or second choices, we already have four of them, we need someone who is going to come in and be the number one pick, and play every week.
Does anyone seriously think Gyokeres wouldn't get 17 or more goals for us, in our current side, current style, current manager, and also contribute a lot to other players?
Does anyone think overall that Gyokeres couldn't score at a higher rate than Britt or Rhodes for us, this year, and offer far more linking up with other players?
Every year there's ~150 strikers in squads for Championship teams, last year 7 players scored 17, only 1 in 20 is making the cut, year before it was 5 (1 in 30), year before 6 (1 in 25).
Look at the teams who went up automatically last year, 1 & 2, they had Mitrovic and Solanke, combined purchase price of 45m. Grant was on the +17 list he was about 15m. The other three were Weimann, Piroe and Diaz, none of them playing for side above us, suggesting they were less likely to go up, and hence did not need to buy a ready made striker. Weimann took 3 years to come good, Piroe came good first year for 2m, good find. Diaz 7m, took 4 years to come good.
20/21, top of the list Toney (5m, 10m with addons) and there was zero chance of getting him up here, the same chance we had of getting Maja from league 1, who then flopped ever since. Armstrong scored 1 in 2 in league one, came good in third season, we don't have that time. Pukki (already proven, they had him a few years, will cover that later)
19/20 Mitrovic (25m), Watkins 2m came good in third season, Grabban £6m (always got goals, older, think we tried to sign but wouldn't come here), Grant 15m, Wells 5m (think we tried to sign, wouldn't come here)
18/19 Pukki free transfer as he was out of contract, this doesn't mean he was a bad player, or much of a risk, lots of competition to get him though, fair play to Norwich on that one, Muapay 2m came good in second season, Abraham (prem loan, already proven in 16/17), gayle (prem loan, already proven in 16/17)
Most of those are already proven players, expensive players or players who did not come good in their first or second year.
The point is if we think the side has a great chance of promotion this year, then we don't have time to wait for an investment to pay off, and it would be very risky to expect an unproven player to pay off. If it doesn't pay off this year then next year we will likely be doing it without Jones, Giles, Steffen, Fry, Howson, Wilder etc.
As above, to even get a cheap signing to make the list, they're normally players in the value range of 2-7m, and a lot of the time they take years to come good. The very obvious prospects we have probably been in for, like just about every other club, but we got none of them.
Getting a proven player on loan from the prem is fine (if we can get one, an they want to come), but likely to be on loan, or expensive.
As for cheaper players, in the last few years we've had: Sporar, Balogun, Connoly, Ikpeazu, Watmore, Akpom, Fletcher, Nmecha, Gestede all on loan or costing <7m. None of them really proven, none of them worked (enough to start every game in a top 3 side).
Then we've had Bamford, good buy at 5.5m (sold for 9m?) but we know he was relatively proven (albeit an outcast), still only got 11 goals though (albeit played out of position a lot).
Assombalonga 15m, proven championship buy, scored at a rate of 1 in 2 for the games he started (for us) for two years, then we let him run his contract down.
Rhodes 10m (sold for 10m), proven championship buy, scored at a rate of 1 in 2 (for us) in the games he started, in the negative Karanka team.
Braithwaite (£9m), he was a good player, highly rated and good enough for La Liga/ Barcelona seemingly, but not really a striker and obviously got fed up with Monk, we got more than half of our money back.
Gees, the best striker we've had in recent times was Stuani, and he was cheap, but even when he was here we didn't even realise he was a striker. Couldn't even see what was right in front of us.
Those four are the only ones who really worked or could have worked, and none of them were anywhere near free, two of them we got at least our money back. We messed up the Assombalonga situation, he wasn't the problem initially, we were.