Blindsided from what we had within….

 

This season has shown what we have had all along and just didn’t quite grasp how successfully we could utilise this within our own club. 

The emergence of Ayoub Assal from a squad player to a first team starter has been simply amazing. Before his introduction in the 71st minute at Shrewsbury at the beginning of March as part of the introduction of 3 finishers by Robbo, we had seen him for 58 minutes earlier in the season with finisher appearances against Brighton U23’s and Oxford United in the Football League Trophy. Robbo put his faith in a 19 year old making his first league appearance with his team staring at dropping a couple of places to 23rd in League One, and only one point above bottom club Wigan. 

Within 13 minutes, he had his first league goal after bundling in a far post header from Pigott into his path. It was only our second shot on target all evening and Shrewsbury had seen two goals disallowed for offside with the first one being given, only for the linesman to put up a late flag. It shows the small margins of this beautiful game we love and also the remarkable sight of a 5ft 5in player even trying to take up a place in the penalty area against big, ugly, 6ft plus defenders. The thing that impressed me that evening was as soon as the ball had hit the back of the net, Ayoub was on his feet, picking up the ball and running back to the half way line to see if we could get a winner. This was his first professional goal, however the team was more important than him. That's when you know you have a winner in your team. 

Roll on two months and Ayoub had secured a new 3 year contract until 2024 and with a bit of luck, will single handedly pay back the intangible cost of the work and time that has been put in form our brilliant academy. If Ayoub continues this development over the next season, I have no doubt we will be receiving multi million pound offers for his signature. If you look at other transfer fees for similar players from the EFL, the Ademola Lookman £11m transfer from Charlton Athletic to Everton in January 2017, who was 19 at the time, is a good comparison. Lookman was playing in League One at the time and had scored 7 goals in 25 games that season. The previous season Charlton had been relegated from the Championship and he scored 5 goals in 24 appearances. 

Ayoub has 4 goals in 14 appearances, four as a finisher and his minutes per goal is 215, which is a goal every 2.3 games. To compare, Joe Pigott was a goal every 2.1 games, of course over 45 games. Charlton also had sell on’s built into the transfer to Everton and Lookman signed for RB Leipzig in 2019 for an initial £16m that could have risen to £22.5m with performance based payments. I was listening to Darragh Macanthony’s “The Hard Truth” which is my favourite podcast at the moment and he was funny enough, discussing transfer this season as a listener has asked about sell on’s and did they continue when the players sign for future clubs in their career. Darragh said that he has sold players with Sell On’s and each time the player is transferred, Peterborough will receive a percentage of the transfer fee along with other clubs in the chain. The percentage reduces as each time the player is transferred, however it is a great source of income from players who have developed and moved on. Normally clubs in the chain will always sell with an add-on, however if they didn’t then the chain of income stops. Darragh mentions that he gave advice to a person in the concrete city over the Dele Ali deal who they sold him to with a 20% sell on fee, however the person spoke to Daniel Levy at Spurs and agreed to take cash up front now for say £6m and they then cancelled the sell-on due to them if Spurs sold him in the future. This is the way we need to service our debt for our club and it's the way we used to do it back in the 90’s by selling one or two of our players to cover the losses we incurred that season.

It was great news that Robbo also announced that we will be giving our academy graduates a two year contract with an option of another year for the club to take up if the player progresses during their contract. It’s a win win for each party as the player gets more security, additional time to develop, as not everyone develops at the same rate, and it gives the club massive protection if the player hits the ground running and then starts to attract attention from Championship or Premier League clubs. Whilst we can’t stop the top clubs getting players cheap before they are on a pro contract, the improvement in the length of contract we offer and the pathway being shown it can happen to the first team, we are starting to develop a strategy that will further enhance the brilliant work everyone does in the academy 

The role Rob Tuvey will play next season as the loans manager will be just as important as we need to get our players in their 2nd to 3rd seasons as a pro out to decent level non-league clubs to continue their development. Nobody knows what the landscape will look like in non-league next season with hardly any money being made, so we could find that players like Matthew Cox, Huseyin Biler and Corie Andrews getting loans for teams in the National League next season as they will be a cheaper option for clubs short on money. 

It was great to see Corie Andrews score two second half goals against Cray Valley Paper Mills at Plough Lane on Saturday for us to progress to the final of this season's London Senior Cup. We will play, wait for it….   Either Fisher Athletic, Hanwell Town, Haringey Borough, Tooting & Mitcham or Erith Town in the final. The London FA would like to have this completion completed by the end of May, so no pressure on the teams as the competition still has five fixtures, including the final to complete. It’s not common knowledge where this seasons final will be played, however if we obtain the safety certificate in good time, it would be nice for us to approach the London FA and offer Plough Lane as the venue and get some welcome income for the club we play and also for us to continue to test out the facilities at Plough Lane. 

The test event is tomorrow night (if you are reading this on the day I launched this blog) and I am excited, whilst also anxious about the event. I know I am not alone with these mixed feelings as this will be the first time that the majority of the 2k people in attendance will have been to Plough Lane and also in a crowd of more than 6 people. This is probably the most challenging time for any club to have a test event for a new ground as not only does the club have to pass the stringent tests that are normally included in this assessment, but they have to also factor the additional Covid regulations. Anyone that has been down Plough Lane in the last 6 months will know that on a normal day during a Covid type rush hour, the traffic can be horrendous and take some time along that stretch of road. Adding 2k fans with the majority new to the ground, using the many train stations close by, bus or even taxi, will no doubt face challenges. I also expect more people than normal to drive to the game with concerns being in close proximity to other people on public transport to add to the challenges of getting everyone into the ground in three 20 minute slots, from 6pm for the game to kick off at 7pm. Personally I have used Earlsfield train station and it's a lovely 15 minute walk down a straight road with loads of places to get food or drink from before the game. No food or drink will be sold in the ground on Tuesday and only A5 bags will be allowed to be taken into the ground. It’s such a shame that Macky D’s is not yet available opposite the ground 😩

It’s been nearly a month since my last blog after the 2-1 win at home to Oxford United. Since then we have secured League One safety with one game left. It’s been a mad month for me personally with my Mental Health and then allowing my Diabetes to get out of control which resulted in my eye sight seriously effected, that I could not see anything on my iPhone, iPad or laptop, even with the settings set the the largest viewing option possible. I have to say this scared me shitless and by cutting out all my carbs and monitoring my blood before and two hours after each meal, I have reduced my blood sugar levels and thankfully, over the weekend my eyesight improved and I am probably back to 90% the level of eyesight I had before. I think I have learned my lesson big time and won’t allow that to happen again!!

With the last game of the league season completed away at Lincoln, Robbo was able to have those horrible conversations with the players to let them know if they were being given new contracts or being released into the anticipated two thousand players expected to be looking for a club this summer. When I heard that earlier this season I thought it was chairman and journalists being way out, however bearing in mind 1.5k players were looking for clubs last summer and the volume of players being released by clubs already, that number looks realistic. I really hope that player agents are speaking to the players they represent and advise them properly of what the market will look like in the summer. We did our business early in the summer last year and Ollie Palmer mentioned in an interview the 9yrspodcast did after he joined, that he was keen to get a new club and contract completed as early as possible. This season the release list only had three players confirmed on it with Luke O’Neill, Callum Reilly & Shane McLoughlin leaving the clubs as their contracts have expired. I am gutted they have all been released as we just haven’t had the chance to see them play this season and thank them for their contribution to the last two seasons. I really hope all three get new clubs early on and hopefully they can return to Plough Lane with a crowd and we can give them a great reception. From a personal point of view, Callum leaving is gutting as he was great to interview for the podcast and we often would chat for a good ten minutes before we started recording the interview, asking how we all were and talking about the world and the way of life with Covid. 

Delighted that we have offered Terell Thomas and Joe Pigott new deals as both deserve them. Realistically we have a 50% chance of keeping our top scorer from this season, but without Robbo’s influence I would have not even given a 20% chance of him staying. Our loans from this season return to their parent clubs and we have had more successful ones than not. The pick of them was George Dobson and he has made a massive difference to the team and his partnerships with Alex Woodward for the last ten games, gave us a massive lift and helped us keep the goals conceded down and in turn, allow Pigott to get the goals to keep us up. Thankfully it looks like we won’t have to go out and get another loan goalkeeper this summer as Tzanev has won, and kept the goalkeeper shirt his own from the moment he was selected for the league game at Bristol Rovers and added another clean sheet to his eight this season in all games. His penalty save against Northampton Town was the stand out moment for him and it gave him credit for the error at home to Fleetwood, which was the only goal in a disappointing performance. The mental strength to respond from that was a big tick for him in keeping the jersey and he went on to be part of the team that won four out of the next five and only conceded 3 goals. 

This morning Gary Neville along with other tv pundits launched a petition for fans to sign to encourage the government to bring in an independent football regulator to try to start fixing football. I say start as this is too big a problem to fix in one hit or with one new regulation. Of course the Premier League (Premier League) have confirmed they don’t need an independent regulator which is code word for “Houston we have a problem” Whilst I welcome the tv pundits joining forces, the irony is that they are part of the problem. TV has caused the problem by the amount of money the TV deal provides to the Premier League. The proposed European Super League (ESL) is a red herring as the PL clubs were enraged that the big six were going to run off with their money. It has nothing to do with fixing football, but everything to fixing a potential problem with future TV revenue. The PL teams will only ever help themselves, but if they look over their shoulders, they will see the damage that chasing the PL dream of promotion from the Championship has damaged some of the most established clubs in the country. Sheffield Wednesday are the latest club to join clubs like Wolves, Southampton, Portsmouth, Sheffield United, Sunderland, Charlton Athletic, Bolton Wanderers, Wigan, Ipswich Town and Bradford City that have all chased the dream and ended up falling into League One. If you look at the bottom half of the Championship table from the season, other clubs like these are in danger of falling and we could soon see the Nottingham Forest vs Derby County game taking place in League One in a few seasons. 

Football is broken and the ESL was a wake up call, but all the while PL clubs continue to cherry pick the best players from lower academies, and take 91.6% of the TV money each season, they are increasing the likelihood of not only football getting worse into trouble, but clubs bigger than Bury going out of business. 

Maybe, just maybe bigger clubs fans might really see the extent of the problem staring us all squarely in the face. 

Once we, and I mean every fan that supports a PL and Championship club, wake up to this and unite, football will continue to be broken and we will see more clubs selling their training grounds and having tens of millions of debt that no sensible potential owner will consider buying… Derby County anyone?