by Gulliball » 07 Oct 2014, 12:35
That's the nature of clubs at our level and of 1 or 2 year contracts. If we had signed Young for a transfer fee and tied him to a 5 year deal, then we could keep him. As it is, he has a 24 month contract, during which time we have to offer him a new contract, let it expire or sell him. Clubs at our level have 10 players out of contract every summer - and largely speaking, the best of these move upwards, the average ones stay and the worst ones get released. We will shortly have Ives, Pearce and Cameron out of contract and may want to keep them, but more than likely they will all receive bigger offers and look to move on.
Looking at Crewe as an example, some players outgrow the clubs they start their careers at, and this is what the transfer market is for. Lee Sharpe would have been wasted playing on our left wing when he was starting for Man Utd as a teenager. If you want to buy raw players and develop them, then you have to sell them when the time is right. Crewe wouldn't be a Premiership club now even if they had kept Platt, Murphy, Ashton and all the others, but selling them allows them to fund the £500k a year it costs to run their academy.
The longest we can currently keep Luke Young for is another 18 months. The other promising guys like Richards, Ajala, Cameron, MacDonald and Pearce etc have at best the same remaining and in a few cases, even less. No-one is contracted past June 2016, and if these players perform well for us then they will attract bigger clubs and bigger offers. The benefit of that for us is that they can help us to promotion before moving on, and leave the Club in a far better state than it was when they arrived. At our level things are cyclical, and every summer is important to build a squad. We benefit from this when we have underperforming players, and release them into unemployment as soon as we possibly can, that is why we offer one and two year deals.
If Ives, Young or anyone else attracts suitors from higher divisions then they will go. We can't magically keep them for the next five years while we look to make League One. The only say we have in that is exactly when they go, and how much we bring in for them. We should be looking to maximise the transfer revenue we can generate from the successes, to give the manager as competitive a budget as we can to compete in whatever division we're in. The only way we will ever sustain League One football is to develop an infrastructure that will allow us to compete there, which means building it up one step at a time. Three or four good players contracted for another 18 months won't help us in the long term unless we use them to build a system that can be repeated and sustained after they've left.
You can't blame the players for this, it is how the system works. They are one bad injury away from having no income in 8 months time, and one transfer away from possibly doubling or trebling their salaries. The only players who dream of playing for Torquay United are the ones who know they won't make it any higher. These players can be Club Legends like Kevin Hill, or play in very successful sides like Matt Hockley, but you have to surround them by an Alex Russell, Eunan O'Kane or Luke Young to bring success, and those players won't stay here just to wait to see if we can make League One. If that was how the job market worked then everyone would be a paper boy and there would be no doctors.
That's the nature of clubs at our level and of 1 or 2 year contracts. If we had signed Young for a transfer fee and tied him to a 5 year deal, then we could keep him. As it is, he has a 24 month contract, during which time we have to offer him a new contract, let it expire or sell him. Clubs at our level have 10 players out of contract every summer - and largely speaking, the best of these move upwards, the average ones stay and the worst ones get released. We will shortly have Ives, Pearce and Cameron out of contract and may want to keep them, but more than likely they will all receive bigger offers and look to move on.
Looking at Crewe as an example, some players outgrow the clubs they start their careers at, and this is what the transfer market is for. Lee Sharpe would have been wasted playing on our left wing when he was starting for Man Utd as a teenager. If you want to buy raw players and develop them, then you have to sell them when the time is right. Crewe wouldn't be a Premiership club now even if they had kept Platt, Murphy, Ashton and all the others, but selling them allows them to fund the £500k a year it costs to run their academy.
The longest we can currently keep Luke Young for is another 18 months. The other promising guys like Richards, Ajala, Cameron, MacDonald and Pearce etc have at best the same remaining and in a few cases, even less. No-one is contracted past June 2016, and if these players perform well for us then they will attract bigger clubs and bigger offers. The benefit of that for us is that they can help us to promotion before moving on, and leave the Club in a far better state than it was when they arrived. At our level things are cyclical, and every summer is important to build a squad. We benefit from this when we have underperforming players, and release them into unemployment as soon as we possibly can, that is why we offer one and two year deals.
If Ives, Young or anyone else attracts suitors from higher divisions then they will go. We can't magically keep them for the next five years while we look to make League One. The only say we have in that is exactly when they go, and how much we bring in for them. We should be looking to maximise the transfer revenue we can generate from the successes, to give the manager as competitive a budget as we can to compete in whatever division we're in. The only way we will ever sustain League One football is to develop an infrastructure that will allow us to compete there, which means building it up one step at a time. Three or four good players contracted for another 18 months won't help us in the long term unless we use them to build a system that can be repeated and sustained after they've left.
You can't blame the players for this, it is how the system works. They are one bad injury away from having no income in 8 months time, and one transfer away from possibly doubling or trebling their salaries. The only players who dream of playing for Torquay United are the ones who know they won't make it any higher. These players can be Club Legends like Kevin Hill, or play in very successful sides like Matt Hockley, but you have to surround them by an Alex Russell, Eunan O'Kane or Luke Young to bring success, and those players won't stay here just to wait to see if we can make League One. If that was how the job market worked then everyone would be a paper boy and there would be no doctors.
