Was transfer shambles a watershed for Swans?
SWANSEA City’s dramatic 4-3 defeat to Birmingham City fully compounded what was a miserable week for the club.
A dreadful deadline day capped off what was a woeful transfer window. The emotion and frustration with events swiftly poured out of everyone connected to the club.
But in the midst of the mayhem came one telling quote.
“Out of all of this, whatever’s happened, we have a massive chance to do things right now and learn from this,” said Russell Martin on Friday.
The lack of additions last month could well prove decisive in Swansea’s bid to reach the play-offs. Indeed, Swansea were already short in certain areas. Take Joe Allen and Joel Latibeaudiere out through injury, and an already thin squad looks in danger of becoming decimated.
Head coach Martin has used just 22 different players in the Championship so far this season, the lowest total of any side in the division such is the lack of alternative options available.
That said, there was still enough talent on the pitch to deal with Birmingham’s late surge on Saturday, while the defending from the two crosses that led to Lukas Jutkiewicz and Auston Trusty heading beyond Andy Fisher left a lot to be desired.
But support in January was badly needed, and few would now be surprised if Swansea drift away from the top six over the remaining stages of the campaign.
Martin was only too aware that the comments he made from his explosive pre-match press conference won’t have gone down well with those on the other side of the Atlantic.
Speaking after the defeat to Birmingham, the 37-year-old commented: “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
“I’ve done my very best to keep everyone focused on what’s important this week.
“I’ve done my very best to be as honest as I possibly could with everyone which has probably made some people really unhappy. I have to deal with that and the fallout from that.”
One thing is for certain. They are words that needed saying. Change really is needed, and urgently.
Martin’s comments that the club’s recruitment team simply won’t stand for another repeat of the January 2023 window were both damning and pivotal.
“I’m not convinced we’ve got a recruitment team and everyone else that’s going to be happy to have a window like this again,” he said on Friday. “I don’t think we’ll be happy to have a window like this again.”
It truly hammered home the exasperation of everyone at Fairwood, but the full scale of the home truths were long overdue.
The two transfer windows during the 2018-19 season, Swansea’s first in the Championship following relegation from the Premier League, fully set the alarm bells ringing.
A toxic atmosphere around the club was successfully used to create a siege mentality as the likes of Connor Roberts, Joe Rodon, Oli McBurnie and Daniel James dazzled in the latter stages of Graham Potter’s sole season at the club.
While some sections of the club’s supporters were less than impressed with the club’s playing style given the talent within the squad, back-toback play-off campaigns under Steve Cooper represented a brilliant period when it came to on-pitch results.
Parachute payments have come and gone. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown up immense challenges while heavily denting revenues. Football clubs aren’t immune to a cost of living crisis either.
As a result, budgets have been slashed, and it all leaves Martin operating in a different stratosphere to both Potter and Cooper when it comes to the club’s business dealings.
To that end, clarity is more crucial than ever, quite simply because it reduces the chances of avoidable mistakes being made.
During last week’s headline-grabbing press conference, Martin referenced the “ambiguity” in the transfer process that proved so costly.
Let’s be clear, fewer than 24 hours before those comments from the head coach, Swansea’s co-owner Jason Levien publicly confirmed in an interview, conducted with the Supporters’ Trust, that the final say on transfers lies at his door.
So with all of this in mind, the killer question has to be asked. What happens next?
All parties can put their heart and soul into fully reviewing the situation with a view to making crucial tweaks to the processes in the hope that they will massively benefit the club as a whole.
Or, there’s the dreaded alternative. No change. Make the same mistakes.
The former scenario gives the club the chance to make shrewd deals, operate in a sustainable manner and, crucially, give Swansea a genuine chance of returning to the top flight. The latter is likely to see a slide in results and further disconnect at Fairwood, not to mention more damage to the overall look of the club.
Few would be surprised if there was a mass exodus, both on the coaching side and in the playing squad, in the summer unless there was genuine hope that the process will evolve for the better.
To his credit, since becoming involved with the club in the summer of 2020, Jake Silverstein has made a real attempt to communicate with fans. He even appeared alongside Martin, Julian Winter and Matt Grimes at a fans’ forum earlier this season.
Since the fallout from the latest transfer window shambles, Silverstein appears to have somewhat surprisingly been engaging with supporters online via Reddit.
“I’ve said many times we are going to change the way our process works in the future to ensure the mistakes of this January don’t happen again,” the account, titled ‘jmsilverstein’, said in one particular thread.
His desire and willingness to communicate is genuinely admirable and immensely refreshing.
And yet, it’s other comments that leave supporters concerned that so many of the words uttered are hollow, even if unintentionally so from Silverstein’s own perspective.
Silverstein highlighted the experience he and his partners Levien and Steve Kaplan have in the world of sports transfers, but later conceded that “while we may not have the amount of football specific expertise in evaluating talent that our football department has, we have a tremendous amount of experience in structuring, negotiating and executing deals which we need to bring to bear during this process”.
Sadly, this execution was critically lacking last month, something Levien himself admitted to.
“I think it reflects more an inability on the execution side, a little bit of an unfortunate outcome that was unrelated to us and you know, being a bit unlucky,” he said when discussing the lack of incomings.
Levien and Kaplan publicly admitted a few years ago that the 2018 summer transfer window was an absolute mess and promised they would do all in their power to improve recruitment.
But here we are, more than four years on, in exactly the same position, only with a drastically lower amount of funds available, which probably goes a long way to explaining the aspirations of bringing fresh investment into the club.
Calls for change were needed, and last week’s events could actually serve as a watershed moment.
But it must actually happen. They can’t afford to be empty words. The progress of the club hinges on it.
The proof will be firmly in the pudding over the next six months or so.