Spending sprees crank up League One heat
THE East Anglian Daily Times had already described Ipswich Town’s transfer window as “this summer like no other” as the new owners of the Tractor Boys throw their money around – before they signed former Burton Albion midfielder Scott Fraser on Wednesday night.
Wigan Athletic have new owners, too, and have embarked on a spending spree which has already seen them outbid others for last season’s League One leading scorer, Charlie Wyke, from Sunderland.
This sort of thing, realistically, is what Burton Albion are up against now and will be up against when the new season kicks off.
Supporters are excited – and rightly so – by the decisiveness and charisma of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and the influence on players he and his assistant Dino Maamria have brought to the Brewers.
People want to play for them, want to run through the proverbial brick wall for them and there have been, at the time of writing, 10 new arrivals at the Pirelli Stadium, as well as a clutch of popular players signing new deals to stay on.
In many ways, it has already been a summer like no other for the Brewers, too.
We are seeing the longer version of what Hasselbaink and Maamria did so quickly in January when they strode through the doors and galvanised a team on its knees.
Players are talking about how hard pre-season is and smiling about it. There is a good feeling in the camp.
Some people already think Hasselbaink’s
Burton will storm League One this season. You never know, they might. They very nearly did when Hasselbaink last started a season in charge at this level.
Burton finished second to a fastfinishing Wigan that season, after Hasselbaink had left for Queens Park Rangers and been replaced by Nigel Clough, but when you look at the league table for that season, it was without the clutch of big clubs that will start this season.
Sheffield United, soon to be brought back to life by Chris Wilder, finished 11th and that was about as big as it got.
Nine clubs from that season will be in League Two this season. A 10th, Chesterfield, are outside the Football League and an 11th, Bury, sadly, no longer exist.
This time, the new owners of Ipswich, Wigan and newly-promoted Bolton Wanderers will be ensuring – at least for the time being – that their clubs are spending on a par with anyone else.
They will be alongside two other big clubs who keep finding a way to miss out on promotion, Sunderland and Portsmouth.
Add to them Sheffield Wednesday. They appear to have been relegated from the Championship in disarray but so were Hull City last season and they were still big enough and wealthy enough to go straight back up as champions.
Oxford United would like to see themselves in that group, too, and successive failures in the play-offs suggest they should be challengers again.
So, the Brewers have a stronglooking squad, full of players with something to prove and with a nice smattering of experience – but the spending of others demands a note of caution.
It was a statement, indeed, when Ipswich announced the signing of Joe Pigott early this week – but it was another one when they prized former Brewer Fraser from Milton Keynes Dons, where he was only one year into his stay.
Striker Pigott had, apparently, been courted by half of the Championship, although a lot of that can often be put down to agents touting their clients, but he is staying in League One with Ipswich and was their seventh signing so far.
Fraser made it eight and you can bet the undisclosed fee would have been substantial by League One standards.
There will be more. New manager Paul Cook cleared out 20 players in the summer and, prior to the Pigott signing, chief executive Mark Ashton stated that he was expecting five more arrivals.
“I have a dashboard that we operate on a daily basis that shows us all the transactions from all our competitors in League One,” Ashton told the local paper, prior to Fraser’s arrival.
“There are some big clubs in League One who are yet to sign a player. We’ve got six in.
“I’m not going to lie to you, I want at least five more. We are down the line in a number of those. Some we will conclude, some we won’t conclude. But we have alternative options.
“The six we’ve got in I’m really pleased with. I think the five that are remaining are the five most difficult ones. That’s why they are taking some time.
“But we are going to be active right throughout this window.”
Similar noises are coming from Wigan. Their statement signing is Wyke, who was being linked with Celtic and Nottingham Forest and who Sunderland wanted to keep after his 31-goal season.
It might be a bit of a gamble. Wyke has not had another season like it in a 10-year career mostly conducted beneath League One and critics points to the number of assists he got from Aiden Mcgeady for the Black Cats.
Even so, he was a wanted man and says his move was partly to do with the pleas of former Sunderland team-mate Max Power, who has also gone to Wigan.
With the greatest respect to Wyke, it will also have been about the size of the deal and the same can be said of former Brewer Tom Naylor, who had already had his medical with Mansfield Town for a move closer to
his Nottinghamshire home when Wigan came waving a bigger cheque, to Stags boss Clough’s fury. Wigan have signed eight players so far.
Among the other big spenders, Sunderland have brought in eight players so far, Bolton also eight and Portsmouth six.
Sheffield Wednesday have brought in only four – while 22 have departed – and Darren Moore clearly has a huge job on his hands.
All things considered then, Hasselbaink has still been busier, earlier than his League One rivals.
He and Maamria said they wanted most of the squad in place by the time they returned for pre-season at the end of June and they have been as good as their word.
Hasselbaink will be quietly happy with his work – but there will be a lot of action still to come around the country in this window.