honeybradger

£8mil pounds for a player who cant cut it at PL level by the way. He's also considered as one of our good transfers in recent years...

Rudkin's supposed to be the person who brings in the head scout and sits above them in the recruitment process. Whilst Sporting Directors arent the ones that identify players themselves, they are responsible for identifying the profile of player for the scouting team to look for and reviewing the options put forwards, contacting the players and eventually green lighting the transfer. Saying that Rudkin doesnt pick the player is ridiculous, the Sporting Director has to be involved in the transfer strategy of the club and be the first and last voice on all transfers. If he's not we need to bring in someone who can actually undertake the role of Sporting Director properly.

It's not like he's a stellar defender in a low block either.

He's our sporting director . Have some shame, no wonder our signings are all over the place if he's not responsible for us bringing in players. It would be even more worrying if he was not responsible as it means our club is being run like the wild west with no responsibility or hiearchy. In fact on second thought you might be right, Rudkin probably is just sat at his desk twiddling his thumbs whilst the rest of the staff are scrambling around with no direction. That would explain our situation perfectly.

Rudkin actually had £12mil to sign a centreback this summer and signed Okoli . At what point is the penny going to drop for the idiots that keep defending him that this guy has no idea what he's doing. @Babylon@DJ Barry Hammond

What can you do when your defensive options are this bad. Faes, Vestergaard, Okoli all had clangers today. Not saying that Ruud is the answer either but these players are so bad.

Us being out of the relegation zone just goes to show how avoidable relegation would have been had we had relatively competent people running the club.

Ayoze Perez has turned into Vinicius Jr apparently. Beaten more players to score his goal today than he did in his 3 years at Leicester.

You would feel sorry for him if he didnt think he was too good for us whilst also being one of the worst centre backs we have ever had.

*winks has been awful this season

We might somehow stay above the relegation zone ffs. How bad are everyone else?

Dont know how Winks avoids criticism (actually i do it's because he was good for us in a lower league) but he is awful at this level.

Worst run club, not only in the PL, but potentially in the top 4 leagues in English football. The longer we have this incompetent as a DoF the further this club will keep falling.

Despite the so called 'collapse' of Brighton they already have as many points as we did in our relegation season. If anything what you have said puts it into perspective how badly run we had to be to go from back to back 5th place finishes to relegation when Brighton are falling off from lower heights and still are nowhere near relegation. We didnt just make 'some mistakes' we completely capitulated and now after one win following 7 losses the 'careful what you wish for' fans are back in full force saying how we're actually secretly a well run club.

The difference is that Brighton will have likely looked at Scandinavia, Croatia etc and decided that Cashin was their best option due to his qualities and how he fits into the team. The last centreback we signed from the championship on the other hand in Souttar (£15mil!) has played less than 20 games for us in 3 years, including when we were in the championship. One club has a clear strategy behind their squad planning, buying players with the qualities that the team needs, both unknown gems from the Eredivise (Van Hecke for €2mil) and players from the lower leagues in England. The other buys players that are almost instantly frozen out by the managers (Okoli and Skipp) because minimal thought and effort was put into determining if they were the right fit. I will eat my words if 3 years down the line Cashin has barely played for Brighton btw.

Brighton fans have been moaning all season about how Lamptey cant play in a back 4 because of his lacking defensive ability. Ajax play a back 5 so they play the right system for him. Good transfer for them, would have been a bad fit for us. Also Ajax are a more attractive club than us.

I would be more worried if he wasnt getting chances. It shows he's making the right runs and getting the better of the defenders which is the main worry with his age. Just needs to capitalise.

Bruno Durdov going to Club Brugge for €5mil to replace Skov Olsen. Would be a good transfer for us. But "everyone is struggling to make transfers in the January window" so we must accept incompetency.

Depends on how good you think players like Cordova Reid and Ayew are (or even Mcateer considering a better bench could help us stay up). If you think they're better in their positions than the best young player in a foreign league then I understand why you would think why it's hard to find an improvement. Personally I dont think Ayew, BCDR and McAteer are any good so I see there being plenty of options abroad for us to improve on them, both currently and in the future.

We got most of our money back on Diabate even after he flopped for us. After Vardy's first bad year for us we still could have made our money back. It's basic economics, there's always a larger market for cheaper players as more clubs can afford them. If a £15mil players doesnt perform for us only other PL sides are in a position to take them off our hands. If we spend £1mil on the biggest talent from the Swedish league or some up and coming youngster in the Eredivisie then we make our money back 95% of the time even if it doesnt work out.

It's easier to sell talents that were bought for cheap from obscure leagues on low wages than it is to sell experienced older players on high wages bought for millions of pounds. You have things the wrong way round.

The sad reality is that the loan fee that we use to bring in a player will probably exceed the transfer fee to sign someone like Bazoumana Toure on a permanent.

Adrian Blake 19 yr old English winger at FC Utrecht. Could get him for cheap and has talent.

This is the type of player we should be going for! Unknown gems.

They have done better in Europa League in recent years than we did in our stints. The fact that they probably have a similar or better level of squad to ours whilst spending at maximum £6-7mil pounds on players, majority under £1mil, shows the different classes in management. As above our transfer strategies are night and day. They bring Denis Undav in on a free from the 3rd tier of the German League, we spend £7mil on Tom Cannon, they buy Victor Boniface for £6mil, we buy Jordan Ayew for £5mil. Again look at their transfer fees and then internalise the fact that they likely beat us in a head to head game. Then seriously consider that idea before you say that we are run at an even vaguely similar level. I'm not going to go through every transfer over the past few years but what you've said is blatantly wrong. We have gotten far more transfers wrong in recent years than we have gotten right. The only PL level players we've signed permanently since the Fofana signing being El Khannous, Hermansen and Fatawu is criminal (maybe Soumare but that's a push). We signed Ryan Bennett on loan to complete our champions league push. We signed Soumare to cover both Ndidi and Tielemans despite being a completely different profile of player to either of them. We signed Wout Faes for £15mil. We signed Vestergaard for £15mil. We signed Souttar for £15mil and never played him. We signed Kristiansen for £15mil. We signed Praet for £20mil. We signed Ryan Bertrand. We renewed Danny Ward's contract and went into a PL season with him as a starter. We let Tielemans run down his contract. We had Soyuncu in the reserves running down his contract. It wasnt ambition, it was incompetence, pure pig headed incompetence that's going to be used as an example for years of how to not run a football club. They are 3rd in the Belgian League despite being 5th from bottom in expenditure in that league. Yes they will drop off at some point (relative to the heights they have reached since their new owners took over) but because they have such a clear strategy to transfers and squad building they wont drop very far. Us on the other hand could genuinely be in league one in the next few seasons and I wouldn't be surprised. All I'm asking for is to get an actual Sporting Director in place of John Rudkin. Someone who actually understands football, who knows what contracts players are worth, what transfer fees they are worth, what attributes we need in the players we are bring in etc.