Show me the money

[Millsy]

Didn't we spend £750k on Butler and £250k on Cureton? Like the equivalent of £2.5million or so now?

Not that much really, but still something.

[Hendo]

Forster was also a decent chunk of change as well, IIRC.

[Dirk Gently]

Shackling ourselves to either the "no transfer fees" or the "spend like Wrexham" model is short-sighted, dogmatic and pointless, because both these are tools available to us when we're team-building, and a blended approach is surely better.

So, of course, we want to develop as many of our own players and bring them through, but we'll never, ever be able to build a whole team that way - perhaps we'll have too many centre backs and not enough midfielders etc, because there's no way to be sure which players will kick-on and which won't make the grade.

So the academy is there to produce as many first-team players as possible, either to play for us or to sell on, but we'll still have holes to fill, and purchases or loans will allow us to do that - and the more successful the academy is and the more loans we have the fewer players we have to pay fees for, so the higher quality we can bring in.

But there'll always be a need to spend money tactically to fill holes in the team - like splashing out £1M in summer 2005 to bring in Leroy Lita as our only other striking option at the time was Dave Kitson together with a couple of unknown Irish lads we'd picked up dirt-cheap from Cork City.