I think ideally you would want to develop a squad without FFP but it’s an unfortunate reality that can’t be ignored, you understand the ceilings as well as me. We may decide to bring in a young left back in the summer, but we both know it’s coming from a limited fund and eating into a loss ceiling. In dealing with the reality of that players like are invaluable as they are cost/loss neutral apart from wages, they maximise budgets and minimise loss ceilings.
Ideally you are right, hoping selling Bolaise and Sandro may raise funds for the kid at hearts, but you wouldn’t put money on it happening. I don’t have any sympathy with our ability to sell players, it’s been terrible. Based on that it actually makes better sense to keep the cost neutral option, if you think he can still contribute which the club seems to as it maximises the available budget as it’s unlikely to come from selling deadwood.
I would have been a big critic of our squad management with the centre half situation at the start of the season after the last transfer window, was I right? On reflection maybe not, if we’d signed Zouma would we have developed Holgate.....none of us had faith he would develop like he did, so credit there. It might be thar Baines is more up to it then we all think and or expect like Holgate.
Its about maximisimg windows and budgets and Baines helps enable that over another year. If we can sign a right sided, central mildfilders and a centre half this window with our hole budget and both full back positions in 20/21 instead of now, we likely have the pick of better quality both this summer and next as we can prioritise and maximise budgets.
