Phil SumblerThe decision of Manchester United this week to recall Ethan Laird and send him to Bournemouth highlighted a major flaw in the strategy that we – and many Championship sides – deploy in transfers and should force a rethink in many ways and not just our immediate plans for the January window.
For the second January running we have been faced with the position that we lose a player who we have looked to rely on – this time last year it was Wolves and Morgan Gibbs-White who saw his loan spell end early and give Steve Cooper the same issue that now faces Russell Martin.
Having loan players return early though is just part of the headache. If you take the position we found ourselves in at the end of last season we saw Freddie Woodman, Marc Guehi and Conor Hourihane all depart the club at the end of the play off final to return to their respective parent clubs.
In the last few years we have seen us loan the likes of Connor Gallagher, Rhian Brewster, Kasey Palmer, Victor Gyökeres, Ben Wilmot and Sam Surridge on top of those already named above. All have played a reasonable number of games for the club but all retain the same statistic at the end of it – they are no longer a Swansea City player.
It can easily be argued that you get a better player for a loan deal – there is no expensive transfer fee to negotiate, no long term contract to factor in and much less of a gamble if the loan doesn’t work out – as we are seeing with Rhys Williams and we saw with Victor Gyökeres. However, the immediate flip side to this argument is that whether the loan works or not the only thing likely to keep a Premier League player at Swansea is a Premier League place – it is a strategy that almost feels like promotion or bust.
There has been much speculation already around this transfer window of the Swans looking at more loan deals with players from Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City already linked and you suspect that before the month is out there will be more links for more loan players.
However, as we are linked with purchases from MK Dons the suggestions come around that we cannot afford them or that the fees suggested are too high. However, the question has to be asked as to whether we are now better to use our transfer budgets for players that could be here longer than a few months and, assuming they develop as we believe that they could there is the chance on a profit on any sell on of the player. This is certainly the case when you look at the type of player that we are currently linked with – Matt O’Riley and Andy Fisher are arguably better long term for the club than any player on a four month loan deal?
There maybe questions being asked at the moment over the decision to loan out Morgan Whittaker as an example but the one thing you would say is that Whittaker is a player we bought because we saw talent in him and we need to continue on that particular trajectory when we are making transfer decisions.
We are seeing a clear danger and message coming from loan deals and that is making each window more and more of a challenge for us going forward. If we can create the large core of our transfer policy around permanent transfers then longer term the benefit for the club should be greater.
The issue of course though is that more and more clubs are reliant on loan deals to bump up their squad and we could take a view that if we don’t follow that pattern then we could be at a disadvantage. However, the simple question for me is whether it is any more of a disadvantage that we are facing every summer when we have to continually look for loan players with the risk that we face the problems we faced with Ethan Laird just a week ago.
And because of that it is why I believe our transfer policy should be built around permanent transfers of young talented players and not helping to develop players for other clubs so they can get the advantage and dictate to us what happens.
