Are we really learning any lessons in our transfer dealings?

The news yesterday that the Swans would potentially be open to allowing Jerry Yates to leave the club on a permanent deal is just another one to add to a list of transfer mistakes that the club have made in recent years.

Yates was signed last summer for £2.5m and the fact that the club could be prepared to let him leave tells you much about the decision to buy him in the first place.   It’s really easy to put that down to a change in management forced when we decided to part company with Michael Duff but given the fact that we laud up our data analysis approach to transfers you have to question what we are programming into the system to start with.

If the club firmly believe that this is the way to approach transfers – and there are more than a few cynics on this front (me included) – then surely it matters not who the manager is.   If they are looking for people to play football the way they claim they want us to then these players would fit at any stage.

There is also the level of irony that we are supposedly happy to move Yates on when we are being linked with wingers, wide play allegedly what Yates was missing to be the kind of striker that we wanted him to be.   I’m confused now if I’m honest.

But actually this isn’t about the decision (if indeed it is one) to move on Yates but more so about another transfer made by the club that seems to have never worked for us.   And in some instances transfers we have never given a chance to work.

Nathan Tjoe-A-On has already been moved on in this window, Morgan Whittaker went in the summer and Nathanael Ogbeta was sent on loan to Bolton last week and scored within minutes of his debut this weekend.    Those three signings all have the ability to claim that they were not given a chance at Swansea which begs the question as to why we signed them in the first place.

There is also speculation that we could also see Mykola Kuharevich and Kristian Pedersen move on this week.   If that is the case then it could mean four of the often mentioned thirteen signings of the summer moving on in the very next window.   Again, this more than brings into question the use of this data analytics model that we like to use.

After the disaster of the last January transfer window, the Swans signed those thirteen players in the summer with Andy Coleman saying back in September “The recruitment team has brought 13 players into the first team, the most Swansea has added to the squad during a transfer window, since its return to the Championship.

“Paul and his team were able to generate significant return for the club through player sales, despite some of those players entering the final year of their respective contracts. Even considering the departures, we have strengthened the club in key positions, added significant depth, acquired assets and brought in high-level first team talent via loans from top Premier League clubs.

“We are now focusing on strengthening the football department so that we are in the best possible position heading into each successive transfer window.”

Now if we do move on a significant percentage of those signings in the summer you have to ask the question as to who is accountable for those mistakes.   We have already seen the incorrect managerial appointment in Michael Duff and now it looks as if we are publicly making admissions of mistakes in our transfer dealings as well.   Again.

This is all well and good and it is accepted that not every transfer works out as you want it to (we have a long history of poor signings to use as examples) but to be so alarmingly out in one window makes you wonder whether mistakes have really been learned from as we have been told on several occasions.

The news at the weekend that we have pretty much secured a new signing in Ronald is welcomed but there are very few people who know much about the player so we only have to hope that this is a result of some extensive scouting and understanding of football rather than digits on a spreadsheet telling us he is the right player.   I lost many jobs in football manager by working purely off data statistics!

Let’s see what the next four days hold but given some of the news from the weekend it  tells you much that there was not much lessons learned from the mistakes of the previous windows – we can only hope that we are proved wrong this week that those lessons have been learned or you would imagine Andy Coleman and Paul Watson will be on the end of some serious questions.