Swansea City: The summer so far

Transfer links, a potential new signing and more shares issued but not announced by the club is the story of the summer to date in SA1 as the plans for next season start to take further shape behind the scenes.

The transfer window has been open for just over a week and many eyes are on next Wednesday when the fixture list will be announced but don’t take the lack of news coming out of SA1 as any sign that nothing has been done to assist Luke Williams with the shape of his squad for next season.

It could also be that the Swans are on the verge of a new signing with the name of Gautier Ott linked in many places yesterday with several outlets tipping him to make the move to South Wales in the coming days.

The 22-year-old winger is currently playing for Portuguese second tier outfit Académico Viseu, and racked up a total of seven assists and two goals in 36 games in all competitions last season.

According to journalist Sebastião Sousa Pinto, a fee of around €1.5m has already been agreed, with the forward poised to sign a three-year deal with the added option of another 12 months.

Meanwhile January target Connor Baron agreed yesterday to join Rangers with the midfielder declaring after signing on the line at Ibrox “I am absolutely delighted. As soon as I started talking to the club, I knew that this was the place for me to come. Everything seemed right and I think it is the best place for me to be at this moment of my career.”

Manager Philippe Clement was delighted to have secured the services of a young, but experienced player.

Clement said: “We are thrilled to welcome Connor to the club. He’s a young talented player with the right mentality who’s already gathered a lot of experience in the Scottish Premiership and in Europe.”

The Swans it is known are on the lookout for a new midfielder this summer but with Baron out of the running attention could turn again to Marc Leonard who has been linked in previous windows but those links this time appear to have, at least at the moment, little substance.

Macaulay Langstaff continues to be on the radar as one of our key targets for the summer and it is believed that Luke Williams would love to pull off a double swoop for him and Jodi Jones who supplied so much of the ammunition for Langstaff’s goals last season.  Both players together could take a sizeable chunk of our summer budget with the club still also looking at a goalkeeper and central defender this summer, the latter being something that could be necessary should Nathan Wood move on as is being widely speculated this summer.

Off the pitch, the club have taken another ‘investment’ to prop up our cashflow with the Trust confirming this yesterday after the filings at companies house.   The latest injection of cash dilutes all other shareholders a little more and is another clear highlighting of the financial challenges that the club are facing.  The investment is the fifth investment of the calendar year to date and should be attracting far more questions than it seems to.   So much that the club now don’t even worry themselves with the announcement which tells you more than the silence probably should.

As referenced earlier, the fixture list will be announced on Wednesday morning at 9am, more than a week after the Premier League announced their own fixtures for the coming season.  As a reminder, every game on the opening weekend will be screened live via Sky with more games this season shown live than ever before.

As June turns into July in just over a week we can expect the transfer speculation and links to pick up some pace with the return of the players for pre-season just a couple of weeks away.   By that time we should start having a much clearer picture of the work that we were assured by Andy Coleman at a recent (hostile) fans forum was well underway.   Judge him by his actions remember…