Also what is the point of our European Scouting Network with FFP hanging over us? If FFP is still being implemented next season and to comply we need to reduce our losses by around £8-10m, so talk of a transfer budget and increased wages is pretty far fetched.. We all know we need 5-6 new players in the summer to stay still never mind progress and I don't know how that can be achieved. The Covid crisis will most probably mean our season ticket sales, whenever they go on sale, will be down to around 4,000. So another £2m of lost revenue from these need to be found as well.

Have Nyambe, Lenihan and Travis improved under Tony's coaching though? I am not that sure, Travis is certainly no where near the player he should be. His natural box to box game seems to have been coached out of him and we will end up selling him for a lot less than we could have done. The whole point of coaching should be to improve the value of the player both financially and to the benefit of the team and our set up is a long way from doing that.

The problem is that a lot of owners will have had to fund their main businesses through the crisis, so unless the owners have an affinity to the club, the football club will be the first to go before their main businesses. If you look at Venky's, they are asset rich but not necessarily cash rich. In this pandemic that is a problem as you need lots of available cash to fund increased expenses and significantly reduced income. If you look at ourselves, we probably make £100k per home game which in an additional £6-700k Venky's will have to find for this season. Alot of premiership and championship owners are going to really struggle to fund the club and rebuild their existing businesses at the same time. When you get down to League 1 and 2 with local business owners (and fans of the club) owning the club it is going to be nearly impossible for a lot of them to keep going with pretty much £0 turnover. I wonder how much Ifollow will pay each club for streaming rights and will fans want a streaming pass in the lower leagues etc

Rothwell is an interesting one, we only signed him for £100k so will make a profit if we sell, but the exciting scoring player of the end of last season seems to have been coached out of existence. The same seems to have happened to Travis's box to box game as well. It seems you have to fit Tony's midfielder blueprint or else it is coached out of you.

exactly, 4 points of the playoffs and he sends that team out when we need to win. Its like he gets a larger bonus for staying in the championship than getting promoted to the premiership

With Brentford, it is not just about a Director of Football (although they have 2) but a whole philosophy that the owner has implemented into the club based on Brentford not being able to compete with other London clubs. They have taken the strengths they have and blended these in such a way as to be competitive and self sustaining. Also their owner owns several data analytics and sports data companies that they also use to guide their recruitment process. This is a relatively old article but it covers most of the philosophies and why they implemented their approach. Also goes into a lot of detail on their scouting approach and data file they create on each signing. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2718752-. With this approach i can buy into a long term strategy and taking 5 years to get to the premier league with a structure built to keep us there but the Mowbray longterm approach is just a waste of 2 seasons and 4 transfer windows so far with no end to our mediocrity insight. I would agree that we should go down a similar route to Brentford if we had good owners but we haven't a chance with Venky's, our best bet would be to get Warnock or Mick McCarthy in with a £m promotion bonus and let them get to work now. The only problem would be that we would be a yoyo club for a couple of seasons.

So looking at it, we need to sign 7 first choice players this summer and a couple of squad players? Do we know if our loan for Cunningham had a commitment to buy him in the summer, as that should at least sort the left back position.

You would have thought with any other club that now would be the time to change manager and allow the new man 5 games to determine who should stay and what we need to mount a challenge for next season, abit like when Souness was appointed. Also if we are going to use Brentford as our new template for transfers etc, we will need a whole new back office setup, so you would think trying to poach Rasmus Ankersen from Brentford to set it all up would be a good idea or at the very least someone similar.

So with the Bank Of India having liquidity issues at the moment due to the pandemic, how exactly are we going to have any type of transfer budget or wage budget next season? When Venky's won't be able to increase their mortgage borrowings or may even have the loans called in to prop the bank up? I am expecting us to have to get to balancing the books for the season, so expecting sales and a very small squad for the year before we have any chance to get any incoming players.

A very good article indeed. I would not be a 100% certain that we won't be one of those clubs. Rumours in India are that the Government is going to have to inject significant amounts into Bank of India to keep it going so I can see the Raos being very short of cash pretty quickly in the next few months.

I do have a quick question, if we do get relegated to League 1 this season, how quickly do we have to comply with League 1's rule that you can only spend 60% of your turnover on player wages? As if it is immediately we'd need to get rid of an awful lot of players very quickly, increase season ticket prices and cut the max we can pay per week to a player to around £5k