INTERVIEW: There's a lot going on

Chief executive Nigel Clibbens gave us an update this afternoon on the latest progress with potential new signings.

“As you'd expect, there's a lot going on behind the scenes” he explained. “We understand that the squad needs a rebuild, everybody understands that. 

"It needs new people to bring new life and new energy to it. But we've also got a number of good players who we've acquired in the last window and in previous windows who've proved that they can be successful in this league.

“A lot of work was done towards the end of the season around identifying specific needs and specific profiles of players and the types that we think we need to be successful in this division and for the future.”

“There's been a lot of investment in IT in order to give us a better understanding of some of the data and that's featuring strongly in a way that it's never done before,” he continued. “That’s a new development for us and another example of us catching up probably with many other clubs. 

"At the same time, it's important that there's human judgement that goes on, and that we look at players and do all the due diligence on the potential targets. 

“There are lots of enquiries being made, there are lots of players being spoken to and agents being spoken to and all of that goes on until the point that you reach a deal.

"I’m not particularly concerned about numbers of players that have been signed or anything like that. We need to get the right players, and we're now looking at players from a different group to what we did before. 

“There's no doubt that the ownership change changes the sort of players that we can target and that's all good news.”

“I couldn't say when the next one will be,” he said. “I've said before, we've had plenty of instances where you think the next one's this afternoon and it doesn't quite happen, and it gets delayed a bit. There are lots of things going on and they’ll start to come to fruition as we go.

“Having more money to play with opens more opportunities to players who consider coming to you, which is all good. But at the same time, if you want to try and do deals, all it means then is you're competing with people who are in a different pond. 

"It's not that you've gone to a group where you've got some more money but nobody else has. It means you're just competing with a different group of teams. And in many ways, that can be a little difficult because in actual fact, what you're doing is you're trying to challenge against some League One teams. It poses a different challenge, but it's a nice problem to have.”

Read Time: 3 mins