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Alex Neil points to Stoke City familiar faces in ‘young, dynamic’ transfer profile
Alex Neil highlighted Stoke City’s promotion-challenging recent loan signings for pointers as where he’d like the club to be shopping in the transfer market.
Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Rhys Norrington-Davies have won automatic promotion from the Championship this season while Jack Clarke is in the play-offs with Sunderland, with the trio having all gained vital experience at Stoke in the last couple of years.
Neil wants that kind of ‘young and dynamic’ signing – but critically wants Stoke to keep them for longer than half-a-season so, with a bit of patience, they can develop with the side.
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He said: “I look at your windows over the last few seasons and I think that some of the loan players who Stoke have brought in have been excellent – but they’re not remained here, they have moved on and subsequently done really well elsewhere.
“The most frustrating part for me is that a lot of them are younger, more dynamic players with their best years ahead of them. Arguably they are the players who we as a club should want to try to keep because naturally their assets.
“You’ve got guys at the moment that have just been promoted to the Premier League or could be potentially be promoted to the Premier League who have been in the building here in the last 12, 18, 24 months and are now playing for other teams in the division.
“Clarke, Harwood-Bellis, Norrington-Davies… That’s just three to mention straight away. Jaden Philogene-Bidace has done well at Cardiff, Leo Ostigard is playing for Napoli. They are the type of signings we really, as a club, want to be.”
Neil isn’t convinced that not pursuing players with those kind of profiles on a long-term basis has just been because Stoke have been constrained by their budget over the last two or three years.
He said: “Potentially but I think what we’ve also tried to do, and this is only my opinion, is go for tried and tested over a number of years in terms of signings rather than potential and people who have got their best years ahead of them and haven’t quite hit the sort of numbers you’d like them to hit.
“I’m sure the lads who we just mentioned did pretty well when they were here but not as well as how they are doing now. That’s the key to scouting, isn’t it? If you look at our best sale in years, Harry Souttar wasn’t the Harry Souttar of now when we signed him but he safeguarded the club purely because you’re given the development years.
“We’ve got to understand that we are now not going to compete with teams who have just come down from the Premier League in terms of wages. We had that chance for two seasons and we didn’t utilise it.
“If you look at Burnley, they sold something like £60 million of talent, spent £30 million and cruised the league. Whereas when we came down, we didn’t even sell that much, spent a hell of a lot more and struggled. Our opportunity to do that has now passed us by.
“We’ve got to understand we are in a different realm now, which means we need to build to get back to where we want to go. That takes a bit of time.”
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