New contracts aside, it's been a summer of discontent so far.
Parents of young kids can relate. Children are always after new toys - or, more specifically, that feeling of being given somethingnew. And every so often, you’ll find an old toy tucked away somewhere that they’ve completely forgotten about, present it to them, and they’ll be as happy as if you’d stumped up £20 on something from the shop.
I feel like this is what Fulham’s doing with us this summer.
Look, I’m chuffed we’ve retained the services of Kenny Tete, Luc de Fougerolles, and - of course - Tom Cairney. But these have all been packaged and presented to us as new signings when, frankly, they should’ve been wrapped up a hell of a lot earlier.
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We’re halfway through July, and fewer than 25 days away from the new Premier League season.
And yet we are, objectively, worse off than we were when the season finished.
We’re all painfully aware that we haven’t signed a single player yet. We’ve barely been linked to anyone.
Marco Silvasaid months ago that the club knows what he wants ahead of 2025/26, so why so sluggish? Is it because Tony Khan has been too preoccupied with AEW’s biggest show of the year, All In, which happened on Sunday? Is it because the Khans and the recruitment team are so steadfast in their belief that true value only comes in the window’s dying embers? Is it because everyone is still on their summer holidays?
Answers on a postcard. Playing devil’s advocate, we only returned to pre-season training on Sunday; any new signings in the next week will have only missed out on cardio drills. But the clock is ticking.
We are famously slow starters in the market, of course. In four out of the last five years we’ve made our first signing later than this date - with mixed results.
There seems to be a general malaise around the whole club at the moment. Details of our pre-season trip to the Algarve have been like finding breadcrumbs on the floor. And those whom it bothers will tell you we haven’t even unveiled next season’s kit yet.
There’s money to spend - and it must be burning a hole in the board’s collective pocket. Charlie Shaw did a fantastic jobdeconstructing the complexities of PSR, and thanks to all the mitigating factors within that mysterious acronym, this is a summer where we can build.
Building should be the name of the game. We’ve lost our best player on paper during the summer window for the last two or three years. All signs this term point to retaining Antonee Robinson (I saidon paper, guys), and wecould go into the new campaign with everyone we wanted to keep, plus some new faces.
How many more faces do we need to reach that next level? Well, a kinder injury list and three or four extra players in key areas could’ve seen us secure a top eight finish last term.
There could be many reasons to be cheerful - and they could all arrive in the next two weeks. But we’re sat on a bit of a knife-edge. Clubs like us thrive on a solid start; dawdle much longer and we could find ourselves behind the pack before Starbucks release their pumpkin-spiced lattes.
Then finding those reasons to smile becomes as hard as finding a credible transfer rumour.
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