Our horrendous foreign market knowledge is inexcusable

Tamas Priskin – I do not understand why we paid £1m for this player. Here is a 19 year old, who cannot speak English, is uprooted to a foreign country away from his family and friends plus only scored 10 goals in the Hungarian league last year which is equivalent to League 2 level over here and if you have a recipe for disaster before he has even signed. Watford are not in a position to pay £1m for a player who is not ready to immediately come straight into the matchday squad let alone the first eleven. This isn’t an attack on Tamas, in fact I have sympathy for his situation, and indeed he may even turn out to be a world class player – unfortunately we needed to sign a striker for the here and now and we didn’t do it.

What Watford should have done in the summer is to follow what Bolton Wanderers did. They signed up world class players like Youri Djorkaeff and Jay-Jay Okocha on one year deals. Lets say both were on £30,000 a week, which is approx £2m a season including signing on fee/bonuses etc. They signed those players knowing that if they were to be relegated then the contracts expiring would mean no financial millstone but if they were to stay up then the players would pay for themselves several times over.

This is not an attack on Aidy Boothroyd, he himself has said his foreign market knowledge is very limited. As soon as we got promoted, the club should have employed a Frank Arnesen type figure as a head of worldwide scouting, someone with incredible foreign market knowledge and contacts. We can’t afford to wait any longer. If the club say they cannot afford some of the domestic transfer fees then we will have to look abroad for players to sign during the January transfer window. Its time to get serious if we are serious about staying in the Premiership.