SO FAR, SO GOOD

Early transfer business has been encouraging and gives a platform to build on

As a general rule, Wolves don’t sign players early in the transfer window. Most of our business tends to happen in the final six or even final two weeks of the allocated period. Yet here we are, with three signings on the board and one high-profile departure before we’ve reached the middle of July. Heady days. Much like an Avanti West Coast train actually turning up and departing on time, it’s extremely welcome, if not a little unnerving. Something must be up here.

The Greg Halford of regional rail franchises.

It’s certainly produced a more positive mood amongst the fanbase, after what was let’s face it, an appalling start to the summer with the season ticket price rises and associated awful PR. It goes no way towards justifying what the club actively chose to do in the name of plain avarice (and those rises have absolutely nothing to do with what we do or don’t spend in the market this summer - any increased income [not a given in itself] is a drop in the ocean for a limited company with an annual turnover comfortably in excess of £150m), but it does at least give us some form of optimism for the coming season. The muddled transfer strategy that we’ve seen in the last 3-4 years is hopefully a thing of the past with work on the squad starting early and key areas being addressed as a matter of urgency.

I haven’t forgiven you and almost certainly never will. But fair’s fair. We are at least getting a move on.

Incomings

The headline signing so far is that of Jørgen Strand Larsen on an initial loan (highly likely to be converted to a permanent £25m move in due course) from Celta Vigo. We’ve long since been short on a main striker; indeed, this is the timeline in the near four years since Raul Jimenez suffered his terrible injury at Arsenal.

• Fabio Silva (a callow youth at the time who we clearly had very little intention of giving regular starts to at that stage)

• The fleeting return of Patrick Cutrone (didn’t want to be here as was abundantly clear, and not good enough anyway)

• Willian José (appeared to think Premier League football was some kind of guerrilla warfare where hiding behind defenders was part of the game. It isn’t)

• Adama Traoré (a man with 12 goals in 211 Premier League appearances is not going to be your answer up front)

• Daniel Podence (a false #9 in the style of the false Rod Hull from Fist of Fun)

  

  I AM HIM

• Sasa Kalajdzic (a panicky signing from a manager destined for the exit door, sadly damned by injuries and in any case not at all fancied by the manager we now have, none of which is really anyone’s fault)

• Gonçalo Guedes (yuck. Genuinely one of the worst signings we have ever made. Awful attitude, stinking ability levels, terrible career goalscoring record)

• Diego Costa (it feels kind to call this his Elvis in Vegas stage. Elvis could still sing then, he was just a chunky fella. Diego couldn’t do anything other than audition for panto)

• Raul Jimenez Mk II (a sad shadow of what he used to be and dogged by unrelated fitness issues)

• The return of Fabio Silva (he did well on loan! He has put on strength since we last saw him! He is probably more mature now! No, he is still rubbish!)

• Hwang Hee-Chan (a fine goalscoring season in 2023/24 but not a natural #9 to play in that role week in, week out. Although arguably we still don’t know exactly what he is, confusing player that he is)

• Matheus Cunha (another who put the goals away and another who doesn’t really play as the main man up front. But what a player)

• Nathan Fraser (simply nowhere near ready at this stage to play any meaningful minutes at Premier League level)

• Leon Chiwome (ditto)

Strand Larsen appears to fit the profile of striker that Gary O’Neil wants - more mobile than Kalajdzic, more physical and more of a focal point than Cunha or Hwang will ever be, with a decent goalscoring record behind him and at an age where there’s plenty of potential improvement in him. He seems to be a confident lad, one who seems unlikely to be weighed down by the #9 shirt being handed to him, and we of course hope that he settles into English football quickly. It’s been a gaping hole for us for far too long.

(DISCLAIMER - as with all fan made highlights videos that I might happen to put up, please watch them on mute for your own sake. The music is always, always, always Frank Nouble levels of awful. You have been warned)

Rodrigo Gomes has also made the move from Braga; he had an excellent campaign last time out on loan at Estoril and fills another gap that O’Neil identified last season, where he went on record more than once as saying that Pedro Neto was the only natural winger that he had available to him. He also offers the flexibility of playing in a wing back role and having only turned 21 this week, again has plenty of room to improve.

Pedro Lima is the arrival who will perhaps take the longest to make an impact on the first team. Only born in July 2006 (I’m sorry, this simply shouldn’t be allowed) he has clearly been signed with an eye on the future; Matt Hobbs has already outlined that he expects Nelson Semedo to play a key role in mentoring him as he settles into the club. That said, with Semedo turning 31 before the end of 2024 and his contract (on hefty wages) due to expire at the end of the coming season, this could be his last year here and Lima could well be being groomed to take over more imminently than may seem immediately obvious. Caution obviously needs to be exercised - Kevin Ashley, Luke Matheson and Ki-Jana Hoever are three young right backs from our past signed at reasonable cost and who amounted to nothing - but if serial hoarders of young talent Chelsea were interested, there’s likely to be at least some substance to the hype.

The departure of Max Kilman

You might expect the sale of the club captain to a divisional rival to cause at least some anguish amongst the fans. However, the reaction has been largely one of approval. For while Kilman has his qualities, it’s long since been apparent that he has a number of natural flaws which are always likely to prevent him from being a genuine top half Premier League player. Any visiting West Ham fans might care to look away now:

• While he’s not bad in the air, nor is he a colossus who will as a matter of routine win those kind of battles. Indeed on the whole, he probably punches below his weight physically given that he’s 6’4’’ and well built - he can be quite easily bullied and requires a more imposing presence next to him.

• It’s not 1989 any more and you don’t need your captain bawling away non-stop. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have some kind of authority in that role…and Max sadly provided very little. He’s just a little too meek to be a genuine leader.

  

  Real Mild Child (Mild One)

• Hammers will get used to commentators continually wanging on about him starting out for Maidenhead, having a Ukrainian/Russian background and playing futsal for England. You might think the latter means he’s a bit of a ball-playing centre half. You’d think wrong. His passing rarely strays above competent, rarely breaking the lines, and you might get him carrying the ball forward half a dozen times a season. Otherwise it’s all fairly nondescript fayre. He’s not a clogger by any means, but you wouldn’t have it as a selling point.

• In his three seasons as a first choice player at Molineux, there aren’t too many goals that are explicitly Max’s fault. Not many Nathan Collins-style howlers from him. Leave that to the experts like Calamity Nath. But frequently he’s just sort of near the action without impacting on anything; a yard too far off an opponent, a half a second too slow to anticipate danger, nearly blocking a shot but not quite as it sails into the net. If some kid kept being sighted near a series of unexplained house fires, you might start to have some suspicion that he might be in some way involved, even if he wasn’t exactly waving around a bottle of white spirit and a box of matches.

  

  She seemed to get away with it though. “Writer” my eye. You know too much, Jessica. Those are also terrible book titles, sack your agent.

• He’s quick enough when he gets going in a straight line, but he isn’t sharp at all on the turn and will readily struggle with balls played into space behind him. This precludes you from picking him and playing with a high line, or indeed playing a back four without a hell of a lot of protection in front of and beside him. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing three centre halves, but you don’t want to be forever wedded to it, regardless of circumstance or opponent, because you can’t trust your main centre half to do anything else.

• International selection isn’t necessarily a barometer of quality - we’ve all seen enough confusing moments from Gareth Southgate over the last month to prove that - but at the age of 27, he has never been named in an England squad and doesn’t appear to be anywhere near now. In a tournament summer where Harry Maguire and Tyrone Mings are absent injured, Ben White is in self-imposed exile, Fikayo Tomori appears to be out of the picture despite impressing for AC Milan and the likes of Conor Coady have drifted from favour, Kilman still didn’t merit any serious mention ahead of two centre halves who have travelled to Germany and not played a minute to date, or two who were selected in the provisional squad and subsequently left at home, let alone the three (plus Kyle Walker) who have played. Does that suggest someone who’s really worth £40m?

Ultimately Kilman is a success story for the club and a big one. Signed for pennies from a low profile non-league club, working his way through the Academy to gradually cement a spot in the first team, becoming captain and realising a gigantic profit in the end. It’s not a bad tale for any kids who find themselves outside the professional ranks in their teens to look at. He’s always come across as a very decent person and for all the above caveats, he’s not a terrible player - this isn’t a situation where everyone is collectively disbelieving that we’ve somehow rid ourselves of someone who has no business even playing at this level. But he simply doesn’t seem to be worth that kind of money, he pretty much is what he is now in terms of development, and it’s not hard to have thoughts that we might end up better off without him.

Still, good news for you Hammers. He’ll be better than the last centre half we sent you. I can promise you that.

The best bit of his time there was when West Ham announced his signing with the hashtag #WelcomeRG. Professional stuff.

Work left to do

All this should of course merely be the beginning of what is a big summer and a chance for O’Neil to definitively put his stamp on a squad that as of May, remained largely one that he’d inherited on the very eve of the campaign. Clearly we do need to bring in at least one centre half; selling Kilman doesn’t look so clever if we don’t replace him adequately or at all, even allowing for the return of Yerson Mosquera who three years on from his arrival at the club, finally seems ready to have an impact on the first team.

There are clear doubts over the futures of Matt Doherty, Hugo Bueno, Chiquinho, Ki-Jana Hoever, Luke Cundle and Joe Hodge, who would all appear to be surplus to requirements. As a matter of urgency we could do with losing all of the expensive and unwanted trio of Fabio Silva, Gonçalo Guedes and Daniel Podence; the former two may well end up departing once more on loan as their weight on our PSR calculations remains and neither have excelled to the point that they’re massively in demand when we’ve previously sent them away. Olympiacos did have the option to sign Podence for €5m at the end of the season but as yet have failed to take that up - nevertheless, there should be takers for someone who had a positive impact on their run to winning the UEFA Europa Conference League.

Questions remain over the goalkeeping department - speculation around José Sa’s future has never entirely gone away and with him turning 32 in January, now may be our last chance to attract a decent fee for him if we decide to move on to a keeper with superior distribution and less of a fondness for a ludicrous error out of nowhere (he has of course broadly speaking, not been a bad keeper for us). Dan Bentley has been surprisingly linked with a move to Arsenal and so we may well find ourselves in the market for two new keepers, as neither Tom King nor anyone currently in the Academy are suitable options to play in the Premier League.

And of course there is still the issue to resolve that we all thought would raise its head this summer - what happens with Pedro Neto. It’s a fairly open secret that he’d quite like to leave at this stage for a club more likely to challenge for honours and Champions League football, but his injury history across the last three years may well put potential suitors off, especially at the fee we’re set to demand (in excess of the £47m Man City gave us for Matheus Nunes last August. And thanks very much for that City). The sale of Kilman should at least give us scope to not accept any lowball offers. He can go, but you have to pay for him. Don’t, and he should start the season here.

Our first pre-season friendly takes place in two and a half weeks against would you believe it, West Ham. Hopefully we’ll have another player or two in place and some flotsam jettisoned between now and then. Over to you, Messrs Hobbs, O’Neil and Shi.