“Still,” said Gary O’Neil, when asked to ruminate once again on the extent of Wolves’ summer transfer business, “we did what we could do, and we signed some good players, but I think we still had the second-lowest net spend in the window. Above Man City, interestingly – maybe we’ll finish above them…”
If O’Neil occasionally sounded disappointed during the transfer window, you could understand why. Any manager would surely like to have a bigger budget available if they could, or at least as big as most of their rivals. Wouldn’t we all?
However, while O’Neil noted last week that his club could not stretch to complete some of the deals he and Matt Hobbs had hoped for, Wolves did make some interesting investments.
Taken individually, all the major deals looks sound. Fan criticisms of Wolves’ summer business have been about what they did not do rather than anything they actually did.
Most clearly, they did not manage to directly replace Maximilian Kilman, whose sale presumably made a number of the new signings possible. But O’Neil has not been left without realistic defensive options. Craig Dawson was only a substitute for the first two games, while Santiago Bueno – a full Uruguay international – has stayed on the bench for all three. Matt Doherty, if required, could also cover.
Barring a terrible crisis, Wolves should not face the same predicament as in the second half of last season, when O’Neil often stood in front of a bench of teenage substitutes, talented but entirely unproven.
“As you see,” he said on Saturday, “Tommy Doyle was pushing Joao [Gomes], Andre will come in and push Joao and Mario [Lemina], Guedes is pushing Bellegarde and Channy [Hwang], so it’s different to where we were at the end of last season.”
In the spring, Wolves’ squad had quality, but ultimately fell on quantity and their season tailed off. Addressing that issue on a restricted budget – by Premier League standards – without diluting the standard is a delicate task.
It will be a few weeks yet before we have a clearer idea of how well they achieved it.
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