Peter Ridsdale on Preston North End player trading, squad average age, recruitment and reinvesting
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Preston North End director Peter Ridsdale feels recruitment is getting tougher but assures the Lilywhites are striving to do better.
The Lilywhites have just come through a mid-season transfer window which saw them add two loan signings in Jayden Meghoma and Ryan Porteous - while swooping permanently for Plymouth defender Lewis Gibson.
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Hide AdPaul Heckingbottom is the latest manager to be tasked with pushing PNE to the higher reaches of the Championship. This season has so far promised to be a mid-table affair for North End, though there are 16 games left to contest.


Once it concludes it will then be on to the summer, in preparation of Heckingbottom’s first full season at PNE - having been appointed in late August. Ridsdale has already predicted up to 10 new signings and said it promises to be an extremely busy few months. North End’s manager has spoken on plenty of occasions about the challenge Preston face in trying to push for promotion.
With the financial landscape and ever-increasing strength of the Premier League it is a task which isn’t getting any easier. For the Lilywhites it is all about exploring all avenues, working smarter and trying to find an edge on the competition where possible. Strong player recruitment, with the data available in this day and age, is one glaring way of doing that.
“I think it's getting harder,” Ridsdale told the Lancashire Post. “If you think back to when we got Callum Robinson or Ben Pearson or Daniel Johnson, we were getting them for £50,000 or £170,000. We were talking about a particular player who went out yesterday and we were quoted a week ago, £350,000-£400,000, and you might get him.
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Hide Ad“This is from a Premier League team and he's gone with an obligation to buy in the summer for £5million. You used to be able to get players that Premier League clubs thought might not quite make it with them, so let's make sure he goes somewhere, gets game time and there's a big sell on or whatever happens to be... and everybody benefits.
“The whole transfer market has changed radically over the last two or three years and it's getting tougher for us. I laughed and joked about the fact we played Luton the other week and I think their centre half cost something like five times what our whole back four or five cost us that day. Therefore, you have to be smarter and it's not easy.”
Reflecting on the club’s recruitment in recent windows, Ridsdal added: “One of the issues, you sit down and assess how have the last X number of transfers been - either permanent or temporary, whether good bad or indifferent. Let's go back to the starting point, which is the recruitment team and the manager of the time decide who they want. My job is to try and get them in the order they want them.
“If we can't afford them we're honest to say we can't afford them. And I keep quoting, which just shows how old I am and people remind me all the time, Howard Wilkinson once said to me: ‘Three out of five right, you're doing very well’. And that's in a market when we were in the Premier League, and we were signing known names.
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Hide Ad“Because it's one thing getting the player. It's then, do they fit? Do they work in the environment they're in? If you think three out of five is not bad, I think we're not bad. You get ones wrong and sometimes if you get them wrong, what you have to then do is accept that, hold your hands up and try and do the best deal for the club you can in making a change.
“Sometimes they come good after a period of time; people have to go out and learn. I mean, would you have said after Liam Delap was with us for six months that he'd go for £20million, 18 months later, for example? Liam's a great lad by the way and a great player. But it's not an exact science. When you look at recruitment, you look at the player you'd like, every manager probably likes the players you can't afford.
“So you're going to market where you have to take a gamble and that gamble works more often than not, in my opinion. But have we made mistakes? Of course, crikey, if we've got it right 100% of the time we’d be geniuses and we're not. All we are is hard working people, trying the best we can within the finances that were set, to get the players that the manager wants to build the team.”
YOUR NEXT READ: Potential PNE transfer boost over Leeds United loan star
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Hide AdOne clear dilemma in the North End squad at present is the average age: around the 28 mark. Prior to the signing of Gibson only four league minutes had been racked up by contracted under-24 players at Preston this season. That was Kian Best on the opening night of the campaign.
Gibson, 24, has played 360 minutes of football since signing. The three under-23s to feature in the Championship are loan men Sam Greenwood, Kaine Kesler-Hayden and Jayden Meghoma. It’s something Heckingbottom has discussed and Ridsdale is aware needs addressing.
“Well, it's obviously easier said than done because if they're under 25 you've got training compensation, even if they're out of contract,” said Ridsdale. “If they're very good players, even in League One and Two now we're being quoted big seven figure fees for players who are unproven at this level. But also if you get more experienced players or older you've no asset, so it's a balancing factor.
“You try and balance it across the squad as a whole. So what you say is ‘What does the squad need?’ If you've just got 24 under 20s they may not be as good as a balanced squad but if you look at who we've brought in, we haven't been bringing in 29 and 30 year olds over the last couple of years. We've been bringing in people to bring the average age down.
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Hide Ad“Lewis Gibson's (24), recognising some of the rest of the defence is getting older. We've got a situation where we've brought Mads in, we've brought Stefan in... they're younger players than perhaps the ones who are currently in those positions today. So, do we want to bring the average age down? Absolutely. But what we also have to recognise is we want to compete, so it's a balance all the time.”
The hope with signing younger players is that they become prized assets for the club and then sold on for a healthy profit. Interest in PNE’s players has dried up in recent seasons but there was some noise around striker Milutin Osmajic towards the end of the window. Whether the Montenegrin attracts suitors in the summer remains to be seen but he is valued highly by North End. Ridsdale accepts there can be no fear of selling best players, should big offers come in.
“The biggest single problem we face as a football club is we get criticised because we haven't created enough value in the transfer market the last two or three years, and then we get criticised if we sell the players that nobody wants us to sell,” said Ridsdale. “Well they're the same players, so we have a choice... we either keep them because they're successful, and then we get criticised because they've got no value at the end of the contract.
“Or, we sell them because it's the only way to bring money in the club to reinvest and then we get criticised for selling. So again, it's always a balancing act. Pre-Covid we did pretty well in the transfer market. We sold Jordan Hugill, we sold Callum Robinson, we sold Joe Garner, we sold Greg Cunningham to Cardiff. We got a lot of money despite the criticism. Josh Brownhill brought us quite a significant amount of money despite the fact he turned the contract down and went to Bristol City.
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Hide Ad“The way we structured the deal, because he was under 25, has brought us significant transfer fees in since then. And again, despite the criticism on Ben Davies and Ben Pearson who had a year to go right in the middle of Covid - so it was a challenge and then they wouldn't talk to us - we've got again significant transfer fees in for the two of them because of what they've done subsequently, and the way in which those deals were done.
“So we've done okay; what we haven't done is very good since Covid in terms of bringing money in for player sales. It is clearly something we would like to do. We've got some players we've brought in over the last 18 months that we think will create value. If one of them gets sold because it's the right thing to do to bring some money in to reinvest, that will be because we think it's the right thing for the football club - and then somebody will criticise us for selling our best players.”
“If we then self-generate more money...”
When North End did have a positive period of selling players for sizable fees - as PNE’s director referenced earlier in the interview - the one frustration was the lack of money reinvested into the playing squad. Jordan Hugill, Callum Robinson and Greg Cunningham sales brought in around £22million; the replacements were Louis Moult, Jayden Stockley, Andre Green, Josh Ginnelly and Andrew Hughes. There is confidence now, though, that Preston would go back into the market and spend cash.
“Yeah we will,” said Ridsdale. “The way in which it works is very clear now. The family and obviously the trust that owns the football club, the way it works is at the start of each season they say to me ‘This is how much money we're prepared to put into the running of the football club and that's the number... don't come up and don't ask for any more’.
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Hide Ad“However if we then self-generate more money: cup runs, transfers, we can reinvest that money. So, there's clarity. Sometimes it's frustrating because you know you've got a finite amount of cash and you'd like to spend more, as everybody would. But there's absolute clarity, there's a certainty about the money which is great in terms of the club's stability. But yes, if we sell players we can reinvest it.”
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