To me this is already egregious mismanagement. We knew we needed a striker a year ago (and many felt we needed a couple years ahead of that when we brought Llorente in). When we didn't sign one last summer, we all knew we were playing with fire.
Now we see the head of recruiting complain about the January window and how hard it is. Sure...good for you. A deal ought to have done way ahead of that with it becoming firm at 12:01am on January 1st. Other clubs all do this and surely it was known that we needed to fill that role. It's unconscionable that it dragged on that far.
But, lo and behold, they managed to fuck that up as well! Here we are, five days before kick off for the new season and we haven't addressed the most obvious issue. To top it all off, there were about 4.5 months with no football, so what exactly were these recruiting and scouting staff doing during that time? Surely they could have lined up a deal or at least a very short list of probable deals to get one done and settled well in advance? It's completely unacceptable that they seemingly have done nothing.
And I am not interested in the "well we had Covid and it scuttled plans" garbage either. This is a multimillion dollar operation. I ran my business through this, which is a drop in the ocean beside THFC, so don't even start. Really, from a business perspective, the lack of action and failure to address this in 2 windows probably cost the business £50-100m by missing top four. Who knows if we'd have won a trophy or advanced in the CL last spring.
Anyway, sorry for the bit of a rant. I feel better already though. I look forward to them announcing Troy Deeney, proving me wrong later today.