The selling of Sam McCallum has once again raised the question of Sisu selling our best assets and hence hampering the clubs ambition. In these troubled times it is perhaps understandable why Sisu agreed to Sams departure. <snip> Below is a number of players names who I think were sold against the fans wishes( not all the fans will have felt like I did when these were sold). No doubt there will be others I have not recalled :
George Hudson, Bobby Gould, John Tudor, Ronnie Rees, George Curtis, Willie Carr, Dennis Mortimer, Gary Gillespie, Gary Thompson, Stuart Pearce, Danny Thomas, Ian Wallace, Mick Ferguson, Robbie Keane, Callum Wilson, Keiran Westward, Scott Dan, Danny Fox, James Maddison, Marc McNulty, Tom Baylis and Sam McCallum.
The above list is nowhere near complete, please feel free to add/delete/agree/disagree
I think we should have held onto Keane, Moldovan, Aloisi and Zuniga.
Some of the names on your list are very questionable.
Many of those players were retained for a very long time and only sold when better/younger replacements were signed.
But to answer your question, I think every L1 or L2 club is a selling club.
When you run an academy, it's a compliment since it means the academy is doing a good job.
We have always been a selling club in the 60 plus years I have followed them. Where as before some of the money came back to the manger to replace the player that left(Hudson for Bly) at the moment and in the forseeable future.I think the manager will see very little of it as it is going to fund our stay in Birmingham.
A selling club, yes. I think that the difference these days is that players who come through the academy or are signed very young like McCallum are only with us for little more than a season as a first team player. The equivalent to Maddison in the seventies would have been Dennis Mortimer. He played over 200 games for City before being sold. At the moment we don’t get long term benefit from the players in the first team and we don’t get the benefit of a really substantial transfer fee (£20m+) because we are in the third division.
Since the summer we have made around £6.5m in transfer fees if the reported amounts are to be believed (Bayliss, £2m,Chaplin £1m and McCallum £3.5m). That also follows on from the Maddison money the previous year.While I don’t believe that Sisu are pocketing the fees, it does seem a substantial amount of money to plug the shortfall of playing in Birmingham. I would wonder how much they are investing this year.