AFC Wimbledon – Overview Of Season 2014/2015 – Part 2

Welcome back to my AFC Wimbledon blog and in this post we shall go over the rights and wrongs of this Npower Championship season.

If you missed part 1 of this season overview then click on the link below:

AFC Wimbledon – Overview of season 2014/2015 Part 1

This is Part 2 of 2 and we will be looking over the transfers that were made over the season in and out of the club and also a look at the finances as well as a look at the squad star ratings.

Transfers over the season

In this bit I will look at the transfers made over as well as ones that went out and will list some of the players that I deemed a success or a failure. The transfers list below shows who came in and out of the club during the season:

 

The transfers above show we were busy over the whole season bringing in a massive 20 signings that were brought in either on loan or on frees. It was 13 players that went out of the club and maybe we could have done with more going out to keep wages at a reasonable level. I am first going to go through the successful players that came into the club below:

Players In – The Successful

In order to view the players profile click on the name and it will link you to that page:

Matt Doherty:

This player was brought in on a free from Wolverhampton Wanderers after spending the season on loan with us the season before and in the end he was a good signing becoming our main right back and still has time to build on his 2 and a half star ability. He put in some impressive performances and I am sure next season that will continue for this young player.

Christophe Grondin:

The player was brought in on a free from AA Gent and although he is 31 he put in some very good performances and was the main part to my midfield but I  feel the fact he is ageing could mean that performances begin to decrease. Overall a great addition to the team.

Manucho:

I found Manucho was available on a free and got him in on October. He turned out to be such a brilliant addition scoring some main goals and got us some important results when he began scoring. He came in when we were struggling to score and sorted that out. It though seems as though Manucho will be going as I brought him in on a short term contract and I will be realising him.

Ivan Klasnic:

The final player I will pick out is Ivan Klasnic and he was brilliant when brought in getting good ratings and a good 10 goals in 18 games which is good for an older player. He was a great short term player to bring in but once again it seems as though he will be released.

 Players In – The Failures

Andy Barcham:

Andy Barcham was brought in on a free in the hope that he would become a main player for my team but it turned out I was a bit sleepy when I got this signing as he was poor hardly getting a game. The fact that I have already released him shows that the season was just not for him and this team wasn’t out he goes.

Christian Montano:

This is the next player I deemed a poor one. He is young but was overpaid during his time and was becoming unhappy ruining the morale of the team so I must be careful on these kind of signings. Once again the fact that he has gone shows that he was not so good.

Shola Ameobi:

This player was a big waste of money. He scored some goals but in the end this elder player was no way near good enough for the team and wasted a good bit of wage which is just not good enough. He will be released at the start of next season.

Joe Slattery:

Once again a young player but really did not help for morale as he started to get angry over the lack of game time. It was really a drop for morale which is not good enough and his wage was quite high so releasing him once again was the right thing for us.

Players Out – The Successful & The Failures

I said that I would go through this but I will do it in a small paragraph as I would struggle to deem what was successful or who were the failures going out. The players that went out got signed up apart from one of them and that is youngster Marko Mitrovic. I think he was a good player to go out as wages are a lot for him. McVey I feel is a player I should have kept hold of as he can play either midfield or defence but in the end it came down to money. I think instead of naming players I will just say that most of these players went out on the financial and morale side as they were just not right for my team.

Finances

I am now going to go through finances, it is unfortunate to have to say I did not screenshot the finances in time so the column that we are going to look at is the last season one.

The first thing I will say is that finances are looking good and that is a good thing following prize money and a board injection which you will find out in my season pre-view post. The thing I notice first is we made a good £4million pound profit. This is thanks to prize money and also £35 million investment. I have to say at the end we were in the red but thanks to the injection and end of season prize money we were able to make this profit.

So we had an expenditure of £41.3 million last season. This for me is quite a lot and rightly so but why and the simple answer is “Ground Maintenance”. We announced a new stadium and of course we paid £30million for it after getting a loan. I also think that £3 million on wages is a bit and this will keep going up.

 

The income was £45million which I was happy with but this is due to loans. We got gat receipts of £1.6 million which will go up when we move into our new stadium and prize money was £2.3million. I think overall we are running like an average club although maybe not so like a Championship club.

The final bit of financial part I will show is Sponsors and Loan Outstanding. As you can see we actually have a lot of sponsors and they bring in a good amount of money one of them is a new sponsor. The main thing I want to aim at looking at is the loan. We owe almost £33 million which is a lot of money and this will be the factor that starts to lose us money and this is one of the reasons I am unhappy the board decided to build a new stadium but now I am starting to come to terms with that.

Squad Star Ratings

The final bit of this post will see me go through the player star ratings before we go into the transfer window and then at the end of pre-season we will re look and see if it is looking any better.

The player start ratings show we are actually a weak side and that comes down to me letting players go early so this is not quite the right squad ratings but the current squad rating gives a poor showing. I would only trust a couple of players out of them and that is Grondin, Alnwick, Doherty, Kennedy and Balkestein. The other reason for such a poor team is because we have a young team and they are still developing.

As you can see I have a silver star rating on goalkeeper Jake Lee and this is something I never worry about for a keeper as I always gamble on having a fit first team keeper so I use a greyed out keeper and give a small contract to him to provide back-up.

We need to build for next season and it should be interesting to see how I do in it but I will not put in this post my aims as that will be saved for the next post.

That is it for this post and the overview of the season. I hope you enjoyed reading it. I will be next writing a post for a pre-season plan post and it will go through what I will be aiming to do during pre-season and you will also get to see what my budget is for the season.

Thanks for reading.

Tim.