Portsmouth chief executive, Andy Cullen, wants the club to move towards longer term permanent signings, opposed to temporary loan deals.
When it comes to money spent on loanee’s, Pompey have spent the most in the EFL, topping the pile over multiple years.
In 2021/22, seven loan players came in, spending over £700,000 more on loan signings when compared to the year before.
As this most recent transfer window came round, Pompey wanted to reduce the number of loan signings they made to build up their squad.
What has Andy Cullen said?
This summer, the club signed just three loan signings.
On this, Cullen said: “We have got three loan players in, we will always have loan players, but the proportion spent is much different to what we’ve had over the last few years.”
As before mentioned, Portsmouth spent the most on loans, a factor which couldn’t continue.
This was of concern to the chief executive: “One of the things that came through from the last benchmarking report, and the year before that. We’re the highest club in terms of loan expenditure.”
As a result, spending had to decrease: “You will see a significant reduction on loan expenditure this year, compared to the last two previous years.
“There Is still some spend on them, they are not coming to us as favours or as cheap loans in any way, you can see that in the quality of all three that are here, they all have something about them.”
With Tino Anjorin, Alex Robertson and Abu Kamara, there is quality there.
The move towards making the most of academy or cheaper talent has been made.
Discussing that, he said: “The route we’ve decided was to pay fees to younger talent coming through that’s available to us, we believe that’s’ the right one to do and the loans can be the icing on the cake.”
This strategy is working so far, with Pompey sitting in fifth place as the only unbeaten side in League One.