We’re the best run club in League One and we're in serious trouble
- Matt Mecham
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
It’s a curious time to be a Peterborough United fan, and it can be summed up by two events that happened over the weekend.
The first was news that Kyrell Lisbie, our mercurial winger who, at times, single-handedly won games, was on the verge of joining Championship team Millwall, with reported figures ranging from £3m to £6m.
This is sensational business.
We bought Lisbie for around £70k last summer from non-league Braintree, and have sold him for millions within a year.
That’s exactly what Peterborough United is known for, and he follows in the footsteps of dozens who have walked down the tunnel at London Road.
Fans should be over the moon at this, but...
The second event was our friendly in Boston. We fielded numerous academy players, and played Carl Johnston as a defensive midfielder to plug the gaping holes in our squad that prevent us from fielding a competitive team.
We lost 0-1, and it’s fair to say that Posh fans are full of fear for what this season holds.
Darragh MacAnthony has spent two years making this club financially safe while half of League One drives itself off a cliff.
He's also presided over the transfer business that has left us with almost nothing worth selling, a squad we can't add to until August, and a first team that needs the kind of player our model was never built to buy.
The case for Darragh
While other owners have been throwing money at problems, Darragh has been in the room trying to stop them.
Over the last year, he's pulled together an owners' group covering most of League One and League Two, and they're lobbying the EFL for stricter rules.
Clubs are currently allowed to spend 60% of what they bring in on wages. He wants that cut to 40%, with managers' wages included .
He has owners admitting they're paying journeyman defenders £9k-£12k a week at clubs with smaller gates than ours, and that owners need to stop their spending addiction.
He isn't wrong. Two EFL clubs are already under embargo this summer, and we've watched Sheffield Wednesday and Morecambe pulled apart in public.
Meanwhile our own books improve every year as we pay off large chunks of debt.
This is good news, but look at what it's cost.
The trap he's built
We can't sign anybody until we sell somebody.
Last year the club had to factor its transfer income, bringing forward money owed on players sold, and the process dragged into late August.
Until it was completed, the EFL wouldn't register the players we'd identified. Darragh has been open that this was the reason we started the season with the squad we did, and not because anybody thought it was good enough.
The signings meant to fix it turned up on deadline day, unfit and unfamiliar with everyone around them, and we spent the rest of the season chasing the league.
This summer it's the same problem with a different blockage.
Archie Collins can't find a club, so we're still paying the wages of what was the highest earner at the club.
Had he signed in early July as everyone expected, that money would have cleared, and the space would be ours.
Add the 24/25 recruitment we still can't shift, and there's very little room to work with.
The frustrating part is that Darragh knows exactly what's needed.
Speaking from the training camp in Spain, he put it at a defensive midfielder, a couple of wingers and a striker, and was clear we're three or four players short rather than ten.
That's more or less every fan's list too. The only question is whether the money will exist in time, and right now the honest answer is no.
It also makes a mockery of pre-season, especially an expensive trip to Spain with what may be our reserves.
Worse still, Luke Williams admitted that we’re still scouting players, as our short list is presumably empty given our targets have already found new clubs, or don’t want to sign for us.
The cupboard is bare
Here's the part that should worry you most, and the best way to explain it is to go back 18 months.
Asked then whether clubs losing money should be frightened, Darragh's answer was that the real test is what's behind the door if things go wrong.
Behind our door, he said, were assets all over the place, players we could sell one after another, and he doubted many clubs in our position could say the same.
He went further: anyone buying Peterborough would be getting a running machine, a young squad full of assets, with no need to spend to make it competitive.
Now go and look at the squad list.
Those assets have been sold, released, or walked out the door for nothing, and their replacements aren’t worth much at all.
By my count, we now have three players a Championship club would seriously pay money for: Harry Leonard, Matthew Garbett and Alex Bass.
Garbett was supposed to go to the World Cup, play well and be sold for millions shortly after. A freak hamstring injury in training put that on ice.
So the three players holding this team together are also the three most obvious ways to fill a financial hole he's described as £5m a year, every year.
One could be sold before a ball is kicked. All three could be gone by next summer.
The model doesn't work without assets
The Posh way is well known, and Darragh will happily claim it as his invention, as he was doing it before Brentford and Brighton made it fashionable.
Buy young, buy cheap, often from non-league, develop them, sell them on for a fortune.
It's why he could say without embarrassment that we'd never sign a finished article, and why good young players kept picking us over clubs offering more money.
Here's the problem:
To guarantee survival in League One this season, we don't need projects. We need players who can walk into the team in August and cope with it, and those players are older, cost more in wages, and are worth less when we've finished with them.
Darragh admitted as much at the end of last season, when he said what the squad really lacked was experienced characters, that they might be 25 or they might be 35, and reached back to Mark Beevers as the template.
Every signing like that is money out with little coming back at the other end.
Buy three of them and the trading machine that funds this football club falls apart.
Don't buy them and we're trusting year two of a recruitment class in which Sam Hughes has barely kicked a ball, Declan Frith broke his ankle in June, and Garbett may or may not play for us again.
It’s fair to say the storm clouds are gathering.
The gamble
On the squad, Darragh’s hope is the much-hyped “year two”.
The young lads who broke through last season, Patryk Sykut and Bolu Shofowoke among them, are around the first team, and have much to prove.
We’re trying to relaunch Chris Conn-Clarke to either nail down the No. 10 role, or be good enough to attract buyers after a lacklustre loan to the National League.
Our biggest signing so far, Tom O'Connor, who I'd written off as another durability gamble after a hamstring tear ended his loan, is back, although Darragh admitted at the fan open day that he may not be fit for the first game and will miss all of pre-season, along with Sam Hughes.
Meanwhile, Premier League clubs are queuing up to send us players off the back of what we did for Jimmy-Jay Morgan, and he doesn't want them. His argument is that Chelsea made millions out of Jimmy while we made nothing, and he'd rather sign our own players and own the upside.
Without Morgan, there’s a fair chance we got relegated last season, so his value is likely far more than any transfer fee we would have received.
Final Thoughts
The uncomfortable truth is that both halves of this are Darragh's work.
The financial discipline is his, and the empty cupboard is his, because you don't end up with only 3 saleable players by accident.
You get there by turning down millions for Hector, Ricky and Kwame, by grading a recruitment window a “D” 18 months after publicly defending it, wasting millions on the Swedish and Swiss markets, and by selling the good ones to plug a hole the bad ones helped create.
Sheffield Wednesday, Wigan, Plymouth, Milton Keynes, Doncaster and even Cambridge have already done good business.
We need a left winger, a right winger, a centre back, a defensive midfielder and cover for Harry Leonard, and we can't move until somebody else moves first.
Get those signings in before the season starts, and fans will be happy.
Leave it to the last week of August again, and we'll be having this exact conversation in October, except by then Garbett and possibly Leonard could be gone, and the money will go towards the debt.
The reality is that we were a solid League Two side for decades before Darragh came along and dragged us out of it.
The focus on finances will secure the club’s future while others risk folding, but it may also mean we spend some time back in that league as payment.
In many ways, we’re playing an unfair game by being financially prudent while others build their debt pile and worry about the repercussions of that later.
But fans are fickle and care only about our success on the pitch.
The coming season will see how this balancing act plays out and is critical to Darragh's legacy.
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