Quality – not quantity – the key transfer window requirements for Millwall

Gary Rowett reckons Millwall need to focus on quality – not depth – when it comes to their summer recruitment plans.

Football is relentless and there is little time for the Lions to lick the wounds inflicted by seeing their Championship play-off hopes implode on a disastrous final day.

Blackburn’s 4-3 victory at The Den earlier this month – fighting back from trailing 3-1 at the break – ensured Rowett’s side finished eighth in the final standings.

Millwall spent 126 days in the top six but eight points from their last nine league fixtures ensured Coventry City and Sunderland bagged the final play-off positions.

Rowett spoke afterwards about adding the lacking components to maintain a charge.

“We missed key players towards the end of the season and that’s a factor we need to look at,” the former Birmingham, Derby and Stoke boss told the South London Press earlier this week. “How can we keep players, if possible, available for longer? You can never completely avoid injuries but you are still looking to have them available, if you can, because I felt that was key.

“We need to improve some of the younger players again. Can we get Romain (Esse) into a position where he can effect the team? Can we improve Billy (Mitchell)? Can we improve Danny (McNamara)? All these things are factors.

“Then the other part is really simple – everywhere else you need to push on. So we need to try and improve the team and that is about what players can we bring in to improve the starting line-up? That’s where it has to start. I don’t think there is any point in bolstering our squad, it’s can we find three or four players to make us better – like Zian (Flemming) did last season.

“I won’t go into details about what positions or types of player, but if you look at a Premier League player and a Championship one then there are obvious differences and attributes that are more abundant.

“But you have to try and aspire to those things – that’s mobility, quality, awareness and tactical understanding, so many things.

“We’ve got a really strong and consistent base to our team and the end of the season probably showed we are just short in one or two little aspects – but not far off.

“You can look over the season and look at where we could very easily have taken two more points – that’s how close it was.

“It might’ve felt like we were miles away at the end but we were genuinely very, very close. Sometimes you have to accept that a couple of small tweaks and we’d have definitely got in the top six. Would we have then got out of the play-offs? That’s a different conversation.

“We need to keep moving forward in every aspect and if you don’t then there is no point. You can’t just be happy with being a team that doesn’t quite get there, for me that is not what we’re about.”

One obvious area which needs addressing is the frontline, which sounds strange when Millwall had two players in the top seven of the Championship scoring charts.

Tom Bradshaw notched 17 with Flemming, a club record £1.7million addition from Fortuna Sittard last summer, contributing 15.

A medical issue forced the cancellation of a January switch for Hibernian’s Kevin Nisbet. Benik Afobe had already been cleared to join Dubai-based Hatta FC. The former Arsenal, Wolves and Bristol City striker had struggled for form but it left the Lions without another ready-made number nine option if Bradshaw was not available.

Loanees Callum Styles, Oliver Burke and Charlie Cresswell have returned to their parent clubs. There is a release fee for Styles, who signed a contract extension tying him to Barnsley until 2025 before he was allowed to head to SE16 on a temporary basis.

“The last eight weeks have been spent trying to find a balance of looking at players and looking at what do we need,” said Rowett, who is the second longest-serving boss in England’s second tier. “Whatever the scenario – if you’re in the Premier League, you don’t get through the play-offs or you don’t quite make it – then you are looking for the squad to be strengthened. We’ve done that quite well, certainly in the last three or four years.

“We’ve tried to regenerate and refresh in a different way each season. It will be a big focus over the next few weeks.

“You can have some very strong targets and you can just go and sign players – but the reality is you’ve probably got to be prepared to overpay for those players if you want to get them done early.

“That’s always the challenge. We maybe need to do that in some areas, I don’t mean in terms of necessarily overpaying, but striking quickly and therefore you don’t get quite as much value for money.

“There are other areas of the team where you can wait – you can pick and choose the bargains a little bit later on.

“Every season I have done this and I would say that everyone gets busy the first week after the season – and you look like you’re going to do stuff – and then it goes two weeks of basically being really quiet and nothing happens.

“It starts properly hotting up just before the start of pre-season. It is just a really difficult window, unless you are prepared to strike early and reduce the chance of getting good value for players.

“The big thing for me is that we need to improve – what does Premier League quality look like? That’s not just the players – that is our staffing levels and our facilities. For me that is (looking at) everything.”