Gary Rowett outlines the transfer difficulties experienced in January transfer window
Gary Rowett has opened up on some of the difficulties that Millwall faced in the January transfer window – with the Lions boss admitting that he felt the playing squad needed “freshening up”.
Millwall sealed six-month loan deals for Oliver Burke and Luke Freeman in the winter window while Jon Dadi Bodvarsson, Matt Smith and Ben Thompson all left SE16.
Rowett had revealed earlier in the month that Millwall were keen to secure permanent targets for younger players rather than pressing ahead with temporary stop-gap signings.
The Lions were unable to wrap up any permanent deals before the window slammed shut on Monday night.
But Rowett said he was relatively satisfied with the business Millwall did manage to do.
“Yeah I think so. It’s a difficult window,” said Rowett when asked if he was satisfied with the business the Lions had done in January.
“We set out at the start of the window to bring some young, permanent players in.
“We had four, five bids rejected for players that we spoke about and it’s very difficult because of course, we have to try and do things in a sensible way. But we tried to bring those types of players for the long-term in.
“When you can’t do that, what you then have to try and do is impact your team, because we wanted to do some business to see if we could freshen the squad up a little bit.
“We had four or five players who had probably been here and not played football for too long. When that’s the case, and they’re not happy, that affects the group a little bit and I felt that the group just needed a bit of a freshen up.
“I think we’ve done that in sorts. I think keeping Jed [Wallace] has helped us to do that in a little bit of a different way.
“It wasn’t perfect. It’s [recruitment] something that I think we need to improve on down the line, but, we’ve got some good players that I think can affect the team.”
Millwall resisted the temptation to relent from their new transfer strategy in the wake of injuries to Tom Bradshaw and Sheyi Ojo earlier in the month.
With January known as a notoriously difficult month to do business in, the Lions instead elected to keep their powder dry until the summer.
And Rowett hinted that the Lions are set to stick to their guns once the transfer window re-opens at the end of the season.
“It’s like anything, as soon as you leave one window you have to start looking at the next window,” Rowett added.
“We’ve spoken about the need to go down a slightly different route in terms of our recruitment model at times, but it’s difficult.
“To buy a young player out of League Two, I think one team had a £1.5million offer turned down, so there’s no easy way to bring top quality young players into a football club.
“We’re a club that have to find the best available players for us, and we’ve seen some of our own youngsters come through and add that little bit of extra zip and quality and we’ll continue to try and do that.”
The transfer window was as chaotic as our football ,a disaster , so much for lowering the age of the squad , the only good thing that can be said , is that Rowett did venture beyond the midlands to recruit, his world got slightly bigger . Millwall is not functioning very well at the moment ,something seems very wrong .