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Friday, 9 October 2026
Occupation RoadWatford

Essay · recruitment

The Wait

Why Watford's squad was left thin, in the club's own words.

· 4,660 words

On 2 May, with one match of the season still to play, Scott Duxbury said Watford had been “missing senior players who understood the Championship and had the mentality to guide our younger talent.” The players leaving, he said, would “in the large part” be “replaced by experienced leaders who understand the demands of this league.” The local press supplied the arithmetic he had left out: professionals in the twenty-six to thirty-two bracket, hardened by the division, who cost money and rarely carry much resale value. The season finished sixteenth, the club’s worst in the second tier under this ownership, and nobody thought the diagnosis was wrong.

What happened next can be stated in a paragraph.

The head coach arrived on 15 June: Alessio Dionisi, the twenty-fourth permanent appointment of the Pozzo era, after a forty-three-day search. The squad he inherited needed at least six signings by the local paper’s count, and the need was specific: two centre-backs, a left-back, two midfielders, a centre-forward. Four British targets were lost, on the reported account, over salary demands. Then the intake arrived, and it arrived from one place. Omar Traore, Iker Bravo, Martin Payero and Luca Kjerrumgaard signed permanently from Udinese; Jordan Zemura came from Udinese too, on a season-long loan. Until the last day of the window, the two permanent signings from anywhere else were both goalkeepers: Federico Ravaglia from Bologna on six years, carrying a buy-back that lapses on promotion, at which point a reported eight million euros falls due, and Sam Walker from Bradford City on a one-year deal in August, thirty-four years old and homegrown for quota purposes. The pledge to buy Championship experience was not abandoned. It was moved to the loan slots, where it waited.

On 28 July, nineteen days before the league season opened, the sporting director, Luke Dowling, told the club’s own podcast that Watford had two senior centre-backs and expected “another three to four” signings “to come through the building.” Duxbury attached a period to a condition: if the centre-backs came in within “the next week, two weeks”, the club could “sit back a little bit”. The next day, Dionisi named a captain — Mattie Pollock, one of the two senior centre-backs, twenty-four years old, already on the books. Three days after that, Pollock revealed that the players had built a five-man leadership group themselves, in a group chat: he and Hector Kyprianou from the start of the summer, with Marc Bola, Daniel Bachmann and Edoardo Bove added later.

So: the club identified a problem, described it accurately in public, could not afford the solution, bought what it could afford instead, and the players quietly organised part of the fix themselves, for nothing. Calling that a bad summer misses what it is. It is how the club works, compressed into seven weeks.

Most of how the club works will be familiar to anyone who has followed it, though not all of it.

The head coach arrives into a squad he did not choose and a culture he cannot hold, and rarely stays long enough to change either. Twenty-four permanent appointments in fourteen years is roughly one every seven months. It was not always so small a job: Malky Mackay attended board meetings and saw the finances, and Ray Lewington refused to sell Heidar Helguson, a refusal that was his to make and may have cost him his job. Neither is imaginable now. The job has been narrowed over a long period, and then judged as though it had not been.

The recruitment model is to buy young, develop, and sell at the peak, and its middle part does not exist: nothing between recruitment and coaching survives a change of head coach and owns the business of turning a promising twenty-year-old into a first-team footballer. The Athletic stated the rule for doing it properly in February, of Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford: success hinges on replacing the best players before agreeing to sell them. Watford sell and then look. Nestory Irankunda cost a reported two million, drifted under three head coaches and went to Sporting in August for around fifteen million: a club that cannot keep a player it wants to keep, doing very well out of not keeping him. Twenty days later Duxbury said so himself. “I didn’t want to sell Irankunda and I still probably wouldn’t now.”

A squad of twenty-two
Star players
5
Starters
7
Bench players
5
Young players
5

One EFL head coach's rules, reported by Jeremy Steele, Analytics FC, November 2020.

The dressing room reproduces itself. Successive head coaches, with almost nobody in common between their squads, have described the same culture, and the local paper drew the conclusion in April that the fault lay in what had not changed. A culture that survives the replacement of everyone in it is not being made by the people in it. The summer showed what the squad is short of. In November 2020 Analytics FC reported the squad rules of an unnamed Football League head coach with several promotions behind him: twenty-two players in four tiers, among them seven starters, proven in the league the team plays in, and five bench players, recruited for attitude and minimal injury history. Duxbury counted twenty-three first-team players on 4 September, one more than the coach’s twenty-two. Against those rules the squad looks short of starters, the nearest tier to what the May pledge described, and most of the players who arrived late came from the part of the market that clubs able to pay for fit, reliable players leave alone: Tom Bodell showed it from their previous seasons’ minutes, and the Watford Observer’s Adam Drury from the squad’s injury record.

The group chat was the most encouraging thing to happen at Watford this summer and also the bleakest: part of the leadership the club promised to buy, assembled by five players out of what was left in the room, with no budget. By the middle of September only Pollock and Kyprianou, the two who had started it, were playing: Bola and Bove were injured, and Bachmann was the second-choice goalkeeper. Pollock, asked in August what had to change in the culture, said he wants the fight question to stop being asked.

The money sets the terms for the rest, and the first essay here set out how: in 2024/25, with neither Premier League television money nor a parachute payment, revenue fell from £57.6m to £26m, and the club lost £15.9m in a year when nearly every cost had already been cut.

One number from that year sits oddly beside the rest. In 2024/25 Watford generated the highest free cash flow in the Championship, £14m, one of only two clubs to generate any, in a division that was £415m the other way. The cash went on repaying £14.1m of external loans. Nobody should read that as profitability, still less as health: it is what happens when a club sells fifteen million pounds net of footballers against a cost base that does not cover itself. But the EFL’s chief executive, Trevor Birch, says the league’s number one priority is “reducing the game’s dependence on owner funding”. Across the division that season, owners put in £431m; Watford’s owner put in £1.8m. On the measure the league says matters most, Watford is close to the club it wants. Matt Rowson made a version of the point on BHaPPY in August, in the owner’s defence: it is inconsistent, he wrote, to complain that the second tier’s financial model is unsustainable and then to object when the owner wants the club to live within its means.

The consequences arrived through the summer, and the local paper listed them in July as one pattern. The women’s team, promoted in April, was agreed for sale to a Norwegian investment firm for essentially nothing. The under-21 side was scrapped and the academy downgraded to Category 3. In June the club’s matchday stewarding contractor served a winding-up petition over an unpaid bill, withdrawn once an agreement was reached: not a solvency event, and it should not be dressed up as one.

The academy decision has been taken before. In August 2012, within seven weeks of the takeover, Watford withdrew from the Under-21 programme and settled at Category 3. The causation ran the other way that time — the category choice drove the exit, where in 2026 the exit drove the category — but the two outcomes are the same two outcomes, and between them sits a promotion season in which the club applied to go up a category, Duxbury calling it important if the academy was to “compete with some of our rivals”. The application went in when the club was climbing; the category went in 2026, the year after it lost £15.9m. That is not hypocrisy: the club did what it said, in both directions. It is the academy tracking the balance sheet for fourteen years, which is worse, because nothing about it was ever a mistake. In September Dowling gave the club’s case that the category costs it nothing: academies produce players whatever their category, and when Watford are competing with another club for a young player, “facilities are irrelevant then.” He said it three months after the downgrade, and two days after a highly rated seventeen-year-old had gone to Brentford for fifty thousand pounds, in a move the reporting says Watford were unable to stop. No report has connected the two, or said what the fifty thousand was.

The club’s own podcast of 28 July left out the women’s team, the academy, the under-21s, the petition, the accounts and the ownership question. The weekend before, on a supporters’ podcast, someone had made the club an offer: tell us what we actually are and we will get our shoulder to the wheel. The specification attached to it was modest: “you can say, I would like to, we really hope to. Don’t say we will.” Nobody was asking for good news, only to be told the truth about bad news they had mostly worked out. The September episode, three days after the window shut, held the same shape: no fee, no wage, no budget.

The answers came somewhere else. On 3 September Duxbury and Dowling met the Watford Supporters Board at the training ground, and on 15 September the Board published eleven pages of minutes. The playing wage bill “is expected to be amongst the lowest in the Championship”. The club went overseas because “players of comparable quality were often available from overseas at a lower cost than equivalent domestic targets”. Its “current financial planning assumptions do not rely upon receipt of any additional Premier League funding”, and it hopes to spend any that arrives this year on the stadium and the training ground; in July, Duxbury had said such money would make “a massive impact on our resources and our ability to further strengthen the squad”. Asked whether the owner intended to sell, the club restated his commitment and listed the support he provides, and the answer contains no denial. The minutes are a summary, not a transcript, and carry no fee, wage or budget either. But the club will say these things. It says them in a room, to the Supporters Board, and the record supporters read is the Board’s.

So here is what I think is happening, stated plainly enough to be wrong about later.

Watford’s owner now lends the club little new money, and at interest, having taken £34m more out of it than he put in over the six years to June 2025. On the measure the league’s chief executive calls its first priority, that makes Watford close to the club the EFL says it wants, though not quite by the league’s route: its cost rules count the player sales Watford relies on, and leave the academy and the women’s team out of the costs they limit, both of which Watford has cut back or agreed to sell. The squad is where the saving shows, and this summer it showed as a wait: a plan to buy experience early became a window finished on its last night, and the club has since explained the delay in ways that do not agree.

The window closed on 1 September, and on the last day of it, all at once, the club delivered. Branimir Mlačić, nineteen, a centre-back, on a season-long loan from Udinese, the sixth signing from the sister club in one summer. Soumaïla Coulibaly, twenty-two, a centre-back, on loan from Strasbourg. Stephy Mavididi, twenty-eight, a winger, on a season-long loan from Leicester. Myron Boadu, twenty-five, a striker, permanent. Four of the five needs the local reporting had enumerated in August, including both of the positions the executives had named themselves. The fifth was a midfielder, and it was conditional on Imran Louza leaving. Louza left, permanently, for Panathinaikos on 28 August, for a reported £6.8m. The midfielder did not arrive.

The delay was long enough to be measured. On 25 August, with the same two senior centre-backs the club had been describing since June, Watford put out a back four in which every player was making his first senior start and lost 1-5 at home to Peterborough in the cup. Dionisi’s account of the selection was that there wasn’t another possibility. Seven days later there were four.

Look at what the four cost. Three are loans. The fourth, Boadu, was a free agent whose contract at PSV had expired in July. No transfer fee is reported for any of them, seventeen days after the Irankunda sale banked around seven million of profit, once Bayern’s share was paid, and four days after the Louza fee. No fee reported is not no fee paid, and loan fees are routinely undisclosed; but four arrivals closed the window, four reports covered them, not one contains a fee, and the club has supplied none. The squad got deeper and the money did not visibly move. Three days later Duxbury was asked whether the free-agent market could still be used. He did not rule it out, but the caution he attached had nothing to do with money: a matchday squad of twenty, twenty-three first-team players and, when everyone was fit, at least three of them in the stands. What he named was the bus on a Friday, and the people who are not on it.

One of the four brings the argument down to a single player. On 30 August, Mavididi appeared in the local paper as a target “deemed too expensive.” On 1 September he was a Watford player. The 30 August report also carried the internal view that “having five points on the board justifies the decision not to rush into signings” the club could now make at a lower cost. Read that twice. A club defending a finished window on results would be ordinary. This is three games of football offered in defence of not following the plan the club itself had described, to have its centre-backs in early, and as proof that the delay had been worth the risk. And the defence is real: deadline-week prices do fall, and a club with this wage bill waiting for them is not obviously wrong. But nobody has said that Mavididi’s own price moved. On 4 September Dowling said that two of the three players loaned on the last day had been targets all summer, and that their clubs had wanted to sell them first; the loans came once the sales did not. If Mavididi was one of the two, what Watford signed on 1 September was a different deal from the one reported as too expensive, and not necessarily a cheaper one.

The wait itself has been explained many times, and the explanations do not agree. On 3 July the technical director, Gian Luca Nani, said the club preferred “to wait a bit” for its first targets rather than take the first player available. On 28 July Duxbury said that if the centre-backs came in within a week or two, the club could sit back and see what loans became available; on the same podcast the World Cup was given as the reason everything had gone “a bit slower”. On 6 August Dowling was firmer: “we can’t wait until the last week to get another two.” On 8 August Dionisi said the club was “waiting for the right time”, and on 16 August Nani put the delay on the market, which in the Championship can make a club “wait for bigger teams to complete their squads”. On 30 August, as reported, five points justified the wait. On 3 September, as the Supporters Board minuted it, the club said the lateness “had not been the intended approach”, and acknowledged that the timing of several arrivals “created challenges for the Head Coach”. On 4 September Dowling said some deals had taken “longer than we certainly wanted and expected”, and that, looking back, “we were pleased that perhaps other targets we didn’t get”, because the players who came late might otherwise have been out of reach. And on 18 September, after the defeat at Bristol City, Dionisi went back to before the season began: “for us it was better to wait until the last minute of the market.” The same evening Sky Sports reported him saying that the club knew the situation well “because at the start I wasn’t happy”.

Drury saw the gap before the window closed. On 26 August, the day after Peterborough, he set the fortnight and the last week against a window still unfinished, and wrote that the delay hinted, again, at misalignment behind the scenes. That day, on FTRE, he also answered the question none of the club’s accounts addresses, which is who made the call: probably Gino Pozzo, waiting as long as possible to drive the deals down. On 21 September he put it in print with the cost attached: the owner delaying signings, “to the great cost of the coach and squad”, to save money. The internal view reported on 30 August gave the lower price as the benefit, so the motive has a source inside the club; the owner’s part does not. The head coach’s two lines of 18 September put him in the conversation before the season, and unhappy with where it left him. Neither says whose call it was.

On the club’s podcast of 4 September, three days after Mavididi signed, both men were asked about the pledge. Dowling said that where a player comes from is irrelevant, that ability and quality come first, and that EFL or Premier League experience is a second consideration on top of that. Duxbury went further. He had wanted more of what he called homegrown players, he said, “but maybe what I was actually saying was it was changing the culture.” And then: “I think they have achieved their objective, it’s just maybe not quite as I stated it originally.”

He may be right about himself. Cohesion was part of the May diagnosis too, and a chief executive saying that “homegrown” had been his shorthand for a dressing room is a reading the year permits. The order of events stands. Watford spent a summer unable to sign the players they had promised, borrowed one on the last night of the window, and were explaining three days later that the promise had meant something else.

Dionisi has a squad now, on paper, and a captain who spent the whole of pre-season as one of two men in his position. Fourteen Christmases have passed under this ownership, and no head coach has been in post at two of them in the same spell. If Dionisi is in post at this Christmas and the next, that will be genuinely new information.

The league season opened on 16 August with a win over Southampton, and five points came from the first three games. Three more came from the next four, as injuries took hold and the late signings were still short of fitness. By the end of the match at West Brom on 5 September all four of the club’s established full-backs were injured, and a centre-back and a midfielder were playing there. After Watford came from behind to beat Preston on 8 September, Dionisi said he had “12 players ready”, four days after the chief executive’s twenty-three. At home to Stoke on 12 September he named eight substitutes, two of them goalkeepers and none of them a central midfielder. “It is the first time in my life as a coach without a midfielder on the bench.” On 14 September Bodell set that line against Duxbury’s three players in the stands. Midfield was the position the window had left unfilled. Nothing came from the eighth game, 1-0 at Bristol City on 18 September, and Watford went into the international break twentieth, three points above the relegation places, with the joint-fewest goals in the division. Injuries do not explain all of it: on Drury’s count Watford have won eight of their last fifty-four league games away from home, a run older than the current staff and most of the squad.

The free-agent market Duxbury had not ruled out was used on 11 September, for Michail Antonio, thirty-six, on a one-year deal. He had trained with the squad since the middle of August; the club said Dionisi would use his experience “from a playing, mentoring and coaching perspective”, and the local paper put him a month away from proper action. On 16 September Dionisi added the owner to the people he says he speaks to every day: “I speak every day with my directors, my owner and they know the situation.” Asked whether he would like a new player, he said: “No, it’s not the moment for me to speak about this.”

Supporters have spent months asking whether the problem is the head coach or the owner, and fourteen years give them reason to look upwards. The club’s account to the Supporters Board offers a less personal explanation. As the Board minuted it, Watford is unlikely to compete with many Championship clubs on wages, clubs “towards the lower end of the Championship wage scale” often find their deals arriving late, and the club expects its own wage bill to be among the lowest in the division. Bodell had drawn the line the day before the minutes appeared: a club that can no longer compete financially has to be patient, but leaving the finishing touches to the final hours of the window was “far from ideal”. The budget explains some of the wait. It does not explain a centre-back from the sister club arriving on the last night, when Drury could see no great reason he could not have come far earlier, or a briefing that called the delay a decision. January, which the minute says is typically used to address squad gaps, is likely to end as the summer did, and as last January did.

Sources

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