It's always difficult assessing exactly how much he's to blame but clearly we need to make massive changes in recruitment going forward. Our policy till now has been to lazily sign known quantities from the championship on very high wages which has lead to the very unsustainable situation.
Clearly though our market has continually been premier league reserves and the championship. That's a very small market to limit ourselves to - particularly when going forward, we will not be paying wages to attract the best players. We will need to look for value elsewhere, be that lower leagues, or abroad, but we've shown zero capability of doing that. Indeed I remember someone reporting from the Mark Miles fan meeting that the club was unlikely to make signings form abroad this season with the loosened restrictions on foreign players as we didn't have the set up for it! How much of that is Pearce or from elsehwere I don't know, but its clear we're in a increasingly limited marketed and making it very difficult for ourselves.
Realistically going forward, player sales HAVE to be a pretty big revenue stream to allow us to be competitive at this level, but currently almost no one we sign appreciates in value. That has to change. To be fair to Pearce, the clubs recruitment has been terrible ever since Ashworth left, short sighted and largely far too reliant on high wage experienced players. We've been very, very poor at scouting potential the last 10+ years. We went from the leaders in the area (though, what could have been if Peace had backed Ashworth's scouting system as an investment, like its been to Brighton, instead of the penny wise and pound foolish approach we took).
