Manager Nathan Jones is hoping to welcome more new faces to Kenilworth Road this summer in preparation for the 2021/22 Sky Bet Championship campaign.
Speaking ahead of his sides’ first pre-season outing against Hitchin Town tomorrow afternoon, the gaffer spoke to the press to give them the lowdown ahead of the competitive season returning in August.
Beginning with transfer news, Jones said: “We definitely would like to do at least two more bits of business, things are well in hand in terms of who we want. We’ve probably had 12 recruitment meetings now over the last 12 weeks.
“We have had a meeting every week and updates and gone for targets. We’ve pretty much gone for everyone who we wanted to go for, so it’s a credit to firstly to the club for backing us, two to the recruitment team in every aspect and for us, as it's been hard work.
“Where everyone else has been off, we’ve actually been working, so it’s been good, we’ve got two, maybe three, but definitely two more we’d like to bring in.”
Despite his desire to avoid the market, the Welshman found success in loan deals last season – namely Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall – and may do so again if other targets aren’t acquired.
“We’ve got loan targets if we don’t get our permanents then we have people who we can get that are really high quality at Premier League clubs, so that decision tends to be made a little later in the window.
“A lot of Premier League clubs will have people away at the Euros or needs players to play in their group to add numbers and so on, so we’re going to have to wait on that anyway, but we like to do our permanent business first, and see where we are then.”
With seven new faces through the door already, expectation is that some may depart either temporarily or permanently, as Nathan went on to say: “You can’t keep everyone happy and you can’t keep everyone moving forward. There will be a compromise with one or two before the end of the pre-season window or before that. We’re going to need to clip the squad down a little bit but we’re not there yet.
“At the minute, we need all the bodies we have because of the intensity of pre-season training and because we want to do a lot of structured work. People are not going to be able to train every day at the rate we want them to, they will pick up stiffness and so on but by the time August comes, we will have our squad in place.
“We will know which ones we take forward, which ones we won’t in the short term and then we will act accordingly.”