Barnsley’s CEO has been commenting on the club’s summer transfer strategy after coming in for a lot of criticism for losing key players and failing to replace them with similar quality.

The Tykes came into this season with optimism after a promotion-winning campaign in League One in 2018/19 but were dealt a series of huge blows as key players left the club in the summer to Championship rivals.

Goalkeeper Adam Davies left for Stoke City along with centre-back Liam Lindsay, while fellow centre-back Ethan Pinnock left for Brentford, and star striker Kieffer Moore left for fellow relegation strugglers Wigan Athletic.

With these four leaving, the job for Daniel Stendel was to replace them with enough quality to see them not thrust into an immediate relegation battle.

However, the vast majority of their business was done to bring in largely inexperienced players on the cheap, with the them very much fitting the ‘quantity over quality’ idea.

It came as no surprise to see that Barnsley struggled to continue their upward momentum from League One and slumped to rock bottom of the table, with both Stendel and now Gerhard Struber citing a lack of experience in the squad as a major issue that needs to be resolved before the end of the season.

Struber added some playing experience in Marcel Ritzmaier and Michael Sollbauer from his former club Wolfsberger AC, but coming in with zero experience of the division.

Speaking to Andy Giddings on the BBC Football Heaven Podcast, Barnsley CEO Dane Murphy insists that the club didn’t make a mistake in their summer business, but it’s more of a long term process. He stated: “Has it failed? No.

“In the short-term everyone is looking back to the comments made in the summer.

“I don’t think you can say that it’s failed, but I also don’t think you can say that it’s successful.

“It’s incomplete. It’s a long-term approach.

“There are guidelines to our philosophy and to our mode of approach and it’s a work in progress as we try to reach something that’s self-sustaining and different from the norm.”

Asked if he’ll make amendments, Murphy said: “Amendments is a good word. There’s guidelines, but they’re soft guidelines.

“We’re not going to move away from our data analysis or this perceived ‘moneyball’ – I don’t think that it’s really equal.

“It’s an approach where we use data to help us recruit players and I don’t think that we’re going to move away from that any time soon.

“The guidelines for that are set in place and something that we adhere to, but they’re soft guidelines.

“In January circumstances changed and we needed to bolster our backline to put everything in place to try and stay in the Championship and we amended some of our policies to get the job done.”

Can you get 16/16 in this Barnsley quiz?

The verdict

While these players could be solid long-term investments, it did seem naive not to add more proven quality to consolidate their place in the division.

By the time that these players have acclimatised to first-team football, they might not be in the same division and the Tykes will be back to square one.

It’s not been a successful season as of yet and they will have to rethink their strategy in the summer, regardless of the division they were in.

The players that they have signed will most likely turn out to be very dependable players in the future but with such a results-based business, it’s hard to justify waiting that long.