Gillingham manager Gareth Ainsworth already has his summer transfer targets lined up.
Recruitment will be crucial in the close-season, as Ainsworth looks to rebuild a squad more to his liking, and one which he hopes can finally start to have a sustained challenge at the top end of League Two.
The Gills are entering the final weeks of another disappointing season, and Ainsworth is confident he can put things right.
“I intend to improve recruitment here,” he insisted. “I don’t think we’ve made the best of it.
“We’ve got all of our targets, whether we get those or not is a different matter, because there’s a lot of other football clubs that like those players as well.
“They’re not just our targets because they’ve done bad, they’ve all done brilliantly and we want them, but so does everyone else. We’ll see where we sit with that.
“Believe me, there will be change here. I want everyone to get excited because the changes are coming.
“We are where we are this season. [We] can’t change it now. We’ve got to get on with it and put a team out that I believe can win on Friday [at Walsall].”
Gills owner Brad Galinson is keen to drive the club’s recruitment more towards a data-driven approach.
Analytics are something the Gills have been utilising ever since the Galinsons took over, and the owner wants more of it to be used in their recruitment process.
Ainsworth believes a mixed approach is best.
He said: “I think Brad’s just trying to add little bits to it, which would help us. It all costs money.
“There are recruitment departments like you wouldn’t believe at some clubs. At Brentford and Brighton, it’s almost like a whole industry, and they’ve done it really well. That’s two examples of how it can be done, but down in League Two it’s tough.
“Analytics is one thing. Eyes on players is another thing. The most important thing in football is recruitment for me.
“I think it’s the most important thing in any business. I think if you recruit the right players, you get results. If you recruit the right people, you’ll get results.
“If you recruit the wrong people or people not good enough, no matter how good a tactician or a planner or a strategist you are, you won’t get the results.
“Adding that [data] to our recruitment process is going to help. It’s going to add more names to the top of the funnel, and when they come out the bottom of the funnel, hopefully we’ll get some better names and some better players.
“I want to get some really good players in the summer and make sure that when we start next season, we are absolutely firing at this football club.”
Ainsworth added: “I’m right in there now with the recruitment department. We discuss lots. We have regular meetings, and there are all sorts of ways of doing it.
“You look at contracts coming up, you look at analytics, you look at players you’ve played against, you get texts off agents, calls off agents, calls off players.
“There are all sorts of different ways of recruitment. We have to cover them all at this time of year, and getting the right players, getting the key players, is something special.”
