Coventry City manager Tony Mowbray has said that he felt like the Sky Blues were almost flipping a coin rather than building a club.
Mowbray told the Coventry Telegraph's Andy Turner: “I don’t want to sit here and bash the owners.
“The investment is what it is and I knew what the budget was. I knew what it was and last year we had a good go with it. Our loans came up trumps for us with Adam Armstrong, Ryan Kent and Jacob Murphy.
“I believed that the way to get out of the league was to get higher quality players from the Premier League, young footballers who could come and help. We almost did it last season and then were really unfortunate with the injuries to Reda Johnson, Ben Turner and Baily Cargill.
“I never change what I believe in and that’s that you build football clubs with good players and get a feel-good factor going and make it a good environment to work in.
“And yet that’s very difficult when we had 13 loans last year and were left with seven players in the pre-season. We had lots of pretty exciting targets this summer but in hindsight, did we shoot too high?
“Was it right to shoot for big players who are now proving they can do it in the league above?
“We didn’t get them for lots of different reasons. Some went to the Championship, didn’t want to drop to League One. Some decided for geographical reasons that they wanted to be nearer home, some went for more money but that’s part of the game.
“I had a tiff with a very good friend of mine who is a manager of another football club. We were going to take one of his players and he didn’t want it to happen and yet the player wanted to come. We got that close to signing players who would have made a huge difference but it just didn’t happen for us.
I’d have to say I don’t think Coventry are the only team in this league who have had to totally restructure again this summer. Look at Walsall this year. I watched them the other night and they had two players you’d recognise from last year.
“It’s a similar story to us. I feel like we are almost flipping a coin rather than building a club.”
More on this - http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/sport/football/exclusive-outgoing-coventry-city-boss-11955663