Fulham’s transfer plans must be shrewd and strategic if the club are to move forward

Fulham fan Kris Balkin says the club’s planned summer overhaul has to be done with a coherent plan in place – or they are doomed to fail once more.

It’s over. It’s finally over.

This nightmarish, galling slog of a season has come to an end and the relief is palpable. Fulham can now go again, start over once more, hope and belief reinvigorated by the resetting of the Championship table.

But it’s not that simple, is it? We’ve been here before, quite a few times in fact – needing to rebuild after a particularly underwhelming year.

Last season, for example, we made huge waves in the transfer market, bringing in players of proven Championship calibre like Richard Stearman, Tom Cairney and Tim Ream.

We spoke of an astute summer of signings, strengthening our weakest areas with genuine talent, putting the hellish days of Felix Magath well behind us. There was a real, and quite reasonable, feeling that Fulham could have gone up this season.

And we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Stearman turned out to be a shadow of his former self, while the likes of Jamie O’Hara and Jazz Richards have put in some laughably poor performances over the course of this campaign.

Who is at fault here, though? On the face of it, the recruitment drive of last summer was sensible.

Stearman was a formidable player at Wolves, Ream a rock in Bolton’s defence, O’Hara the only good thing to come out of Blackpool in many a year. Moving for these players was, without doubt, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Yet it didn’t work out and this year we have to get it right. There is real ambition for this club at board level – no matter how questionable some of their decisions may be – with a 5,000-seat stadium expansion already underway. For it to be worthwhile, we need to be in the Premier League.

So the recruitment must be shrewd and strategic. This team doesn’t need uprooting completely – players like Ryan Fredericks, Ross McCormack and Cairney deserve to stay – but a number of signings clearly need to be made.

Just as important, the dead weight needs to go. Dan Burn has already announced his departure and more need to follow if we are to truly start afresh.

But most importantly, there needs to be some kind of plan in place. For a number of years now we have bounced between various styles of play, from the cuteness of Kit Symons’ original approach to the route-one tendencies that seem to come hand-in-hand with the presence of Matt Smith.

There is a middle ground to be found, of course, and there’s every chance Slavisa Jokanovic will be the one to exploit it. We need to be pretty but gritty, entertaining yet unyielding, and the Serbian’s Watford side showed that it can be done.

And this needs to be the foundation for the summer ahead. Sign players to fit into a philosophy, not just because they are good.

It seems so simple and yet we’ve been doing it wrong for so long.