EFL Transfer Bulletin #23 - Broadhead to Wrexham, QPR get Kone, Boro's Dutch dribbler & more

The latest done deals in the EFL, and in focus: Richard Kone to QPR and its many angles.

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Richard Kone (ST) - [Wycombe Wanderers - QPR] - reported £2.75m rising to £5m

There are many angles here, so let’s touch on a few:

For Richard Kone: from the Essex Senior League to the Championship in the space of 20 months. It really is a tremendous story.

Like most modern football fairytales, there are some contextual aspects to the story that shatter the romantic illusion of a wrinkled old scout with a pipe and a notebook having a eureka moment on a dog walk in Dagenham. It was only a visa stipulation that stopped Kone from going professional earlier, rather than his going under the radar for years when playing for Athletic Newham. Many clubs were interested in signing him, most notably West Ham, but Wycombe were the ones that were able to sell him the pathway. It has worked well for both parties.

In Kone and Rumarn Burrell, QPR have signed one standout League One striker from the first half of last season and one from the second half of last season, and In order to fund these signings, they sold the League One Golden Boot winner: Charlie Kelman. We can predict regular comparison between the fortunes and goal returns of Kone and Kelman between QPR and Charlton fans, although Kelman as a striker profile is probably more comparable to Burrell.

Will both Kone and Burrell get up to speed quickly and adapt quickly to a higher level, providing what QPR need from their #9 between them? Or will QPR have to swallow a period of adaptation that could see them a little undercooked at the top of the pitch? Žan Celar may be off soon, and Michael Frey has seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.

For Wycombe, this is a record sale, beating the fee received for Anis Mehmeti. Between Kone, Mehmeti and Chris Forino, they have done incredibly well with signings from outside the professional game. This can hardly have been a surprise departure, so how have they succession-planned? In Daniel Udoh, they have a solid League One striker. In Bradley Fink, they have a project player with good Modern Striker attributes and an eye-catching youth career. Fink played nine minutes off the bench on opening day and hasn’t been in the subsequent two matchday squads. Don’t be surprised if they dip back into the striker market in the next two weeks, particularly if results don’t improve over the next three games.

Finally, Kone as a player. We like Kone a lot, but not as much as our friends at SCOUTED. SCOUTED produce some of the best, most consistent work in the industry, are fabulous human beings to boot, and paying for the work they produce feels like one of the best value subscriptions of its type. They’ve produced some incredible work profiling players - especially the ‘Power Forward’ profile - using data that’s rarely used in publicly available analysis.

And, guess what? SCOUTED love Richard Kone:

You can tell Richard Kone spent his developing years in the depths of non-league football because he can do everything: pound channels, be a target, hold up play, find others, drive with the ball, win headers, get all kinds of shots.

No heirs or graces—a proper centre-forward.

He is the antithesis of the academy-spec striker that can only do two things to a standard and relies on cookie-cutter moves to score goals. Kone has had to battle and scrap for everything, doing it against some of the hardest bastards you'll find. He is much better for it.

Finally, why is it a seemingly low fee? Given Kone’s reported valuation in January was closer to double this fee, Wycombe appear to have settled at a price lower than they had once demanded, when Kone was in peak form last season.

League One clubs seem to be struggling to command more than this sort of fee for their players, in the current market, but for all clubs at League One and League Two level, a sale of this size still does a lot for your Salary Cost Management Protocol figures, and therefore future wiggle room in the transfer market. Given Wycombe’s aggressive recruitment from within and outside the UK over the last three windows, a sale was likely necessary and planned for to some degree.

Are we surprised that other Championship clubs weren’t entering into the conversation, sparking a bidding war and driving the price higher? Frankly, yes. The likes of Middlesbrough spring to mind. Is there something about Kone that was putting clubs off the idea of going north of £5m? We don’t know. But we cannot wait to see how his QPR career plays out.

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Championship

Sontje Hansen (RW/LW) - [NEC Nijmegen - Middlesbrough] - Undisclosed (reported £3m)