Coventry City manager Tony Mowbray has said he would rather be after players the club could sign than loan players.
Mowbray is busy looking at players for next season and he told the Coventry Telegraph: “We’re at that stage of the season where we are having recruitment meetings every day really.
“I have got lots of agents phoning about their players, asking if we would we be interested and there are some surprisingly good players.
“There are some that I don’t know about and who I need to study the videos but the early signs are encouraging.
“It’s the same as last year when we ended the season with not many players in contract - five or six - and we played through pre-season with a team of kids, not being able to score a goal until Armstrong and Murphy came late on.
“You have to be patient and wait for the right ones but if the right one comes along you have to take him.
“And I would rather try to get some players we can sign because I think I have fallen down the hole of loan players being our key players this year. And they were, and have been, and yet I can sense the difficulty for them as human beings to keep going so young and having a manager demanding of them all the time.
“When they are not this club’s player it feels like the foundations are not solid, if that makes sense.
“In an ideal world we find enough players so we have a nucleus that this time next year we are not saying we have five or six players under contract but 15 or 16 and we need to find another four or five and add some loans if needed.
“Ideally we’d find players who you want to give two year contracts with option years so there’s longevity of building.
"I think Walsall are a classic example of doing that with players over the last three or four years just about getting them to where they want to be rather than changing everything each summer and tossing a coin and seeing if you get it right next time.”
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