The path from Kasper Hogh to Andre Brooks may seem a circuitous one but it reflects both Norwich City’s changing needs and the game’s new financial landscape.
Philippe Clement is always a compelling listen but not many of his soundbites since taking over at Carrow Road hit quite as his striking winter transfer reveal.
Mo Toure was one recruitment file that came to fruition in the Belgian’s first window working in tandem with sporting director Ben Knapper. Bodo Glimt’s Kasper Hogh was another that did not.
Kasper who? Said no one with a modicum of knowledge, or interest, in the elite end of the European game around that time, after the Dane’s goalscoring burst saw off first Manchester City and then Atletico Madrid in Bodo’s surprise Champions League group stage passage.
Clement did not name the 25-year-old explicitly, when he spoke for the first time publicly on the club’s winter signing strategy, ahead of Blackburn’s early February league visit.
“First, to say, we have put the bar really high before this transfer window,” he said. “As a club, everybody aligned around that, and we were really, really close in signing a striker who wanted to come, but the situation changed, because his team was winning games that they were not expected to win, and the situation changed.
“So then at the end of the window we had to go for another profile, and Mo is more a younger profile with qualities for now, but also for sure, for the future. It was first the idea to bring somebody in with more experience. So that’s a little bit the story about the striker choice made during the window.”
When Clement was pressed whether Norwich City would go back in for a Hogh, or a similar grade of striker, he peered out of the Colney press room window at gloomy wintry skies and said words to the effect summer is a long time away.
How prophetic. But some further transfer-flavoured soundbites on the level of City’s ‘ambition’ – spoken towards the end of a campaign which handbraked dramatically from relegation fodder to the top 10 – appeared to be interpreted in some quarters as completing that unfinished striker business.
There were even the stirrings of a narrative on social media around ‘frustration’ and ‘broken promises’, prior to a multi-million pound Brooks deal announced well before the summer window had been open a fortnight.
To understand the pivot you have to grasp the context and the shifting plates around Clement’s squad in the intervening months.
Norwich were in deep waters in January, and Josh Sargent in the deep freeze as his transfer stand-off erupted amid a protracted eventual move to Toronto FC. City had the unproven Jovon Makama shouldering the burden, and leading the line in a relegation battle where goals were a crucial commodity.
The feeling internally was City needed an instant hit, a proven goalscorer to hit the ground running, even if that prolific reputation had been forged far away from the English Championship. See the Hogh pursuit in that light.
But Makama did respond, and when the baton passed to Toure the instant goal rush far exceeded even the most optimistic internal forecasts. Toure’s goalscoring debut came in that Rovers’ home win from the bench. He followed up at Oxford a few days later, with the first hat-trick from a Norwich league starter in five decades.
Either side of a muscular injury lay-off he finished with 12 goal contributions in 11 games, and led the line for Australia in their opening two World Cup games.
His club boss appeared to concur down the stretch last season that maybe the 22-year-old was a little bit better than ‘raw potential’.
With Toure and the Championship a pleasing fit, and now Makama due to be available for the new kick-off after his season-ending foot injury, the recruitment focus long since switched from Hogh or any other striker addition this coming summer. Especially if you add add Ante Crnac and Mathias Kvistgaarden to this equation.
The Dane was City’s headline grabber 12 months ago in the market, but his debut tour was a turbulent mix of injury and disruption from a change of head coach.
Hard to see a path for Kvistgaarden to become a frontline option when Clement has all his strikers fit and available. But even if there was a mutually beneficial exit – be it loan or a permanent – at the back end of this current window do no expect Norwich to return to the market.
The sense is they have the ammunition and the forwards in the building. Brooks was the missing piece of the attacking jigsaw. The type of aggressive, direct, dual-purpose profile down that right flank Clement appears to favour.
It is why he was so keen to get Papa Amadou Diallo fit for duty this pre-season, to supplement the craft of Ali Ahmed on the left.
Clement’s creativity was pushed to the limit on the run in with, at one point, even Kenny McLean deployed on the right of the attacking three, after similar experiments involving Matej Jurasek, Amankwah Forson and Liam Gibbs.
That explains the clear shift in priorities from mid-winter goals guarantees to a difference maker attuned to the needs of Clement’s preferred game management strategy.
But there is another entwined strand driving Norwich’s work, one rooted in the revised football governance rules around the newly-adopted Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) controls agreed by Championship clubs at the start of the window, and now in effective operation.
The scale of the Brooks’ signing marked a signal of intent sanctioned by Mark Attanasio and Norfolk Holdings but it should not overlook the post-parachute payment reality, or the imperative to increase revenue.
City’s spending on transfer and agent fees, wages and bonuses, is now tied to 85pc of their income, with any additional owner equity headroom capped and monitored independently.
Every transfer window under Knapper’s direction has been driven by the quest to balance squad improvement with healthy returns for City’s player trading strategy.
The hope and the expectation would be this summer does not require a significant player sale, in the manner you saw Gabby Sara or Borja Sainz depart. But that is not the same as saying City could go ‘Brooks-sized’ big again in the rest of this transfer window.
For now, there is alignment between the club’s football and financial strategy. But that stress-testing is constant, and as the climax of the January window proved, with emergency measures required to plug a defensive midfield hole, Norwich will need to retain the scope to be reactive as well as proactive.
Best not to rule out more forks in the road.