Gregg Broughton has opened up about the “whirlwind” transfer window after becoming director of football at Rovers.

Broughton arrived at Ewood Park having previously held roles at Norwich City, Luton Town and more recently Bodo/Glimt in Norway.

He oversaw the signings of Callum Brittain, Tyler Morton, Dom Hyam, Sammie Szmodics, Clinton Mola and George Hirst.

“It was a bit of a whirlwind,” said Broughton. “Myself and Jon came in during the transfer window and it’s been a steep learning curve, a positive learning curve. It’s been a really good experience.

“The transfer window was a challenge, there is no point pretending that it wasn’t. I started here on June 6 and Jon was in place 10 days later.

“The club had done some really good work in the background to prepare, but it wasn’t preparing for what the style of play would be. It wasn’t a case of starting again, you can use some parts of it, but we did have to do a lot of work on it.

“We had the tragic situation with Karl [Newton], which was personally the toughest situation I’ve ever had to deal with in my time working in football.

“June was a really tough month, but we were very clear after that month that we had to bring six players into the building. Although we had 12 players leaving the building last season, two of those had already gone in January.

“There were only six who had played 900 minutes or more, so the key objectives were to replace those six players.”

It is still early in the season but there has already been success for Rovers’ Academy following the debuts of Ash Phillips and Adam Wharton, and Broughton says it was important to involve young talent in the squad.

He added: “We looked at what players we had in-house and had [Dilan] Markanday who had barely played due to injury.

“We had [Bradley] Dack, who had returned from injury, Ryan Hedges came into the club late, Jack Vale did brilliantly with the development qquad after returning on loan and also Hayden Carter, someone who had a really good loan period.

“That is without discussing any of the young players in the Academy, who we felt it was really important to involve them in the squad and see how far they got to.”

Hirst arrived on loan from Leicester before the window closed, having impressed during a spell at Portsmouth last season, scoring 15 goals in all competition for the Fratton Park club.

“We identified early on that George was one of the strikers we wanted to sign,” Broughton explained.

“The process works here where the recruitment team present their list to Jon and his coaches, Jon and his coaches can then add anybody to it. From there on, Jon can decide who’s target one, target two and target three.

“Up front, George was always the number one target there. The request went into Leicester City straight away regarding whether it could be a permanent or whether it could be a loan with a view to a permanent move.

“Leicester had their own challenges. We stressed that we wanted him in early but they have their own assessments to make. We had to be patient with George, we had to wait until the end and we got the centre forward in that we wanted right at the start of the window.

“Of the six players we signed, five of them were identified very early in July. Enquiries went into their clubs very early, but we have to respect that they weren’t our players at the time. If you want your number one targets then you have to be patient."

Rovers were also linked with Sepp van den Berg during the window before eventually bringing in Hyam and Mola from Coventry and Stuttgart respectively.

And Broughton admits the Liverpool defender came very close to a move to Ewood Park before he ended up at Schalke.

“There were some players at the end of June that we missed out on,” Broughton added. “We had the moving pieces with Sepp van den Berg and I think it was open knowledge that he was here, he did his medical, he did his interviews and photographs with the media team.

“There was then an injury crisis at Liverpool, they weren’t prepared to sign that off despite the fact everything was done at our end.

“As that came towards the end, Liverpool won 9-0 at home and we got the call to say that the deal could happen quite quickly. However, Schalke made a player sale to AC Milan overnight and things moved again.

“We weren’t prepared to wait for Sepp to make his mind up and we had to move quickly to bring both Dom and Clinton in after that.”