Gregg Broughton accepts there is an element of trust that needs to be regained with supporters after the January transfer window.

Rovers failed to sign a striker, and also to submit the necessary paperwork in time to land Lewis O’Brien on loan and Rochdale prospect Ethan Brierley on a permanent deal.

Broughton says it would be ‘too binary’ to associate those mistakes in January with Rovers missing out on the top six, and those were down to administrative errors, rather than failures of the recruitment team. 

Rovers’ player of the season, Dom Hyam, and Sam Szmodics who finished third, were two of six arrivals last summer, and at least that figure is being targeted again.

“Of course there is,” Broughton said of whether there was trust to regain.

“As a football club we were unable to deliver and made administrative errors that didn’t allow us to get two signings over the line on transfer deadline day. It would be naïve of me to look at that in any other way.

“We understand the reasons for that.

“What’s important is that if you look at the recruitment process of lining up Lewis O’Brien as one of those players, then the recruitment team have done all of the hard work, we’d had consistent communication with Nottingham Forest, knew it was going to be late in the window, then an administrative error let the process down.

“My job is to now say ‘how do we stop that from ever happening again?’

“When we were asked to trust the process because that’s how the club has always worked, in September or the summer window we didn’t see that stress because we didn’t do any business.

“I’ve now seen the stress, seen that didn’t work and it’s now down to me to say that I can’t now leave that process down to the business side of the football club, that has to come under our control, otherwise we do all of our work and then it collapses at that point.

“Ultimately I’m the one who’s responsible for transfers, that’s one of the major parts of my remit so I can’t now allow that to fall under someone else’s remit and for it not to work.

“We will much better placed to deal with that this summer.”

Rovers saw 12 players who featured in the 2021/22 season leave last summer, a combination of expiring contracts and loanees.

Ben Brereton, Daniel Ayala and Bradley Dack are the three senior players to have left this time around, alongside three loanees.

The emergence of more Academy graduates have helped ease the number of signings needed, but Broughton says there was also an understanding the club would have to be busy in the market.

He added: “I don’t think it’s a rebuild at all.

“We knew we would have to do a significant amount of business this summer.

“We always had in the back of our minds there could be alternatives for all of those players.

“We had to prepare for both scenarios and we are well prepared for that.”