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Wanderers do not envisage another major rebuilding job this summer, regardless of what division they play in next season.
Ian Evatt is working on two separate plans for recruitment with a chase for a play-off spot still considered a viable target in the last 11 games.
The Whites go to Gillingham on Saturday looking to move closer to their top-six target but whether they are successful or not, Evatt believes there is now a structure in place which will avoid the need for wholesale changes.
Wanderers made nine signings in the summer and added seven new players in January – but the Bolton boss hopes the market will now be more stable, explaining why such a big turnover of players was a necessary evil.
“We won’t want to have to keep going window to window as we have been doing,” he told The Bolton News. “Every window can’t be like the one just gone.
“It has been needs must. I think sometimes we lose perspective and forget that at the start of last season in League Two, we had to recruit an entire new squad in the middle of a pandemic in a salary cap.
“A salary cap limits your expenditure, so for every Eoin Doyle and Antoni Sarcevic we signed, we had to also sign players that were a lot less value and a lot cheaper for us to come under the salary cap and they were becoming the understudies.
“We got promoted last season in a salary cap - people must remember that - we didn’t overspend, we spent what everybody else did.
“We then moved into this season and the salary cap was taken away, but fundamentally we still had the same squad that was built for last season.
“Some of those players, I believed, were not capable of getting us out of League One, hence why there has had to be a huge revolving door of players coming in and out.”
After the January reshuffle – which saw Doyle join Sarcevic in departing the UniBol – Evatt feels he now has a squad which is capable of challenging at the top end of the division.
“For me, the first 12, 13, 14 players at the start of the season were capable, but once we started getting injuries, the drop-off was huge and that was the effect of the salary cap last season,” he said.
“Now that’s been taken away we’re building stability and a squad which is capable of being competitive, regardless of injuries, suspensions, illness, Covid, to not have that drop-off and still maintain the standards of what we’re trying to set to get out of League One.
“That takes time, but we are well on the way of doing it, I believe.
“And that is why we recruited heavily in January - and this summer we won’t have so much to do.
“There are still bits and pieces where we need to maintain our forward thinking and add in some strength in depth not nearly as much as there has been.”
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