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Virtually all of Wanderers recruitment plans for next season are up in the air, admits Ian Evatt.
While different plans and budgets have been drawn up, depending on whether the Whites will be competing in the Championship or League One, the uncertainty means that even out-of-contract first team players do not know exactly where they stand.
MJ Williams, Josh Sheehan, Kieran Lee and Elias Kachunga are among the senior players who are not tied to the club beyond this summer.
And Evatt knows his task could soon be complicated further, as play-off football would extend the season by at least another fortnight into the summer.
“It is really hard and it is impossible, in fact, to firm anything up at the moment,” he told The Bolton News.
“There are a lot of things up in the air. We don’t know what division we are going to be in, and people may say that is slightly ambitious, but we are in a good position.
“You have to plan as best you can and for next season, if we don’t get promoted, then expectations will rise. We will want to be stronger again and we should be in a better position to be more competitive towards the top end of the table.
“Every window we go into we look at how we can improve the squad. There are always anomalies, there are always players who might want to leave, offers for those players, so we have to think again and adjust.
“We are doing whatever we can within reason. At the moment that isn’t easy because the Championship boundaries are up there and the League One boundaries are down here.
“The Championship even changes things with regard to not just recruiting from the UK – we can recruit from Europe, it opens up a whole new pond of talent.
“I have never met any club that get recruitment 100 per cent right but I would like to think that over the course of the last three years we have got more right than we have got wrong, and I’d hope that would continue.”
The opportunity to cast his net further into Europe and look for talent beyond UK shores is one that interests the Wanderers boss. But he says the philosophy he has stuck to over the last two-and-a-half years will not alter.
“Buying from abroad is something that will take time to get right,” he said. “I will say we try and limit risk as best we can. The owners’ money is always at risk to some extent when you sign a player but we try and reduce it as best we can.
“I would rather keep and save the money than rush into something.
“We don’t make instant decisions that come back to bite us on the backside but the variables at play here, not knowing 100 per cent what we are aiming at yet, make it a complicated job.
“We’ll do our best, we always do, but my focus even with those out of contract players is to win the next two games. That’s goal one, then we go for goal two.”
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