David Coates

Yeovil Town owner Prabhu Srinivasan has predicted a major turnover of players at Huish Park this summer saying that he expects manager Billy Rowley to begin with “almost a clean slate.”

The chairman said the club would release a list of the players it was seeking to retain “shortly” and said he will give the boss “a reasonably big budget” to rebuild for next season.

Following the conclusion of the National League Premier Division season, the Glovers have just six players under contract for next season – defenders Jake Wannell, Joy Mukena and Dan Ellison and forwards Luke McCormick, Ryan Jones and James Daly.

Speaking to BBC Somerset reporter Jack Killah on Wednesday, the owner said: “The good thing is we almost have a clean slate. We’ll give you the retention list shortly, but it’s almost a clean slate and we want to make sure we augment Billy’s requirements on the pitch with a reasonably big budget.

Last week, he revealed the club had already appointed a Sporting Director for next season, describing the appointee as someone “has operated at Football League level.” The identity of the individual is still unknown.

The owner said his “intent” was still to secure promotion back to the Football League and added that the ownership group would focus its attentions on-the-field rather than making buying back Huish Park and surrounding land its top priority. Last September, owners Somerset Council confirmed that it had extended the ownership group’s exclusive rights to buy-back the land by two years.

On the potential buy-back, Prabhu said: “I think the council’s been very accommodating and been an open book with us. We have a buy-back till May 2028 and we want to get the stadium back as soon as we can, but again we’re just doing the balancing act of where the money goes first. Right now the money has to go into building a team for the pitch.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, I would say about 7 in terms of being priority in our mind, but we have to do the balancing act. The things we have done from an infrastructure perspective, we got the floodlights put up, which is EFL standard. We’re getting an entire drainage system set up right now as we speak, which will be EFL standard. We’re also doing a lot of refurb within the stadium to make sure that it’s EFL ready. Some stuff like locker rooms and restrooms, we need to make sure it’s EFL ready.

“We will do a lot of investments, but again we have to balance the act of giving more player budget for Billy versus what we need to do for the infrastructure. We will do that balancing act, but yes, we will make some investments in the stadium. The big one is the drainage system.”

The owner also spoke about the “clean up operation” that had taken place both on and off-the-pitch at Huish Park since his Inflection Holdings group completed its takeover from former owner, Martin Hellier, last May. He described the strain on the club’s financial position as “fairly high” following the takeover, adding he now saw “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Having sacked manager Mark Cooper at the end of August, the club saw the coming and rapid going of Danny Webb, the short-lived appointment of Richard Dryden before the appointment of current boss Billy Rowley in November.

Prabhu said: “I can just say it was Operation Clean Up. Everybody understands inheritance tax and we’ve had to pay a lot of inheritance tax for buying this club. There were many skeletons in the cupboard, so we had to do a lot of clean up. I think we started breathing easy from November when we got Billy on board, but before that there was a lot of stuff which we needed to clean up in the back end.

“We were just reacting to situations rather than being proactive. I’ve said this before, we just stayed away from what we needed to do fundamentally because we had to do a lot of clean up. Which most people don’t see on the pitch, there’s a lot of work which happened on the back end. There were past debts, we had to deal with the players we had, we had to deal with the managers we had before, and it was not easy.”

“We had to take some really hard calls and I’m glad we took them and I’m glad I went and saw Billy where he was manager before (at Walton & Hersham). I had to see him on the pitch what he did with the team, and that’s what clicked for all of us, and I’m glad he came on board in November.”

Rowley took over a side sat 17th in the National League Premier Division and finished the campaign one position better off, but the owner insisted he had seen improvements.

He added: “Just go stats,  goals per game has gone up by 20%, which is fabulous, and what I liked about Billy when I went and saw him in Walton was that he’s got a high tempo transition tactic – he creates an orchestra on the pitch. About 50-60% of the time the ball was in our possession, we were not chasing the opposing team and we also managed to get about circa 20% more goals per game. The other thing is he managed to get all the dribbles completed, 70% of the dribbles were completed, but before Billy  that was not the case. You can see on the pitch there’s a proper orchestra, where we lacked might have been in the defence, which is something we’ll try and fix for next season.“