How Portsmouth slow coaches transformed to become this summer's League One recruitment pace setters

Fast forward 12 months and seven new faces are present for this week’s return to pre-season training, all permanent recruits, some paid for.

It marks a substantial change of pace from the Blues, whose racing start to this summer’s transfer window consisted of seven signings in the opening 15 days.

Overseen by sporting director Rich Hughes, working in tandem with head of recruitment Phil Boardman and head coach John Mousinho, the early recruitment drive has been encouraging.

And for Andy Cullen, Pompey are now reaping the benefits of key structural changes behind the Fratton Park scenes.

The Blues’ chief executive told The News: ‘Sometimes the window unravels at different paces, it’s not necessarily a race to get everything done in your squad within the first couple of weeks. It doesn’t work like that.

‘But this season we wanted real clarity, doing things well in advance of the window opening, having focus on the structure now in place.

‘One of the things different from previous was that, when we got to the end of the season, we knew our players out of contract and what our position would be,

‘So we hadn't gone into May where offers had been made to a number of players and were waiting for decisions, as in previous years. That wasn’t the case this summer.

‘There were offers on the table for Ronan (Curtis) and Jay Mingi, but overall we were very clear as to what we were going to do.

‘In effect, that means you can move a lot faster and a lot quicker than waiting on a player who has not made his mind up about what he wants to do. That does affect your ability to bring somebody else in.

‘Some of the new players themselves said that, as we’d had that dialogue early, they could see the intent and commitment we were prepared to make to them.

‘The ability to act decisively has been important. In an ideal world, you want to go into pre-season with a squad in place – and we are in a good place.

‘The other key thing is the strategy we have always tried to articulate. We want to bring in a good core of young, emerging talent which are first-team ready.

‘In terms of some of the young talent we have brought in, the majority of them have already played a good number of games at first-team level already and are able to hit the ground running.’

So far Will Norris, Conor Shaughnessy, Christian Saydee, Terry Devlin, Anthony Scully, Ben Stevenson and Jack Sparkes have been signed this summer.

And Cullen has joined Hughes and Mousinho in declaring that business is still some way from being concluded.

He added: ‘We still have a lot of work to do and making good progress on other ones as well.

‘Hopefully, over the next couple of weeks, there will be more incomings to announce. It’s an encouraging start but we still have much to do.’