Huddersfield Town have little transfer room as director’s departure confession made

Martin Drury inherits a side that has seen eight departures from the squad since the end of the campaign

Huddersfield Town sporting director Chris Markham says “there will naturally be some evolution” in the playing squad this summer.

The Terriers are gearing up for a third consecutive campaign in League One, following their ninth-placed finish last season.

Town ended up eight points adrift of the play-off places, as they missed out on promotion to the Championship for a second time following their relegation from the second tier in 2024.

After overseeing the final seven games of the campaign in interim charge, the Terriers have appointed Martin Drury to the permanent head coach role, with Jon Stead as his assistant, after it was confirmed that Liam Manning would not be returning to the club.

Drury inherits a side that has seen eight departures from the squad since the end of the campaign. Mickel Miller was the only first-team player to be released by the club, while Ruben Roosken has been sold to Oxford United, and Rhys Healey has had his contract mutually terminated.

Meanwhile, loan quintet Josh Feeney, Will Alves, Cameron Humphreys, Ryan Hardie and Bobby Wales have returned to their parent clubs.

However, with Joe Taylor, Herbie Kane, Jacob Chapman and Tom Iorpenda coming back from their loans, the Terriers currently have 23 first-team players under contract for next season.

That leaves Town little room for manoeuvre unless further departures are sanctioned, and on the prospect of there being exits this summer, Markham said at Drury’s press conference unveiling: “I think that’s clear, just by the make-up of the squad, by the contract durations, and what we’re wanting to do to try and evolve it.

“It’s not something that needs tearing down, but it clearly needs I think some things adding, so there will naturally be some evolution, and that’s common across the game, so as well as working on the ins, there’s obviously going to be plenty of work trying to assign what we need to replace as well.”

Expanding on the upcoming transfer window, which opens on Monday June 15 and closes on September 1, Markham added: “I think obviously we know that it’s going to be a fluid summer, because of the nature of having to get the outs.

“You don’t know which outs they might be, you don’t know what transfer fees they might accrue, you don’t know what gaps might appear, and we’re sort of contingency planning for all those different outcomes, and we’re pretty well prepared and in a pretty good place I feel for that.

“I think probably as in keeping with some of the things that Martin has discussed around what we feel it needs to look like, it probably involves a slightly younger profile of players than maybe the last couple of windows, which would help with that athleticism.

“I certainly think around pre-season, some of the really successful stories that we had in the academy last year, with obviously their fantastic triumph at the end of the season, they’ll be in and around pre-season.

“There’s definitely a thing of being smarter, but everything again with the idea of ‘what can we do to win?’ All the conversations that I have, particularly with Kevin (Nagle), are all about winning.

“He deeply cares about winning, and every conversation I have with him, it is about that, and I’m sure some of the conversations he has with DTS (David Threlfall-Sykes) is about ‘what does the bottom line look like?’, of course it will be, but from our point of view, whenever I speak to Kevin, he’s only been very supportive around wanting to help Huddersfield Town win, I can’t stress that enough.”