City made their second signing of the January transfer window towards the end of the week. Once again, the new player was a striker, but if Fraizer Campbell was bought to, hopefully, get us promoted this spring, Rhys Healey is very much one for the future – you will probably have to be someone who watches us play at Development team and/or Academy Under 18 level to see him play for Cardiff City this season.
Although his first name suggests he is Welsh and it has been reported that is eligible to play for Wales, eighteen year old Rhys Healey was born in Manchester and I’ve not seen anything “official” to back up those Wales eligibility claims yet. He joined Connah Quay Nomads (as I’ll always know them despite their fairly recent name change to GAP Connah’s Quay) a couple of years ago and had trials at Manchester City and Stoke before breaking into their first team this season. In twelve starts for the North Wales side he scored twelve times and was named Corbett Sports Welsh Premier League Player of the month for November after scoring five times in that month including this hat trick against Llanelli.
City have paid an undisclosed fee (which I’ve seen reported as £50,000 including add on’s) for Healey and his former manager at Connah’s Quay Mark McGregor thinks he is good enough to make an impact at first team level within a year – time will tell, but it’s good to see us making this kind of signing and I look forward to watching how Rhys gets on over the coming weeks.
Our latest signing Rhys Healey – welcome to Cardiff Rhys and here’s hoping you have a long and successful career at the club.
There have been a couple of developments off the pitch as well. Firstly, former Chief Executive Alan Whiteley, who was replaced by Simon Lim in the autumn, has left the Board of Directors after being charged with fraud following a police investigation which went on for nearly two years. I’m not in any position to comment on the validity or otherwise of these charges, but Mr Whiteley had my sympathy in the summer after he was lumbered with the thankless task of trying to justify the unpopular change of kit and badge when he probably knew little more than your average supporter of the reasoning behind the decisions.
The other matter was the filing of the club’s accounts for the period year ending 31/5/12. If you want some explanation about the various figures, then this thread (especially the first post) on a City messageboard is well worth a read. With losses of £13 million plus (despite what I’m pretty sure are club record turnover figures), the accounts make for sobering reading and, given the level of spending on transfer fees and wages since the end of May, that debt figure is close to, if not past, the £100 million mark by now – given our current position, failure to go up now would be a real sickener in on field terms, but it would be even worse than that for the club off the field.
