Former Plymouth Argyle manager Wayne Rooney has commented on the transfer strategy employed by those at Home Park – and the one major defect that stopped him signing his preferred targets.

Almost six months on from his Plymouth sacking, Wayne Rooney has pinpointed the most significant flaw in the club’s transfer model. And it had a major hand in preventing the Manchester United legend from signing the players he may have wanted most.

Rooney, 39, arrived at Plymouth in May 2024 full of optimism and made a number of signing in the summer transfer window. Arguably the most prominent arrival was former Premier League striker Andre Gray, who signed from Saudi side Al-Riyadh in October on a three-month contract.

However, Rooney has opened up about the Pilgrims’ data-driven recruitment model and how it doesn’t account for certain traits he values highly. Specifically, he decried the data for its inability to assess a player’s constitution, something that may have helped the club stave off Championship relegation if it was in more abundance.

“At Plymouth, scouting was basically all data, which is good in certain ways, but not in other ways,” he said on The Overlap Fan Debate. “My big question that I had was that the data can give you an outline of a player, but what is the player’s character?

“What will he be like if you lose a couple of games? The data doesn’t give you that, but it gives you an outline – for your budget, it will give you the top 10 players for that budget and then I look through them all.”

Rooney was sacked by the club in late December after winning just five of his 25 games in charge. He was later replaced by Miron Muslic, who managed to take Plymouth within three points of survival and has said his side would have stayed up were he in charge from the beginning of the campaign.

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