Stephen Robinson admits he faces a battle this summer to make St Mirren better on a budget.
The Buddies boss wants to improve his squad and identify replacements for six players who have left the club following an incredible season which saw Saints clinch a top-six finish for the first time in 38 years.
Richard Tait, Joe Shaughnessy, Charles Dunne, Curtis Main and loan stars Thierry Small and Tony Watt have all departed the SMiSA Stadium.
However, Robbo insists bringing in more quality will be a challenge as he tries to make the numbers add up – with a number of knockbacks already received.
Reflecting on Saints’ early summer transfer dealings, the gaffer said: "It’s not gone to plan so far.
“The problem we have is we’re trying to make a top-six side better on the same money – that’s really difficult. We’re trying to sign players who are under contract, not out of contract. We’re trying to sign players who are better than we have for the same money.
“Those players leaving are probably going on to double or treble their money. We have lots of irons in the fire, so to speak. We’ve had lots of refusals, we’ve had lots of bids turned down.
“But we know what we need to improve the squad. We’ll be working on that throughout the summer. I like to get my business done early but we haven’t quite got the signings in we want to so far. It’s still very early on, though.”
Meanwhile, Robinson is confident Saints will not suffer a Premiership top-six hangover next season after they finished the season without a victory in seven games – failing to win any of their five post-split fixtures.
He explained: “Results wise, we were 20 seconds from beating a Hearts team we shouldn’t be on the same level with and eight minutes from beating a Celtic team who have been all conquering all season. Performance wise has still been very good. We’ve come up short and we know that.
“We will freshen the squad up. We will bring four or five new players in.
“We will look back and analyse the whole season, we’ll analyse our away form. A lot of it is uncontrollable – we played six games with 10 men away from home. That doesn’t help.
“There are things we can’t control and there are things we can be better at. There are things we can control and improve on which we will do.
“There are a lot of things going on in the background to make sure things don’t happen and obviously you need luck along the way.”
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