Raith Rovers: Stark's Park supremo John Sim reveals prospective new owners would target signing younger players

Thailand-based businessman Sim, who in recent months has been trying to sell a club which has lost an average of £150,000 a season since 2005, told Raith TV: "I know that the people coming in have very good football contacts, they have a system that they want to help us introduce at Raith.

"For an accountant it resonates because it’s about benchmarking, it's about stats.

"This is where it’s dangerous because you always have a tendancy to recruit people who think the way that you do.

"But for me Raith Rovers needs to have young hungry players and that’s very much their focus.

"And if you do have young hungry players you can have slightly more players, because the more experienced players command higher salaries, they’ve got mortgages, they’ve got wives, other things that have got to be taken into consideration.

"So we’ve had some perliminary discussions with the manager (Ian Murray) about what he’s looking at for next season. I will never hopefully be directly involved in selecting players but I think we’re going to be going for younger players going forward.”

The new Rovers investors – a group of Fife-based businessmen – have been locked in talks with Sim about the takeover since Rovers rejected a previous advance from Silverbear Capital Inc.

Silver Bear representatives discussed a potential takeover with Rovers in January, but Sim rejected it after Raith chairman Steven MacDonald fell out with Silver Bear mouthpiece Mike Dellios after branding him “unprofessional”.

"We’ve made a couple of false starts,” Kirkcaldy-born Sim, of accountancy firm PKF Thailand, added.

“But this time I’ve personally been far more involved in the process of getting to know these people.

"And we have made it quite clear to them that this is no slam dunk.

"Raith Rovers is different and it’s got tremendous potential but it’s like a train, it requires a lot of effort to get it moving.

"But once it’s moving it can really make progress.

“Hopefully they (the prospective new owners) can take the club to the next level.

"They’ve got very ambitious plans but of course plans need financing.

"So we’re looking at that.

"We’re looking at how we can work with the community foundation in terms of sharing facilities because they have schemes that they could run.

"Over the last three or four years we have been trying to improve our recruitment process.

"We have invested in the Catapult GPS system, bringing in a full-time sports scientist, full-time data analytics person.

"The encouraging thing talking to the people looking to support us and help us get to the next level is that they are very systematic, they have a system and hopefully we will be able to follow that system.”