TONY PULIS has warned the days of Middlesbrough spending eight-figure fees on ready-made players are over – and says the club have to build their future on recruiting cut-price ‘rough diamonds’ who can then be sold on.

Pulis is planning a major overhaul in the January transfer window, but while he is determined to bring in two or three new attackers, he will not be breaking the bank to remodel his squad.

Since dropping out of the Premier League in 2017, Middlesbrough have continued to spend huge sums on players. More than £30m was splashed out to recruit Britt Assombalonga, Martin Braithwaite and Ashley Fletcher, but the trio have failed to make the impact that was anticipated and Pulis would ideally like to move them on. However, their price tag is making it extremely difficult to engineer their exit.

Instead of targeting similar players when the transfer window reopens, Pulis insists Boro have to be much cleverer with their recruitment policy. Signing the finished article is all well and good, but the Boro boss sees a much brighter future in identifying players at an earlier stage of development, and seeking to train them on.

“The aim of this club has to be that we get the best players before anyone else sees them as being the best players,” said Pulis, who takes his side to QPR this afternoon. “So we’re not buying them at £15m, £20m, £30m – we’re actually buying them at £1m or £200,000 or £300,000. We’re the first team that gets them for other clubs to come and buy them off us.

“That’s got to be the principle the recruitment people work on. It’s no good coming to me and saying, ‘Thierry Henry is a good player’ when he's at Monaco, because there’s no way in a million years we can afford Henry.

“I’m talking about (deals like) the lad (N’Golo) Kante, who went to Leicester. Everyone talked about him, Leicester did it and they sold him for a fortune. We need to be in that market where we’re finding them before everyone else.

“To do that is difficult, because we need to get up to the level that other clubs are at. They’re trawling those areas, and we need to trawl those areas too. We need to be a lot cleverer.”

To that end, Pulis has spent the last 12 months overhauling Boro’s recruitment system and scouting network.

The appointment of former FA chief Adrian Bevington to the role of head of recruitment in May was a key part of the restructure, and Pulis has widened the scope of Boro’s scouting research,

He was clearly unhappy with the backroom set-up he inherited – the academy’s previous reluctance to allow players to leave on loan was another major bugbear – and while he is happy with the progress that has been made since his appointment last December, he sees the reorganisation as a two or three-year project.

“What happens at football clubs is that there's almost little dynasties that are built out of nothing and those dynasties stay together,” he explained. “There’s got to be a point that everyone is trying to aim for.

“A lot of clubs I’ve been at, when I’ve first gone in there, you can’t say they’re a club because there are too many different factions doing their own things, not working for the club.

“It takes time to get people to understand we are all together, irrespective of whether it's a youth game, whether it's an Under-12s, I like to find out what's happening and what's going on. I like to know about recruitment, what they're doing and what they're not doing.

“We've set up a data system now, we've got different things in progress. We've got people working out in the fields a lot more diligently than they were before.

“But it takes time, it doesn't just happen overnight, it takes time. Hopefully, this is in place for a long time and the club will benefit.”

In the shorter term, Pulis is hoping to make progress with a couple of his targets before the window officially reopens on January 1.

He is desperate to add some pace and power in attack, admitting Adama Traore has still not been adequately replaced following his departure to Wolves in the summer.

“We’ve got feelers out, and we know what we want,” he said. “We’re trying to get the best we can possibly get, but if we can’t, we can’t.

“We hope one or two things might drop for us and we can push on. Everyone knows we're looking for a bit more in the forward line, more pace and power.

“We're working behind the scenes to get that sorted, but we need to be patient and lucky. If you look at team last year and what Adama did, the amount of home games where because of his sheer pace and unpredictability he opened doors. We need someone who can do that.”

Mo Besic is suspended for today’s game at Loftus Road, and Boro are also likely to be without Lewis Wing, who is struggling with a hamstring injury, and Dael Fry, who has missed some of this week’s training sessions because of a cold.

Middlesbrough (probable, 4-1-4-1): Randolph; Shotton, Ayala, Flint, Friend; Clayton; Downing, Saville, Howson, Tavernier; Hugill.