This article is part of Football FanCast's Pundit View series, which provides opinion and analysis on recent quotes from journalists, pundits, players and managers...

This might not come as a big surprise if you’ve been following Birmingham closely.

Having sold Che Adams to Southampton in the summer, that put a lot of pressure on Lukas Jutkiewicz to be the club’s main goal-scorer this season.

They have tried to make up for that shortfall by investing in some attacking midfielders and strikers to play off him like Fran Villalba and Alvaro Gimenez, and promoted through a couple of academy in the form of Jude Bellingham and Odin Bailey.

However, the Blues still find themselves struggling, having failed to score more than two goals in a game throughout the season.

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What’s been said?

Those issues have made their way to the management at the club, as Birmingham Mail reporter Brian Dick is suggesting.

He's claimed that replacing the goals Che Adams scored last year is the club’s top priority going into January.

The journalist said on Friday:

"I know for a fact they're working on targets, they're having discussions already. It wouldn't surprise me bearing in mind what they did in the summer if they went to Spain to find a replacement for Che Adams but that isn't going to be cheap.

"The loan market is a possibility depending on where they are, if they're just outside the top six and they need a loan to fire them into a play-off position then that is an option. If they're struggling towards the lower end of the division then you're shopping in an entirely different market all together."

That makes the next few months crucial

Dick lays out the battle plans perfectly. It’s relatively straight forward when you think about it, but it just emphasises how important a good run-up to the window can be.

Birmingham cannot afford to go through the kind of slump they did before they played Middlesbrough or it is going to damage them not just for this season, but potentially for campaigns to come too.

Even if they don’t quite manage to get promoted, which given their expectations at the start of the season would be a bit of a miracle, bringing in high-quality players means they could start to put together a good core of players.

Resultantly, it might be something that can build the foundations of a squad to challenge for the next couple of seasons.

But as Dick says, it won't come cheap, so Birmingham may have to be strategic in the way they do things. Perhaps exploiting the loan market might be a better idea than searching for a permanent acquisition in Spain.