Striker signs four year deal for Boro

Mark Viduka, Stuart Parnaby and Abel Xavier have already left the Riverside Stadium this summer, but Gibson is happy with the way the club is progressing under boss Gareth Southgate.

"When you're trying to bring players in, you have to know the market. We've wanted to replace players by bringing in the kind of players we were looking for, but it was something we couldn't do so easily in the past because we didn't have the knowledge.

"When I appointed Gareth Southgate, I knew that he would have to work with the squad we had from the previous season. He did that, in addition to bringing in players he knew - Robert Huth, Julio Arca and Jonathan Woodgate."

"That's £14-£15million in the past 12 months, which is a significant investment in the team. But we always felt that we needed to expand our ability to find and identify more players."

"That's why we've been setting up a recruitment system which is as good as anything outside of the top-four. We've done it very quietly and put people into positions they didn't expect 12 months ago."

"It means that we can come up with players that we might not have been able to identify in the past and we are in a position to continue to do that."