The final curtain is still to come down on the 2001/02 season with three youth team games and the Player of the Year evening still to come but that hasn't stopped the names being thrown into the hat.
It looks certain that Paul Gascoigne has played his last game for us and sources close to the club suggest that David Johnson will more than likely be playing his football elsewhere following our failure to get into the Premiership but already new players are supposedly coming in.
Before we look at the names already linked it is worth taking a look back at this time last year. Only the day after our last match of the season we were linked with Bradford City's Robbie Blake but I dismissed it at the time as an unlikely signing.
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The 22 year-old Spring played in 42 of Luton's 46 league games this season scoring six goals. He is a midfielder who likes to get from box to box and is also good in the air standing 5ft 11ins.
He made his debut for The Hatters in September 1997 at the age of 17 coming on as a second half substitute for a player previously linked with the Clarets, Liam George. His next appearance, his first start, saw him sent off. He has since made 185 league appearances and still three months short of his 23rd birthday.
If some of the weekend press are to believed then we are set to sign Darlington's 24 year-old left back Paul Heckingbottom on a free transfer, a player not previously linked with the Clarets.
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He then joined Sunderland and stayed with the Mackems until being released at the end of the 1998/99 season but never played a first team game for them. During his time there he did spend time away on loan on three occasions with Scarborough the furthest one away.
In fact it was with Scarborough that he made his first Football League appearance in the 1997/98 season in a 3-1 home defeat against Peterborough United. He made 29 3rd Division appearances for them before returning to Roker Park and in the following season he was to have two more loan spells playing five league games for Hartlepool United and ten for Darlington. His first game for Hartlepool was also a home defeat against Peterborough, this time 2-1, but he scored the Hartlepool goal which was his first in league football.
Darlington must have been impressed though and offered him a contract in the summer and he joined them permanently just before the start of the following season, 1999/2000.
He has since played a further 106 league games for Darlington and has scored five goals for them. He has been a regular this season and like Matthew Spring has played in 42 of his club's 46 league games.
Needless to say there has been no official comment by Burnley regards either of the two players and that is how we would expect it. We haven't really been a club that has signed younger players from the lower divisions but maybe Spring and Heckingbottom could be set to change that