Cape Town - Kaizer Chiefs coach Ernst Middendorp believes the squad as a collective will be competitive and won't be reliant on the four new signings.
Chiefs have brought in James Kotei, Samir Nurkovic, Kearyn Baccus and Lazarous Kambole ahead of 2019/20 with much expected from the quartet.
Kambole and Nurkovic featured on Saturday in the Carling Black Label Cup final but failed to trouble the scorers in the 2-0 defeat to Orlando Pirates.
Middendorp told reporters: "I've said it several critical times in preparing for this season, let's not go and talk about the new players. For us, of course, it's not mentioned very often, we have players like Itu Khune injured since January.
"There's no doubt Khune is the number one, he's so influential when organisation and leadership is needed. We have Erick Mathoho, I don't think I need to explain his value if he's at 100% level in terms of defensive work and if you have set-plays upfront.
"We have Rama [Maphlele] - we've seen it, even though he was with the national team, he was not really capable of coming back during the past four or five months to end the season [strongly].
"We have Lebogang Manyama, we have Happy [Mashiane] and some other players, Nkosi Ngcobo. These are for me and us the main priority, let's not talk about the new players but the main priority is to get these players to the maximum level of performance.
"So, we're talking about four to six players [coming back from injury], who will make up the starting XI, plus adding the players coming from outside, and this is what we followed up during the break."
Chiefs' first game of the Premiership campaign in 2019/20 is away to Highlands Park on Sunday.