On the final day of the 2015-16 season, Southampton beat Crystal Palace to finish
sixth in the Premier League. Their starting eleven featured some real quality, as did the bench.
The team have yet to better this finish. Ronald Koeman had inherited an excellent
side from Mauricio Pochettino, added Virgil van Dijk and Oriol Romeu,
and Saints saw only one defeat in their final ten Premier League games.
Indeed, from 2013/14 to 2016/17, the side finished 8th, 7th, 6th, and 8th,
having only returned to the Premier League in 2012.
A two-pronged strategy of promoting youth players to take first team places or be sold
for significant sums or find relative bargains who could be sold was working. Since 2017, though, the
club has struggled, with relegation scraps becoming a more regular occurrence.
So, what has gone wrong?
Southampton came a long way in a short time when Koeman led his side to that sixth place.
The club had nearly folded in 2009, but was rescued by Markus Liebherr.
The businessman died the following year but left Saints to his daughter, Katharina.
Between 2009 and 2014, the club was run by Nicola Cortese, a driven, divisive character
who brought in Pochettino. Recruitment was overseen between 2012 and 2014 by Paul Mitchell,
who went on to join Pochettino at Spurs. Les Reed, brought in from the FA,
oversaw a complete restructuring of the academy system and also influenced player transfers. Reed
drove the creation of Southampton’s famous Black Box, the data-driven analysis and recruitment hub.
This was the club’s golden period. Katharina left the club to Cortese and Reed. The academy had,
in the past, produced, among others, Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott, Calum Chambers,
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Luke Shaw, and James Ward-Prowse. Before Mitchell departed, he and
Reed oversaw one of the best transfer windows any small Premier League club has achieved.
In 2014/15, Saints brought in Sadio Mane, Shane Long, Dusan Tadic, Ryan Bertrand,
Fraser Forster, Graziano Pelle, and Toby Alderweireld on loan. It was a big outlay,
but it laid the foundations for Koeman’s success and the club recouped huge sums from later sales.
The next window saw Reed bring in Van Dijk and Oriol Romeu.
Although the loss of Pochettino and Mitchell to Spurs was a blow,
Reed had identified Koeman as a successor.
But in 2014, the seeds of Southampton’s decline had been sown. Although Cortese is still a
polarising figure among fans, his replacement Ralph Krueger is almost universally derided.
A former ice hockey coach, Krueger knew nothing of football when he became the club’s chairman
in 2014. Koeman’s appointment and the club’s recruitment held things together,
although the regular sale of its best players caused consternation.
Between 2014 and 2018, the club has consistently been forced to sell
to bigger teams. Academy product Luke Shaw and Morgan Schneiderlin left for Manchester United,
while the sale of players to Liverpool actually became a running joke,
with no fewer than six first team starters moving to Merseyside.
Such a turnover is always hard to deal with, but the club was also starting to lose its touch
in the market. While 2014/15 was a superb window, from 2016 onwards things have been
decidedly less successful. And this, in part, is because of the flux in managerial appointments.
Pochettino and Koeman had constructed squads capable of playing an intense,
vertical style, although Koeman did temper this slightly. But their successors Claude
Puel and Mauricio Pellegrino wanted a slower, more defensive approach, while Mark Hughes was
simply a firefighter. Puel recorded seven 0-0 draws in his one season in charge,
a club record, and while he made Saints hard to beat, he made them harder to watch.
The side still finished eighth and reached a cup final, but this change of styles
meant that recruitment became more confused. Too many managers in too short a space of time
means that there are difficulties in building a squad with a consistent footballing approach.
DId recruitment really got so much worse out of that shifting context? Southampton fans will
point to windows such at 2017/18, when players like Mario Lemina, Guido Carrillo, and Wesley
Hoedt were brought in, as a failure, but it can be hard for players to adapt to changes in coaching.
And Krueger’s lack of football knowledge meant that some signings were sanctioned by managers,
rather than Reed and Ross Wilson, Mitchell’s replacement, having as much of a say.
But, since 2016 the club has also recruited Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Danny Ings,
Stuart Armstrong, Kyle Walker-Peters, and Che Adams. It’s not a complete failure but stacked
against the cost of the players who didn’t, or haven’t yet, worked out, it is a decline.
Perhaps more significantly, the focus on the academy has dropped. James Ward-Prowse is the
last genuine success left at the club, although Jack Stephens has been decent. In addition,
the club haven’t sold a youth product for a good fee since Shaw, and also let Ben White
go. When Matt Crocker re-joined Southampton to become director of football operations in 2020,
he felt that “it looked as though there had been a neglect of some of the academy facilities…
some of [them] didn’t feel like high-performance environments to me”, he explained to The Athletic.
That both robs the club of a revenue stream and its identity. That’s one of the reasons
that Ralph Hasenhuttl has worked hard on his SFC playbook, while Crocker, the director of football,
has revitalised the academy set-up, changing the under 23s to a B side.
In 2017, Liebherr sold her majority stake to Chinese Lander Sports, owned by the Gao family.
Reed left, but it wasn’t until 2019 that things started to change significantly behind the scenes.
Hasenhuttl was already in the dugout, and Gao Jisheng appointed himself chairman,
getting rid of Krueger and Wilson, promoting Martin Semmens from within to become CEO.
Semmens brought back Crocker from the FA to oversee all football matters.
This leadership group, supplemented by new head of recruitment Martin Glover,
have also shifted their approach. They want to recruit top Championship talent and academy
prospects at bigger clubs. This had led to the signing of Adams, Adam Armstrong, Thierry Small,
Tino Livramento, and Dynel Simeu. Crocker has overseen significant investment in the club’s
training and academy facilities at Staplewood and had a hand in the SFC playbook with Hasenhuttel,
a list of principles and philosophies which outline Southampton’s club-wide vision.
Crocker’s resigning by Southampton is hugely significant: he led the academy
system from 2006 to 2013, when Shaw, Walcott, and others came through, before leaving to head
the FA’s pathway for youth international football from under 15s to under 20s.
But these things take time to come to fruition and clubs need stability. Crocker and Glover need time
to reshape the club’s playing staff and academy but Southampton must also avoid relegation,
or the mistakes of the past four years will haunt them for far longer.