I'm sure the board does an end of season review on how things went. Puel said his targets set when he joined were get out of the group stage of the Europa (he did, but not how they hoped ) and quarter final of a cup (he's exceeded that). Depending on whether we win the cup, the board will probably mark this season down as ok. If they raise the bar for next season, he should ask for more support.
It depends on the objective... If the objective is to win the Premiere League, or trophies in general, then you can't really say our transfer policy is working. However, it's not as bad as Leicester's - and they had more money to spend and more to lose this season than most. Also, Leicester did what they did last year with a transfer policy that was not designed to win the Premiere League. There are teams with limitless cash who have successfully invested to win the PL (e.g. Chelsea) There are also teams who have unsuccessfully invested to win the PL (Man City, Man Utd) I don't want to be a Stoke thanks, throwing money at people and not really seeing any more success than we have had recently (we have way more to cheer about than Stoke since we came up) So what is the objective? I genuinely think that the owners of Southampton FC don't see us as a club that is going to win, or compete to win the PL. I think they see us as a club that has to grow players (either youth or buying in 'potential') and sell them, and can achieve PL security with the odd foray into greatness. And I think I'm happy(ish) with that... It makes the great times sweeter, and it makes me feel like we earn whatever success we have, and we deserve it all the more because of that. The odds are stacked against us - but they always have been...
We know how hard it is to shift players (decent ones) in January. I suspect we did have two short term targets that we were confident we could get one of this window. Not unreasonably. We'll then likely have some longer term targets which we'll be able to move on in the summer, which weren't possible this window. Short term target A was Sakho. Unfortunately that got scuppered by Palace wading in with great wads off cash, that we wouldn't offer as it would have unsettled our long term squad members. So we moved to short term target B, Tasci, who was about to sign for us until he limped his way into his medical. It's a shame, but sometimes you get a run of bad luck and these things happen. Should we have had a short term plan C? Possibly, but then perhaps not if the only C people there were genuinely available were no real improvement on what we had.
You are probably right fats, no one knows either way. However mate would you not concede that they knew of Fontes unrest going back to last Summer? Also he is reputed to have put in a written request well before the transfer window. So surely you would have thought they would have been in touch with or at the very least been ready to step on the gas as soon as the window opened for his replacement? At the very least he should not have been allowed to depart until we had his replacement. Same thing regarding a forward.......the board Knew of the need surely they would have prepared well ahead of this window for all these players. Some teams have managed to bring in their targets with out too much hassle, why not us? What is it about Saints that seems to take a whole window to negotiate for single player. Is it because Les Reed seems to be the only one that can do it so his time is limited? More questions than answers but the board cocked up this time it seems as they seemed to not be really prepared?
True: do not disagree with your comment. Never a good time to get a replacement but we have come up empty handed. How do you feel about the current model of buy cheap and sell high?
I think it's served us well for the past 3 years or so. This season was always going to a difficult, transitional year, so I'm not too concerned about it. Next season will be the tester in my opinion - ask me then! We'll likely have a more settled side where many of our younger players with potential will have more experience in the league, will be older and know what the league is about.
Hi Archers: l think it doubtful that we will finish inside the top ten this season; we are not winning enough of those games against our equals or teams struggling nearer the bottom. That's were l would like us to be however. I think Champions League is probably not realistic; the big 4-6 can always buy out your players as we have seen. Maybe the influx of Chinese cash will enable us to pay higher wages and bonuses to keep talent and then have a tilt at the top four.
I'm not sure that it was the club's "policy" to sell the likes of Mane, Schneidelin, Shaw etc, it's just that we could not match the ambitions and demands of such players without upsetting the whole pay structure and as other clubs have found, even Everton, who are traditionally bigger and richer than us had to sell Stones. When a massive, rich club comes knocking, the best that you can hope to do is to get the best deal possible for yourselves. As far as recruitment goes, I think that we have bought some good players with potential and in cases of VVD and Romeu absolute bargains. I think that Boufal and PEH will turn out to be class too and Cedric is proving his worth this season. I don't think that we have signed any out and out flops recently, Martina was cheap (plus he was going until Pied got injured), Gardos has barely played and Clasie is solid enough. I would put this season's lower position down to a new manager finding his feet but I think that we will still be in the top ten in May, with a possible improvement next season with the same squad and a couple of additions.
Another factor is that we have had **** all luck with injuries this season, losing Austin was the biggest blow. Here is a pretty decent team when everybody is fit Forster Cedric Yoshida VVD Bertrand JWP Romeu Davis Gabbiadini Austin Boufal/Tadic McCarthy/Hassen Pied Stephens/Gardos PEH/ Clasie Rodriguez/Long Boufal/Tadic Sims/Hesketh/McQueen/Targett
My problem is with the short-term targets on offer. That it'd cost money to loan Sakho was never a surprise...Liverpool was going to want most/all of his wages subsidized and a loan fee paid. So we were effectively hoping that we'd reach the end of the window and Liverpool would change their tune for lack of other options, which is a risky proposition to begin with. Then, we have short-term option B, a player who has been missing for most of the year, managing just one appearance in over two and a half months. Finding out that he is injured is not really the shock of the century; injured is his default state. Neither of these were good plans come undone; they were stretches to begin with, after several months to plan.
There's a lot of fair debate about what we could/should have done better, but all in all I'd still take both our approach and the results of it over any of the other teams outside the big boy club. But that's just personal preference, for example I'm sure many would've liked us to beat Palace to Benteke, Townsend and Sakho as they were widely requested, I wouldn't want any of the three.
I remain of the opinion that last summer was a disaster. We went into the season without replacing pelle and short in AMC and CB ( and that was with Fonte). Towards the end of the window I said we were 4 players short of a squad to compete on a 2 games a week basis and nothing I have seen since including limping out of Europe has changed by mind. Now comes the jan window and we try and rectify the mess but we can't because it doesn't work like that in Jan. And to top it off we sold our main CB without getting in a replacement. How have the recent transfer windows gone? Unless you are a goalkeeper I would say they have gone "quite badly" Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk
This is hilarious. Ar the start of the season we were told to wait until at least January to judge our soending. We are now discussing it in February, after another window, and it is just reactionary tosh? Fantastic. At what point is our transfer policy going to become a valid discussion point? 2073? Some people here are spineless wonblers when it comes to critical comment...
This is going to sound like a broken record but I always compare ourselves with Sunderland. They get well over 40,000 every home game but have no money to buy players. When they do, they buy high and sell low. We buy young players at the start of their career, Sunderland buy old players at the end of their career. Sunderland have had one season where they finished 10th the rest have been relegation battles. I am old enough to remenber Saints being in that situation, getting old players looking to retire to the south coast. This season the transfers have been below par but that is because we set the bar high in previous years. Keep the faith.
Fair comment perhaps, but you would have thought we would learn from those lessons. Taking a month though just to recruit one player doesn't suggest we got off the starter blocks too quickly.
Point of order: Sunderland doesn't buy high, at least in recent years. Rather, they buy a lot of lowish-priced and extremely average players, and end up with an unwieldy squad full of mediocrities on 30-50k p/w, none of whom can be sold on for any great sum. Per Transfermarkt, they managed to spend £56m in '15/'16 with their biggest outlay being £10m...that takes effort. And they loaned several more in, while also having several more former first teamers farmed out on loan elsewhere. That's the danger you run into when you aren't willing to go for real quality to fill needs: you end up with three players at a position, none of whom actually fill the need. Then, you have to buy a fourth, while shunting one off at a loss to reduce the wage bill, and it keeps going.
We knew Jose was going and had over a month to find a replacement, and then when VvD got injured alarm bells should of been ringing even louder. Sorry we had more than enough time to find someone and that we even before Virgil got injured, nope the board have ****ed up yet again on this one.
The initial amount of money is not vast but what you end up with is a lot of money going on wages for players you cant shift, as you point out. Still prefer our way of doing business.
