With Minamino out of the running I'd like us to take a look at Franck Honorat. Wide mid/fwd from Brest.
Well this makes for extremely painful reading. Of course, he’s not Premier League quality though is he? Was our worst bit of business in a long time selling him. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...e-summer-swoop-Fulham-star-Harrison-Reed.html
We let him go 18+ months into Ralph’s management here. It’s Ralph’s fault, simple as that. We sold Reed and bought in a replacement 2 or 3 years or so behind in terms of development. Massive f*ck up and it cost us very dearly.
I was one who wanted to give Reed a real chance, but I doubt Reed was terribly interested; by the time Ralph showed up, we'd left Reed languishing in the reserves for a long time, followed up by a couple years on loan. I'd imagine that he was much more interested in playing full-time somewhere than getting backup minutes with Saints by that point.
That’s totally hypothetical. We have no idea about that. He might have been more than content to fight for his place had Ralph given him encouragement. What we do know for certain, was that he was voted Fulham’s best player in their 19/20 promotion season. How and why did we ignore that? Ralph should have recognized his improvement and promised him more. That’s what a good manager does.
Again, though, what is that promise worth to Reed? On one hand, he has a club that has just made him an important part of their squad, and wants him to remain an important part of that squad in the Premier League. On the other, you have a club that has given him basically no chance in the preceding five years, but has suddenly decided that he's perhaps worthwhile. In Reed's shoes, which one is more appealing? I'm taking the former all day without even a second of hesitation.
And the club are just forced to sell? Of course not. Easily could have said ‘not for sale’. Reed has always been very professional and there is nothing to suggest that he would have kicked up a stink, especially if given more game time.
I mean, we could have declared him not for sale. That's seriously unlikely to endear us to him unless we made him a consistent starter, and his contract only had one year remaining, so we had no leverage whatsoever. He could use that playing time to establish himself, and then financially the best decision for him would be to walk on a free and get a much heftier pay packet. The time to play Reed was a couple years earlier; by the time we sold him, the die was cast.
No, its not Ralphs fault. He debuted under Pochettino for Pete's sake. That was in 2013, and its now 2021. The years in between that debut and Ralph taking over are why he ended up being sold. He was consistently overlooked and underdeveloped for years. I'm stoked for him that he has been given the chance and totally unsurprised that he's done well.
He would have re-signed if a little faith was put into him and he was promised game time. He wasn’t exactly a big enough name to go round turning down contract offers. If he’d been getting regular game-time by xmas he would have re-signed. He could even have asked for a clause to be put in if game time expectations weren’t met. We didn’t try hard enough to keep him - that’s The Southampton Way.
Be honest, were you one of the many posters on here last September who was saying Reed isn’t Premier League quality?
You seem incredibly certain about this on zero evidence whatsoever. We'd shown no faith in him previous, but if we said "totally, we'll play you, pay no mind to the contract offer from the team that actually did play you", he'd have re-signed while taking less money than he'd have gotten if he walked at the end of the year? You're basically assuming that Reed cared so much about a team that had done nothing but ignore him and farm him out on loan for the first half of his 20s that he'd set aside all rational self-interest to stay with us, and I just don't see it.
We developed him into a professional footballer. I’m sure he has at least some affinity to the club. But you’re right, we don’t know what he would have decided. We are both using hypothetical arguments now. I guess we just both believe what we believe.
We did develop him into a professional footballer, but between his PL debut at age 18 and when he was sold at age 25, we gave him a grand total of 16 Premier League appearances, including 73 minutes of action for the club in the preceding five years. Were I him, even if I had some affinity for the club, I'd find it very difficult to be convinced that I was badly wanted (rather than wanted to maximize my value as an asset), because I'd have seven years of data showing that I was not.
Not that I recall.. though that doesn't mean I didn't think his ship had sailed with us. So many years had gone by since he debuted. I do remember writing a blog post for the EPL broadcaster here in NZ about his debut season and great prospects going forward. Never realised sadly. I agree that we didn't try hard enough to keep him, I just think that it was over the span of several years rather than one. The question I ask now is would I have played Reed over Romeu or JWP last season? The honest answer to that is no. After 18 years under contract I think it was probably overdue of the club to sell him and let him move on. Good on Reed for making a go of it.
