It's not 'If'' but 'How' can we win the league?

Found this brilliant Daily Mail article this morning http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...outhampton-masterplan-win-Premier-League.html

In the centre of a practice pitch at Southampton’s Marchwood training centre, Mauricio Pochettino is demanding that little bit extra from his players.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ he shouts with increasing cadence as Gaston Ramirez volleys into the net a cross from the improving left foot of Nathaniel Clyne during this high-tempo shooting exercise.
It’s an absorbing session to watch as James Ward-Prowse, a thoroughly charming individual, listens intently to the Southampton manager’s instructions. Pochettino speaks to him in perfect English.

The Saints are preparing for tomorrow’s clash at Chelsea and anticipation is filling the air. Defeat at Arsenal last weekend hurt this upwardly mobile team.
They had begun at the Emirates with six English players: Clyne, Luke Shaw, captain Adam Lallana, Jay Rodriguez, Rickie Lambert and Ward-Prowse. Chairman Nicola Cortese harbours an ambition to field 11.
This club has become the envy of English football, a beacon for promoting bright young talent and everyone wants to know the secrets of Southampton’s success.
On the sidelines a delegation from the Polish FA is watching Saints keeper Artur Boruc flinging himself across his goal to claw away crisp strikes from Lambert and Dani Osvaldo. There are no Cruyff-turns today.
Some of Southampton’s Under-21 development squad sneak around the corner like naughty schoolboys for a peak at the first team session.
Harrison Reed, a substitute at the Emirates last Saturday, is one of them. On January 1, a midfielder who has drawn comparisons to Paul Scholes will be promoted to the first team for good.

Furthest from his spying eyes, a few yards behind the goal of Kelvin Davis, an enormous Caterpillar digger is piling earth into an enormous heap. Soon enough this training hub will be transformed into a £30million football factory for the best young players in the country.
There will be 12 practice pitches of varying composition because Barclays Premier League clubs use different types of turf.
Arsenal, for example, use Desso GrassMaster, a hybrid system that has 20 million artificial grass fibres woven into the surface.
When Southampton play at the Emirates next season, they will switch training pitches in the build-up to the game and practise on their own Desso surface.
By then the temporary huts that overwhelm you with the reek of stale sweat, mud on boots and Louis Vuitton shower gel when you walk down the corridors will be gone.

They are to be replaced by a fabulous new structure at the edge of the New Forest that will be finished in time for the start of next season.
Inside there is the ‘Black Box’, a room where every game, every team and every player from the seven best leagues in Europe will be analysed by Southampton’s team of 26 technical staff. In time they will have the capacity to monitor leagues all over the world.
The refinement means they will never sign a player in a panic on transfer deadline day or splurge unnecessary cash to shore up their defence. Southampton’s searches are prolonged.
One of this season’s finds is Croatian central defender Dejan Lovren, a £7m steal from French club Lyon in the summer. After being alerted to Lovren’s potential, Southampton’s head of recruitment Paul Mitchell ran one of the most sophisticated background checks in the club’s history.
Lovren is already worth three times his fee, but Southampton are not a selling club.
The players love being at St Mary’s, a place where every member of staff and every WAG receives a birthday card signed by Cortese

In the corridors of power they still laugh about the baby boom among the playing staff that followed the firework party at St Mary’s when they won promotion from the Championship in 2012.
Cortese is behind the club’s transformation and this smart, sharp Italian is responsible for a culture that he has branded ‘The Southampton Way’.
He is not the tyrannical monster so often portrayed. In the refurbished offices at St Mary’s, which could easily be mistaken for a business class lounge at an airport or boutique hotel, Cortese plans for the future.
A video presentation, not surprisingly titled The Southampton Way, offers a fascinating insight into the aspirational culture of the club. There are videos of Barcelona pressing the opposition, sucking the life out of teams when they are without the ball and forcing them to make errors.
There are cutaways of Southampton’s Championship team playing a very different game, with players chasing after the ball like rabid dogs. The evolution of the team, from League One to the Premier League, is astonishing.
At the end of the film, a message runs across the foot of the screen asking not ‘if’ Southampton can win the Premier League, but ‘how’.
This is Cortese’s vision. To work at St Mary’s it’s immediately obvious that everyone must match his ambition and drive if they are to succeed in this environment.

The attention to detail is frightening. At Cortese’s insistence, every club car has just been fitted with winter tyres in anticipation of the chilly spell.
There is a modern-day corporate culture, with staff encouraged to mix in a break-out area and share a mid-morning coffee rather than sit at their desks and spill it all over their Macs.
On each desktop screen the club’s forthcoming fixtures are displayed, a reminder that every member of staff shares the same vision. Southampton’s players are thriving here.
Back in the main car park at the training ground, which will soon be dug up and turned into a goalkeepers’ practice area, a white van is being loaded with tailored mattresses to be taken to the team hotel in Kensington, London.
The players need a good night’s sleep and this neat idea, borrowed from the world of cycling, is a home comfort for Pochettino’s squad when they are travelling.

Yesterday afternoon a team of outfitters pulled out each hotel bed and used a high-powered hoover to swallow up every particle of dust in the players’ hotel rooms.
At the start of winter, when radiators are turned on for the first time in months, the air is thick with dust particles carrying germs and all manner of unhealthy bugs.
These small, but impressive, touches are appreciated by the players and they understand the benefits.
Each morning they are required to be at the training ground by 9.15am for a saliva and well-being test before training.
Each first team player answers a Q&A on an iPad relating to how they feel, how well they slept and whether they are fit and fresh.
Within 15 minutes the results of the tests are scanned, analysed and downloaded to Pochettino’s desktop computer. If they are dehydrated, or they try to beat the system, they don’t train.

Next season, the junior teams at Southampton’s academy will be presented with mini-iPads with a specially-designed Saints App to monitor their training progress.
It will measure their performance, fitness, skills, with notes from their coaches, as they progress through the Saints system.
On another level former Reading captain Graeme Murty is training with a group of young academy recruits. All of Southampton’s young players are looked after and even travel to the Under-21 development matches in the first team’s Starliner coach.
For a bus, it is beautiful. When the first team arrived at Old Trafford earlier in the season they pulled up alongside United’s team coach and Southampton’s players realised they had travelled in something more luxurious.
They responded with a performance that glistened, drawing 1-1 on a chilly October afternoon against the champions.
It was fine result, but there is undoubtedly much more to come.

 

First of all, without reading the article, I'm going to ask, how brilliant and Daily Mail can co-exist in the same sentence..? However, I'm nothing if not open minded. Even about The Fail. Now I'll read on...

 

You might be pleasantly surprised!

 

I wish they would stop giving all our 'secrets' away. Same when Sky got into cycling, they were doing groundbreaking stuff, but after only a couple of years everyone is at it.

 

Like you TSS, I am a bit staggered at that article. We really seem to be making all the right sort of headlines (Artur's gaffe apart) this season. And what a great thread title, thanks Morgan's Bit!

 

No problem.

 

Yes, I can certainly say I was very pleasantly surprised. Thanks for picking it out, Morgan's. A very nice early read.

Have to admit, the author didn't really miss a trick. I tend to hoover up any significant news about Saints, which is why I generally find transfer-out news so boring, because it has all been said a hundred times before and refuted time and again. But there was a lot in this article that was new, interesting and occasionally eye-poppingly exciting. Hats off to the sports section of the Daily Mail.

 

Oh, and just as an aside, what's happened to the "Like" buttons?

 

I know it's been said a hundred times, but what a great time this is to be a Saints fan.

 

I'm not sure that too many other teams will be copying us successfully, as this kind of thing needs commitment from the top if it's going to work.

I worked for IBM during the dotcom boom and it was hilarious watching the company pasting on little bits of other companies' ideas onto what we did, hoping that in some way the magic attached to them would cure the core ills of the company. Unless it's a real change mandated and supported from the top it falls by the wayside or has no effect.

I think we owe a staggering debt to NC's passion for detail combined with a vision that seems not to have any boundaries.

 

They were helping to cause the database errors, so the feature was removed. I think the Not606 forums are getting a little on the large size for the servers to accommodate it. I'm not criticising and it would be churlish to do so. It's free and this particular Saints forum is the best I've ever been involved in.

When pundits, authors and rival fans refer to Saints as a breath of fresh air, what they are really doing is complimenting NC. This is entirely his vision and he's implementing it in the most professional way I've ever come across. His attention to the little details is fantastic. I hope he doesn't wear himself out because I want him, his vision and his legacy to be around for donkey's years. And the best is yet to come.

 

A great read with details I hadn't heard before. What I find so cheering is that it is obviously a long term plan...even now, I keep thinking this is temporary and can't go on, but this shows that Nicola is in this for the long term and isn't going to get bored and move on to something else. We are being set up to be a major player in the future and not just a flash in the pan. We are going to have players clamouring to come here, but it won't be so easy to get in...they have to be the right player for Saints, just being talented won't be enough. Loving it!!

 

Yep, this one is worth breaking the Daily Mail rule for.

 

I've banged on about this in the past but "Soccernomics" is a good read on this subject. Not just for the interesting positive bits but for the attack on the way the majority of clubs are/were run. Players turning up for their first day of training at a new team not knowing where to go and not even having a locker for their gear; Ruud Gullitt (a real cosmopolitan) being dropped into a hotel in Slough when he moved here; clubs not having anyone to help foreign players settle (if you moved to Uruguay how much hope would you have of even arranging a mobile phone, let alone buying a house or finding a school for your kids)... the list goes on and on. Hard to believe that things like that were overlooked. Now these are old examples and I suspect that things might have moved on, but we're in the vanguard of looking after the details, thanks to the professionalism of the people involved.

As for people copying us, for example: getting together twelve different training pitches set up to resemble away grounds isn't the work of a weekend. By the time we've done it, we'll be on to the next improvement while others catch up. And so it'll go on.

Vin

 

It has been mentioned before that the players take newbies under their wings...Hooiveld is especially good at this. Nicola mentioned in an interview that other players help sort out cars and even finding a doctor for a player's wife. All helps a player to settle in and feel welcome rather than a rival for a position.

As an aside, Barry Sanchez is unimpressed on SaintsWeb. As he said, what good is a card for a WAG....really homed in on the crux of the article there, Barry

 

Very exciting article for a Saints fan and the attention to detail is astonishing.
That infamous DVD which Cortese plays must finish with not 'if' but 'how'

 

I am so glad that guy didn't heed our warnings and hanged himself with the amount of rope we gave him.

 

Never really read anything on Saintsweb before bar a few minutes before I stumbled on here. Not sure I'll be in a hurry to visit again. What a poisonous character this Barry Sanchez is. Not a single entirely positive post. Makes you wonder why they go to matches, doesn't it?

Vin

 

A fantastic read, proud to be a fan.
Can't go wrong with a chairman who strives for perfection and greatness for the entire club and staff not just himself

 

That's really just rather wonderful.