To bring it back to the original question. Perhaps we are waiting on new owners. My opinion is that they better have deeper pockets where needed and a firm stance on players leaving when they choose to.
Older players, or lesser players. If we cleared out a couple rotation-level offerings to pare back the squad and allow for higher quality additions (or, in the case of midfield, make room for someone a little different than the other offerings), I doubt anyone would complain.
The difficulty is getting Saints to the position where players want to come want to stay. Even Liverpool have this problem, though to a much lesser degree than us! How do you get great players to get us to 4/5 in the league without the teams in 1,2,3rd place cherry-picking those very players with their CL prospectus and financial clout? I think that the answer is slowly and with great difficulty!
I think there is a consensus that is saying let's wait and see what happens in the summer. Are we going to be sold are we going to sell our best players? Yet another new manager possibly? I hope I have been wrong in my thinking, but analysing the last few years doesn't convince me differently. For me there has been nothing but negativity of late. Sadly that how I feel at the mo.
He only had a year left, so doesn't count unless you think it's ok to let someone go for nothing. Same as Pelle and Mane had two years left.
Circle Vicious You need to keep good players to be winning things. You need to be winning things to help keep good players Which comes first?
I think winning things is sometimes overrated when it comes to keeping players. League position is more important. As Arsene Wenger famously said, when you look to sign a player he doesn't ask if you've won the League Cup recently. He asks if you're in the Champions League. Why do we sell players? From what I've read on here and elsewhere it seems to be at least partly because we convince young players like Mane and Clyne (and Wanyama, Alderweireld and van Dijk?) to come here by effectively telling them to use us as a shop window or stepping stone. So to some extent it's a business model the board have chosen to use. How do you keep more players? Well it's not quite this simple but the short answer to keeping players is to pay higher wages. That's a big part of why Everton have been able to hang onto coveted players like Baines, Coleman, Deulofeu, Barkley, Lukaku etc and tend to get really big fees when they do sell (Lescott, Fellaini, Stones). I somewhat agree with Beddy. Something Les Reed said in his interview today caught my attention. He talked about how we have to be "the best of the rest" and finish top excluding the mega clubs. It's quite a different message to the interviews Cortese used to give where he said he was thinking about how the club could win the league and asking why we shouldn't aim to finish in the top 4.
Not that a contract means anything. Let's sign all are players on long contracts. Pay them a signing fee so that they sign then we can maximise the fee when we sell them two weeks later
The shop window argument is well tested and proven as a business model in football. The time to move forward from that model is when we actually win something, or qualify from the Champions League. Then we can hopefully convince our top players it's worth hanging around a bit longer. Saints have been somewhat a victim of our own success in the last couple of seasons in that we have reached the glass ceiling and become, as Les Reed put it, the "best of the rest" already. The next challenge is the hardest one yet faced, breaking through the glass ceiling. Do you not think that's where the ambition of the club lies, getting to that next level as a sustainably run club? Everything that's been achieved in the last 7 seasons has led us to this point, but the problem is that it's exponentially more difficult to get any further. So it has to be done slowly, by managing resources and building strength. The squad we have this season isn't strong enough, we know that, but if we don't have a major exodus this summer it could be next year or the year after that. If Les and Ralph and Katharina are around for the long haul they have to convince the players to stick around as well. If we can be among the "best of the rest" this year and maybe next year, they might just be able to do that.
I think the approach has changed. The public statements certainly have. Under Cortese the attitude at the top appeared to be "Let's make this happen now." while under the current leadership the attitude seems to be more along the lines of "Well yes we want to do that. Let's be realistic though, it's not going to happen right now, we just can't compete. Maybe at some point in the future." To be honest I don't think it's possible to get to that next level as a sustainably run club. I've said many times on here that big money needs to be spent for that to happen. Why do I believe that? To my knowledge nobody has ever progressed a football club in England so it consistently competes at the top level by carefully planning and managing resources. It certainly hasn't been done in the last 25 years and I don't believe the current board/ownership have created a masterplan to do it sustainably either. Les Reed effectively said today that they now aim to be best of the rest and perhaps take advantage when one or more of the bigger clubs has a poor season. Chelsea and Man City - the only two clubs in the last 25 years to have consistently broken into the top group of clubs - did so by spending huge sums of money and posted enormous losses for a period before turning their finances around (admittedly to differing extents - Man City have been better at this than Chelsea at least partly because they don't sack so many managers). Newcastle, Leeds and Blackburn achieved some short term success in the 90s by spending big money. Leicester are the one outlier but their success is increasingly looking like a one-off freak. We've basically been the "best of the rest" for the last three seasons and players still leave every summer. I don't see why being among the "best of the rest" for another couple of seasons will make players want to stay.
And quite a bit different than Reed's own messaging previous. He has spent the past three years telling the media that we're in year one of a five-year plan to make the top four, so it's a substantial change to say that we're aiming to be the 'best of the rest' (so, seventh most years).
Welll I'm glad we're trying to be a sustainably run club. If some don't like it, tough!! How many people really think we're going to be much else?
Would you consider our current actions to be in the pursuit of sustainability if, say, the club were sold in the next six months? Or might it suddenly seem like the club was working toward something else along the way?
Why of course, let's do the better option of not giving any new contracts, which gives an even better chance of keeping them #blueink
I'd consider that yes, but whilst still having their sustainability approach. Why does it have to be one or the other? Club philosophy is to be self sustaining as much as possible and run the club in a conservative manner. Meanwhile the owner says that she'd listen to the right offer from the right people and be preparing for that. Would you consider both can happen at the same time and in fact one approach compliments the other?
