I don't know. We will never know if all the players would have left if Nicola was still in charge. But don't forget he sold Ox when he was here, impossible to say whether the ones we sold would have stayed if he were in charge. Personally I think they would've left anyway.
Spoken by people that experienced the Academy first hand, that's very damning evidence of Reed and Hunter right there.
We don’t know how much pressure he was under from Katharina to sell Ox. And you can’t be sure the others would all have gone. At one point in Koeman’s second season we were 3rd in the league IIRC, if we had by some miracle qualified for the Champions League that would have been quite an incentive to stay.
True, but playing devils advocate slightly. We may never have been in that position if what you previously said is true. Poch would've stayed, we wouldn't have sold half the team and that Koeman era and team would never have happened. That is still the biggest **** up in our good times for me. Not buying a striker when we were 3rd in January, we really could've gone for the CL that season.
When Mané left for Liverpool he gave up the chance of Europa League for a purely domestic season at Anfield. It’s only money that motivates them.
Well you have kind of made my point really. If Poch had had more than a season and a half with the likes of Ox, Lallana, Jay Rod, etc., etc., who knows where we could have ended up? And Rickie may have had his best years behind him but what a leader and role model he would have been for the youth coming through.
But if they all stayed we might not have signed VVD, Mane, Tadic etc. People have said that Koeman had a more talented team than Poch did, so who knows what could have happened. Basically there are far too many variables to really have a discussion about it. I just think that Cortese or no Cortese when the likes of Liverpool start sniffing around a player at Saints that player will most likely want to go.
That mass exodus following Pochettino’s departure was unprecedented though. Surely very few Premier League clubs have sold so many players in one window?
Wasn't it Cortese who supposedley said to Shaw, I think it was, you can go next year if you give us a year (or something like that)? Wouldn't surprise me if he said that to a few of them.
True, but it was also pretty unheard of for a mid table team to have so many players the big clubs wanted. We sold 5 in the end I think (Lovren, Lallana, Lambert, Chambers and Shaw). I have no idea if another PL team that hasn't been relegated has sold as many starters in one window, I suspect not. If Poch stayed that might have convinced some of them to stay another year, but that is just guesswork. If Cortese was still here would the players have thrown their toys out the pram at not being allowed to go? I seem to recall there being talk that Ox's dad kicked off when he wasn't allowed to go to Arsenal and Cortese ended up selling him, so no reason to think that wouldn't happen again when Lallana/Lovren kicked off. There was also talk wasn't there that Cortese made an agreement with Shaw about leaving the following summer so he signed a pro deal and we could get as much money as we could for him?
All this is true, and as you say Magic, we wouldn’t have got Pelle, Tadic, VVD and Mane if they had all stayed. I suppose that begs a further question: why was Paul Mitchell allowed to leave? He was the one responsible for bringing all those players in, and we have missed him badly since he was poached by Spurs.
Which ever way you look at it..........since our benefactor died.........his legacy was not carried through. If left to Cortese I personally think it would have carried on. Sadly Kat was more worried about her money than the investment side. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out. All the bullshit about Goa and his big money Investment was all talk. Kat made a hefty profit but won’t be interested in putting in any investment (ie 10% from her if Goa was to invest heavily with 90%) Would you blame him for not putting in a big investment if he has to do it all?? Just so she can take 10% of any returns with nil investment. Hopefully someone has told her she will have to invest along with him and rekindle her fathers dream. So has a turn around started?????
I feel this is a red herring. At the time we sold Ox we were in League 1 and he was blatantly in a different class to the rest of the team. We sold him for something like three times the price of our record signing at the time. Simple economics says that no matter who the owner was, there was no way Saints could resist an offer for him. So to say "if only we had kept him" is just pointless - it was never going to happen, and I think that will always be the case for truly gifted players (we could arguably have held on to him for another year, but that would still have been 3 years away from Koeman's second season, so I don't think your argument holds). The more interesting case is when the academy produces less-gifted but nonetheless PL-capable players, like Surman, Lallana, Chambers, Targett, Stephens, JWP, Sims ... Building a team is all about making something that is more than the sum of its parts, and I firmly believe that all of the above could be integral parts of a successful PL team. However, by having too big a squad, they never get the time to play and gel into a team and the manager will always take the easy option of playing the bought-in player, who may be technically superior, but who does not necessarily gel either.
Markus saved us, but sadly wasn't here for long....it was Katharina who carried things through and probably had some hard decisions to make. And Cortese wasn't using his own money and was given the chance to stay....though with some restraints. Considering Katharina never set out to own a football club I think she tried to see it out as best she could. Markus was apparently not as rich as everyone thought and subsequently a large tax bill appeared because he visited Germany too often in his latter years. I'm not saying she did it out of philanthropy, but neither was she an uncaring owner. None of us know what Markus would have done in the long term and our best years were during his daughter's tenure.
My opinion of Kat will change for the worse if it turns out that she sold the club to a dud. She promised that she wouldn't sell us down the river but i'm not liking the noises that are coming out of Saints with the latest Krueger interview.
And Koeman passed up the chance to manage us in Europe. I'm still a bit surprised by that tbh. Perhaps he thought he had no chance competing after losing his best players.
