In a move that will surprise absolutely nobody at all, Spurs have announced that former Southampton Head of Recruitment has joined the club. His title has a slight addition, Head of Recruitment and Analysis, but I assume that he's going to be doing roughly the same job. Where does this leave our set up? Pochettino emphasised this week that he's not the manager, but the head coach. Baldini's the Technical Director, apparently. Ian Broomfield's our chief scout, I think. How does this all come together?
Add to that Freund is our head of youth recruitment. A logical way to look at it is like this: Freund scouts players for the academy Mitchell scouts Homegrown players Baldini scouts overseas players ...which pretty much guarantees that's not how it is set up.
I might think it works something likes this: Pochettino as Head Coach identifies positions he wants strengthening, and a combination of Mitchell and Baldini then scout and recommend players, perhaps the former with a focus on youth/domestic talent and the latter focusing on those overseas. They then bring back a shortlist of players to Pochettino who picks his names, who Baldini and Levy then try and sign. What will probably happen though is that a list of players is formed, at which point Levy steps in and signs someone completely different (but who plays in the right position, maybe, if they're lucky) but at a quarter of the price, so its fine. I thought Freund was now a Club Ambassador of sorts and was no longer so actively involved in recruitment? Although I could well be wrong.
I saw one report that said Mitchell in = Baldini out, on the same line of reasoning that had Levy deciding the Bale money buys were poor, and that from here on out we were going to build through youth. The great thing, of course, is that I have absolutely no idea to what extent either of those things are true, though the smart money would certainly hazard a considerable sum on "not 100%, and probably much less than that." Was it the Guardian who claimed Mitchell was our biggest acquisition? The idea is that Southampton seems best at building through youth, that this is the game everyone would rather play, and that therefore he’d provide us a huge edge down the road. Of course I hope they’re right, but you don’t know how much he produced the Southampton youth program and how much he was a passenger in it.
Welcome aboard Paul. Waiting for an insightful comment from sa1nts to let us know how **** Mitchell is and that they bid good riddance to him.
There were stories about Sevilla's DoF Monchi being approached as a Baldini replacement last month as well - which once again implies that Levy doesn't understand the DoF system, as the whole point is the DoF picks the manager they work with, rather than gets installed with a manager who is already there.
I still cling to the fact that Saints signings have been good for us before and hope that they will be again. Mitchell seems to know what to look for so let's give him a chance.
No he should be OK. Providing you see it as a long term plan and are patient. He sees the big picture and he will develop a sizeable team to support a cultural shift. But remember 'recruitment' and analysis' are two quite distinct roles. I think his (teams) real strength at Saints has been analysing opponents for upcoming games and giving the players and manager insights as to how you counter their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. If Poch has had a hand in getting Mitchell to you I think this is more the area that he wanted to strengthen to be honest. As for recruiting, its hard to imagine how he has had a hand in any of the good or bad signings since he has only been at the club since 2012. It was always believed thatCortese had a hand in the Mayuka, Osvaldo, Ramirez signings which have been less than spectacular. As for this summers signings, Tadic Pelle and Mane were very much Koeman signings but Mitchell claims they were already on our radar. Well he would say that, given he claims to havedata on virtually every professional player in the world.... So that leaves (of the good signings) Bertrand and Alderweireld - both loans - as well as Forster and Long. The suggestion is that some of our recent youngsters were also secured by Mitchell. We are talking here about kids in the 8-14 year age range so really too early to tell how that turns out! If you detect a feeling that we won't really miss him that is simply because we have spent many years developing an organisation around succession management - no one person in the club is indispensible. That philosophy was put to the test well and truly over the last year as we lost a good Chairman, a promising manager, five international first teamers and now a recruitment manager. In every department other than Paul's (where we are still to replace) the loss has been matched with a very clear upgrade. So I'm sure he will be good for you. He comes across as a genuine guy. The big question is whether Levy will be patient enough for the culture to change or will he demand 'instant success or be sacked'.
