Are Stoke the team that smaller clubs with big ambitions should be aspiring to?
A team that has gone up and stayed there on the foundations of hard work, good management, stability and sensible spending.
Their owner is rich, but he's not one of these super-rich men that are buying other top clubs. He's a Stoke fan too, something that seems increasingly rare, i.e the club being owned by an affluent fan.
Looking at the team, there are quite a few cast-offs from other clubs in there along with a few higher profile signings in there. On paper, they should be fighting the drop, but because the work so well as a team, they are comfortably in mid-table and also in an FA cup final that gets them into Europe.
Apart from Pulis' controversial style of direct football, Is this the sort of model that Cortese wants to install at Southampton? When he and Markus arrived, he said that his ambition was to make Southampton self-financing in the Premier League. With the new contract given to Adkins, It would seem that Nigel is very much a part of that.
With bits of various models being used to rebuild Southampton, is Cortese on a mission to define how to build a successful football club? For a guy who doesn't know much about football, he certainly makes the right noises.
A team that has gone up and stayed there on the foundations of hard work, good management, stability and sensible spending.
Their owner is rich, but he's not one of these super-rich men that are buying other top clubs. He's a Stoke fan too, something that seems increasingly rare, i.e the club being owned by an affluent fan.
Looking at the team, there are quite a few cast-offs from other clubs in there along with a few higher profile signings in there. On paper, they should be fighting the drop, but because the work so well as a team, they are comfortably in mid-table and also in an FA cup final that gets them into Europe.
Apart from Pulis' controversial style of direct football, Is this the sort of model that Cortese wants to install at Southampton? When he and Markus arrived, he said that his ambition was to make Southampton self-financing in the Premier League. With the new contract given to Adkins, It would seem that Nigel is very much a part of that.
With bits of various models being used to rebuild Southampton, is Cortese on a mission to define how to build a successful football club? For a guy who doesn't know much about football, he certainly makes the right noises.
