The last post I wrote about football was nearly three years ago, when I was bemoaning the lack of loyalty from badge-kissing players who’d recently signed long term contracts and promised to see their careers out with the club, before getting their heads turned just a few months later and basically going on strike to engineer a move.
In that post I held out the vain hope that Southampton would reach a stage where their best players, especially the academy products, weren’t sold off to the bigger clubs every summer. Since then Saints have continued selling key first team players at fairly big profits every summer, such as Schneiderlin, Clyne, Wanyama and Mane (although none of these came through the academy) and lost another manager in Koeman, who jumped ship to manage Everton last summer. At the time, I was pretty annoyed that he had also broken his promise on seeing out his contract.
Now, we are at a stage where, despite having had a season that more than half of the clubs in the league would consider a success, there are rumours that we might sack our manager this summer, rather than him moving on to a “bigger” club. There are the inevitable rumours of players leaving too (Van Dyke for £60 million?), but most of the talk is about whether well get in a new manager. I must admit that I was gutted when we sacked Nigel Adkins and brought in Pochettino, but that turned out to be an astute move in terms of the quality of the manager (if not his loyalty to the club). This time, I am not sure how I feel. If Saints are really aiming to do much better and get into the Champions League, I feel we need a better manager who can really inspire the players to reach a higher level. However, if we’re going to settle for being a top half team that is basically a feeder club to the richer and more prestigious clubs, with a business model that depends on us training up young players and selling them on at a profit, we seem to have a pretty safe pair of hands for that.
If we do get rid of Claude Puel, it will be very hard to expect any future manager to show us any loyalty, because if I were in their shoes and knew I was only a few results, or the odd missed penalty away from getting the sack, I’d be on the lookout for better opportunities too.
missedtrees 