Motivational Hockey Guy to The Rescue

Heeeeeeeeeeeere's Ralphy!!!!

If you write a blog about Saints and you wait for a quiet bit so you can catch up... it never arrives so here's where I've got to...

You would have been living under a rock not to know that Saints have been the main sory of the transfer window as Rickie Lambert, Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Calum Chambers, Jay Rodriguez and Morgan Schneiderlin have all walked out the door.  I say ‘walked out the door’ – of course we’ve been paid a fortune for them but regardless of that, it’s been a complete shocker.  What’s that you say?  Jay and Morgan haven’t gone yet!  Give it time…

I’m going to try and line up some theories as to why this has happened

It’s easy of course to blame the Southampton FC Board but whilst they haven’t done themselves any favours, they’re not to blame.  The Premier League is a horrific place if you are not one of the Big 5 and as has been discussed earlier, is set up purely to maintain the status quo and for the same teams to finish in the top 5 every year.  If you have the temerity to be a small club who does well then you will be completely pillaged for every decent player you have. Can you blame the Liverpool’s or Arsenal’s of this world though.  They have so much money to slosh around it makes sense for them to just throw £20 million at something rather than spend 10 years developing a player. It’s a lot less effort and of course, £20 million is nothing to these Champions League clubs. 

The Premier League could divert funds to clubs who develop English kids and play them in the first team.  They could do this without breaking any EU Employment law (I guess) and they could make it worthwhile to develop and pick English players, thus helping the national team but they choose not to as the big clubs wouldn’t like it.  How about taking half the money that’s on offer in prize money and distributing it pro-rata to the clubs who gave the most minutes to English players that they’ve developed.

Anyway, enough of dreaming, back to SFC....  Pick your favourite theory out of this lot.

Theory 1 – Limit of our ambition

Without spending shedloads of cash, we’re not going to able to attack the top 4.  We could (pre-departures) have brought in about 3 new quality players and maybe at a push challenged Everton, Spurs and a Suarez-free Liverpool for 5^th spot but we still would have been nowhere near the top 4.  Would the realisation that we weren’t going much higher cause all these players to independently walk out?

Theory 2 – Money & Tapping Up

Money talks as we all well know and despite there being rules against it – they’re unenforceable and it’s easy for a contracted player to get wind of what a new club would pay him per week.  On England duty for example – how hard would it be for Steven Gerrard to tell Adam Lallana that his salary would multiply by 5 if he signed for Liverpool.  How hard would it be to pass on a message that Brendan Rodgers was interested?  Could all the player have been tapped up and had their heads turned?  Ask yourself if you’d agitate for a move if you were told you would be offered five times your salary? 

Theory 3 - Club being sold

Are the Board under instruction from the Liebherr’s to sell as much as possible to recoup any losses so the club can be sold as a profit making concern?  The theory is that we sell all these players and replace them with cheaper players, stay up and look more attractive to an eternal investor as we’re debt free, relatively low wage bill and still in the Premier League.

Theory 4 – Cortese Booby Trap

There is no way that any Board would let 7 players leave without telling at least one of them that they weren’t going, no matter what they wanted or what was bid.  Having already raked in £90 million, the sale of Calum Chambers proved this.  Here’s a 19 year old who has played half a season, moving to Arsenal for £16 million quid.  We don’t need £16 million quid – we need the player.  He’s 19, he’s playing, he’s not going to play much for Arsenal, it doesn’t make sense.  Tell Arsenal to piss off, tell Chambers that he’s not moving and to get on with it.  He’s not going to go on strike so why not tell him to lump it.  So, we’re left with a pissed off player perhaps – so what.  It just seems that the Board have no choice in the matter whatsoever, that the white flag is raised.

When Luke Shaw was making headlines last year there was talk of him having a ‘Cortese’ clause in his contract.  It was assured that the clause wasn’t inserted but the details of it were that Shaw could walk away if Cortese wasn’t at the Club any more.  How odd.  How’s this for a theory that all of these players (except Lambert) had this clause in their contract.  If it is the case that there are these ‘Cortese’ clauses in the contracts then I wish they would come out and say so but it’s not the style of the Liebherr’s to do air the dirty laundry in public.  The players will know this so they can get away with throwing their toys out and know that they will get what they want.  The worse you behave just means that you only get a two line goodbye on the official club website but that’s it.  Do you think Lallana and Lovren care about that?  Probably not.

Theory 5 – Pochettino stirs the Pot

The players loved Pochettino – this much is beyond doubt.  What’s also beyond doubt is that he was always going to leave at the end of the season once Cortese had gone.  Is it possible that he told the players he was leaving as soon as he could and that they’d all be better off seeking pastures new?  I struggle to believe that all 7 players would independently decide that it was the right time for them to leave the club that had done so much for all of them.  It’s like there’s been some sort of pact. It’s fairly well known that Pochettino also did his fair share of stirring things up before he left and all the Board are guilty of is naivety in believing that he’d stay.  They fell for all his honourable man bullshit like I did.  He knew all the players were going to leave.

Theory 6 – The Saints Board thought the offers too Good to Turn Down

There is such a massive difference between the amount of money that the Champions League clubs have and the rest of the mere mortals.  Whatever amount we’ve spent developing a kid over 10 years is dwarfed by what the big boys can throw around. £20 or £30 million is nothing to them but purely as a business decision, it’s a fortune for clubs like us.  Also, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that you don’t have to spend £27million to replace Luke Shaw for example.  Looking at it purely as business decision – you have a commodity that you have spent a bit of money developing and someone offers you 50 times that to buy it.  You know you have more commodities coming along to replace it.

Theory 7 – The players were on ridiculous contracts.

Were all the players who signed contracts in the post-Markus era, incentivised by ridiculous contracts that got bigger every year at a faster rate than the club could afford?  Cortese ran the club on his own, with no accountability to the owners and was in effect, playing with someone elses money.  Maybe the incoming accountant Hans Hofstetter uncovered a financial ticking timebomb that we had to diffuse?

Theory 8 – We’re getting what we deserve

As football fans we want the best for a our club, be it a better manager or better players.  Careful what you wish for.  Nigel Adkins got fired and you couldn’t help but like Nigel.  Lovely guy who got us promoted twice and was turning it round in the Premier League but we fired him. Initial fan outrage soon subsided when it turned out that his replacement was decent and then it turns out that he’s s complete shit who led everyone on, stirred up problems and buggered off as soon as he could.  Then there’s the players.  We had players a couple of years ago who would never have left the club unless kicked out like Dean Hammond, Guly do Proado, Richard Chaplow and Danny Fox.  Maybe not the greatest footballers but fantastic blokes of good character.  We go up to the Premier League and replace them with the likes of Dejan Lovren, Dani Osvaldo, the new Morgan Schneiderlin, the new Adam Lallana who are absolute shits.  Maybe it’s karma.

Theory 9 – People actually believe the Daily Mail and the Ben Smith of the BBC

No, that one’s ridiculous.

There are probably elements of all of these in the reasoning behind the exodus but if I had to pick a couple of favourites then I’d go with 2) Money, 4) Cortese bomb, 5) Poch.  Oh and 7) Contracts and fuck it, probably all of them except the Daily Mail one which is of course, ludicrous.

Meanwhile, having written all that down, I don’t really give a shit any more as to why they left.  In the real world the following went down.

Calum Chambers signed for Arsenal and no sooner was the ink dry on that one then Morgan Schneiderlin and J-Rod were off to Spurs.  Morgan I expected by J-Rod?  Are you seriously telling me that we can’t even keep a player who’s only got one fucking leg?  Accidentally lose his medical records or lock him in the gym.  He can’t run away.  There’s the additional problem of it being Spurs and Pochettino who in my opinion, we should not be dealing with because a) it’s Spurs and b) he’s a bastard.

To our rescue, riding over the hill on a white charger…. It can’t be!!! It is!!! It’s Ralph Motivational Hockey Guy Krueger who will be interviewed in an hour.  Oh shit.  Let’s go to the pub until this has all blown over and then we can pick over the bones of the statement that the Southampton Super Soccer Saints are in rude health and we’re not a selling club.

Things had obviously been addressed though as he came out and categorically stated that Morgan and Jay were not being sold, even if they wanted to be.  He also addressed the sales that had taken place by saying they only happened at (cringe) premium prices.  If Ralph though that was going to settle everything down then he was sadly mistaken as Morgan became the latest hero to zero in 140 characters with a tweet that basically said that 6 years at a great club were DESTROYED in an hour.  Oh fuck off!  Did you honestly think that the club weren’t going to draw a line in the sand at some point and say ‘no more’.  If he was previously verbally promised a move by someone in the past then I can understand him being pissed off but situations change.  I think he’s been a victim of being away at the World Cup and not getting his move sorted out quicker.  From a football point of view, he’s a great player but we have more cover in the existing squad than we do for Dejan Lovren for example.  The Club should have allowed certain players to go based on football criteria, rather than saying “we’re going to let so many go, we don’t care who…. and then no more” which is what they appear to have done. Also, fan irritation had reached a height with the Chambers deal so it’s didn’t surprise me when Ralph reappeared at that point.  I still would not be surprised to see Morgan sold but whatever happens, it’s amusing that the fightback started when Spurs got involved. 

The shitstorm of course made us media fodder as we have been all summer.  It’s much more important to the nation to read about Saints selling players as opposed to the fucking dismal performance by England in the World Cup.  Ben Smith managed to get his head out of Cortese’s arse for long enough to write another long rambling diatribe of negativity about us, the best bit being that some bloke had pulled his 15 year old kid out of our Academy due to uncertainty at first team level.  Just hilarious how he’d not want for his son to stay here for 3 years and then maybe get sold to Manchester United for £30 million.  Tell us who he is so we can see how his career pans out?  Ben Smith of the BBC – you are full of agenda driven shit and probably a complete fucking liar.  Oh yes… and he said Lallana was popular…. Really! The two line exit statement suggests otherwise.  A proper journalist would maybe do a little digging and maybe try and find out what Cortese promised the players either verbally or n contract clauses but that would involve biting the arse that he feeds on so don’t expect Ben Smith to do that.

Never dull is it…