Getting Relegated The Southampton Way

Semmens: This is Looking Dodgy
Solak: Where is My Money Going?
Kraft:  You Kept To Your Motto Rasmus
Ankersen: If It Isn't Broken, Consider Breaking It

For a club the size of Southampton, it literally only takes one bad season and you can go down.  This can be triggered by a bad transfer window, a few injuries, a bad managerial appointment or all of the above and much more besides.  Like we proved in 2004/05, it can also be impossible to just pin it on one or two things – sometimes it can be an endless number of things that cause the relegation and it’s just a colossal omnishambles from start to finish.  Such is the case with Southampton 2022/23.  I’ve tried to put these roughly in order but it’s difficult because they all overlap but it does paint a picture of a club acting like a bad gambler, chasing his losses with a succession of ever more desperate decisions.

Firstly, let’s deal with what has gone on before this season…

The lack of investment during Chairman Gao’s regime
This meant that basically the squad got weaker and weaker every season. If you stand still in football at Premier League level, you inevitably go backwards, and we did until he left. 

And then of course, the new owners…

Sport Republic getting very heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the football club
They of course, said they would never get involved too much, which is probably why they were chosen as the preferred owners.  So many senior staff leaving tells you that the Sport Republic way must be questioned massively.  The exiting staff can’t all be wrong.  Sport Republic have tried to do too much too quickly and it’s backfired massively.

So – to this season

Ralph Celebrates Getting Out

Ralph not being replaced in the summer
Ralph Hasenhuttl should have been replaced in the summer and not left hanging on until the World Cup. It was obvious at the tail end of last season that he didn’t have the energy for it anymore.  Sport Republic dithered and had a kind of “lets see how it goes” attitude, which is pathetic for top level sport.

The Summer transfer window
This window focused mainly on bringing young players with resale value and very little attention was given to what was actually needed to give us a functioning football team on the pitch.  Signing no striker of any pedigree was the biggest glaring omission but no one also faced up to the fact that our creative players just weren’t good enough.  Some players, like Joe Aribo, were signed seemingly because we could (the Joe Shields connection) rather than because it was what we needed. With Ralph still in charge and the playbook still being adhered to, we signed players like Aribo, who didn’t fit anywhere into the 4-2-2-2 formation.  Maybe he could have fitted into the 3-5-2 that Ralph was attempting to transition to…

Ralph’s Summer Reset
Ralph attempted to change his system in pre-season despite having proved over time that he was not really an effective coach with anything that wasn’t his trademark 4-2-2-2 high- pressing style.  Going to a 3-5-2 formation all seemed very last minute, even though it had been spectacularly unsuccessful at the end of the 2021/22 season.  Having played all pre-season with it, it was then abandoned after a game and a half of the season starting.

We let go the more experienced battle-hardened players.
This is hindsight of course but if Fraser Forster, our first-choice goalkeeper for the previous season, had been in goal this season then we would undoubtedly have been better.  Gavin Bazunu is promising but there is no way he should’ve remained in goal virtually all season.  Forster apparently was difficult, mainly because he wouldn’t accept being second choice behind McCarthy, a player who has virtually had an entire career being happy to be second choice.  Selling Oriol Romeu was calamitous.  Whilst it was good of us to respect his wishes to leave out of respect for his years of service, it took away so much.  Romeo Lavia had already got injured and like idiots, we believed Ainsley Maitland-Niles could fill the void that we already knew Ibrahima Diallo couldn’t fill.  This is one example of experienced players that we have not being good enough to pick up the slack of having youngsters in the team.

Ralph getting burnt out with the difficulty of being Saints manager.
Ralph Hasenhuttl – a Champions League experienced manager – lest we forget, needed replacing because he had no more miracles left, having kept us up with an ever-weakening squad. The playbook wasn’t working any more and he became too obsessed with our work against the ball and basically, got rid of the things we were previously good at.  Do you remember when the buzzword was ‘bravery’?  – well that all disappeared completely and all we heard about was ‘rest defence’.  When he was finally removed from his post, I thought that in time that people would realise what a good job he had done over the previous four years but I didn’t really think that it’d be so obvious, so quickly.

Calm Down and Look at My Metrics

Metrics vs Football Knowledge and Common Sense
Sport Republic and Rasmus Ankersen’s first chance to put their principles and philosophy in place in a really noticeable way, came when it was time to choose a new manager.  Solely trusting metrics rather than looking at the situation we found ourselves in and using conventional football wisdom (and common sense), was a complete disaster. Appointing Nathan Jones was the most ridiculous idea and the single biggest reason why we got relegated. The assertion from Rasmus Ankersen that stats built up in the Championship we’re going to translate to our Premier League team in the situation we were in, was laughable at the time and it’s laughable now.  Meeting Nathan Jones for 5 minutes would tell you that it was never going to work but metrics trumped everything.

The Wasted World Cup Break
You could tell after the first game after the World Cup break, the League Cup game against Lincoln, that Nathan Jones had completely wasted the World Cup break.  We had just two players away but nothing had changed and we looked no better in any aspect of the game.  Giving everyone two weeks off at the start of the break said it all.  Whoever signed off on that alone needs to be made accountable.

Beating Man City and Palace in the Cups
These wins kept Jones in a job too long.  They kept him there long enough to waste a very favourable run of fixtures after the wasted World Cup break, in which we won 1 and lost 6.  Losing to Brighton, Fulham, Forest, Villa, Brentford and Wolves.

Philosophy Changes and the January Window
The appointment of Nathan Jones diverged completely from what the still lauded SFC Playbook was all about.  In the January window, with no Head of Recruitment, Ankersen changed focus away from ‘players for the future’ and acknowledged we needed players for the here and now.  Paul Onuachu was obviously signed because he fitted Nathan Jones‘s style of play and we signed James Bree from Jones’ previous club.  We also signed two wingers in Sulemana and Orsic who didn’t fit Jones’ way of playing at all.  Of course, we sacked Jones soon after.  So much for the ‘aligned departments’ that Henrik Kraft talked about.  Also, despite saying that we wanted players for the here and now and we weren’t after young players for their development and resale, two of the players signed, Sulemana and Alcaraz, were raw 20 year olds.  . 

Key staff especially in recruitment, not being replaced in time
When you have no Head of Recruitment in place in time for transfer windows, it leaves you with Rasmus Ankersen overseeing recruitment.  When data and stats doesn’t work – what else has he got?  Who oversaw that the players being recruited were actually going to make us a better team or at least, fit in with the philosophy of the club or make us a better team in the short term.  See previous point. 

Allowing Nathan Jones to make decisions
Not recalling Nathan Tella in January on the say-so of Nathan Jones, is another classic decision. Instead of recalling him, we went out and signed Kamaldeen Sulemana and Mislav Orsic, neither of whom have performed any better than Tella would’ve done.  Not really a reason for relegation but another example of not thinking and not having departments aligned and as a result, wasting a load of money.

The Goalkeeper Situation
Bazunu is 20 years old and was beginning to badly struggle around Christmas.  In fairness, Nathan Jones would probably have brought McCarthy in but he got injured.  He still had Caballero but didn’t use him.  Bazunu just carried on losing confidence and that spread.  Dreadful mismanagement.

2 Wins in 14 Games

Sport Republic Still Trying to be Clever With Managerial Appointments
Having ballsed the appointment of Jones with his metrics, we then went with Selles, who had zero experience as a manager.  In everything he’s done in his career, results have been secondary to player improvement, yet here we were, with a manager with zero experience of ‘having’ to get results and signing players to make an immediate difference now as results were all that mattered.  Why does a Premier League team in the situation we were in, appoint someone like that and expect it to work?  Why are we as a Premier League club, taking a massive punt.  Selles still talks like he’s a development coach.  He’s been useless.  In some ways, Selles is actually worse than Nathan Jones.  Trying to be too clever when we can’t even manage the basics.  There’s a reason no one else does it… and it’s usually because it’s already been proven that it won’t work.

Managerial Appointments to End Up Worse Off
We sacked Ralph because his tactics weren’t working anymore. We then paid millions in compensation to Luton for Nathan Jones.  We then kept Nathan Jones too long because he won a couple of cup games and then we sacked him and had to pay off his contract. Then we appointed Ruben Selles who is mainly employing the tactics from the end of Ralph’s reign that weren’t working anymore.  Managers 2 and 3 have been completely useless and out of their depth but it has cost us millions to find that out and having two of your worst ever managers in the same season is never going to work out well.  More money down the drain to end up back worse than where we were.

Selles not using January signings
We signed players in January to fix the short-term goal scoring issue. The players brought in specifically for this purpose and for the now, were Mislav Orsic and Paul Onuachu. The latest manager has not played either of them, instead reverting to the tried and failed and repeating it until we ran out of games. Rasmus Ankersen was responsible for the recruitment in January so I find it very strange that the players brought in to solve the lack of goals have not been used, especially when we still aren’t scoring any goals.

The Selles Delusion Part 1 – Front Footed
Ruben Selles describes this as a front footed team. When the pressing is working on the opposition have the ball then you could argue that but when we’ve got the ball we are not a front footed team because we don’t know what to do and we just pass sideways and backwards which is not a definition of front footed that I would use.  How about making runs ahead of the ball?  Can’t possibly do that as we have the ‘rest defence’ to worry about.  Maybe if we attacked the crap sides, we might score some goals.  Just a thought.  If you delude yourself about what your team is, how are you going to correct it?

The Selles Delusion Part 2 - Over being in a relegation battle
Not just a Selles thing but a club thing.  A general lack of awareness of the situation that we are in. We have been battling relegation ever since Ralph got sacked. We don’t seem to have realised this at any point aside from Ankersen saying we were signing players for the here and now. Ruben Selles kept going on about trusting the process and the process clearly wasn’t working and the process was clearly not going to get us enough points to survive this season.   He kept going on about performances being good when we were losing every week and not scoring any goals.  Who are you trying to convince and what good will it do?  There was a point where I thought that Selles had actually been given a free pass to get us relegated and he was the man for the rebuild.  Selles lack of urgency about the situation has translated to the players who just don’t look that bothered, with a couple of exceptions.  After the Forest defeat, it was like everyone finally realised we were in trouble.

The Selles Delusion Part 3 – You Can’t Play Like Pep with Inferior Players
False 9’s, No Strikers, Full-Backs in midfield in possession etc.  All of these things are tactical innovations brought in at the top levels of the game, by elite managers like Pep, working with elite players.  That list of elite managers and players does not include Ruben Selles and Ainsley Maitland-Niles.

The Goalkeeper… Still
Selles persevered with Bazunu, who was shot by this stage, until we were virtually dead and buried.  Selles had seen every game this season and not deemed it worthy of rectifying.

Having no Bravery… Still
Selles continued the theme of playing risk averse football when we were playing fellow strugglers, even though he’d been there seeing this not work, all season and even though we were in ‘must win’ territory for virtually the whole of his tenure. So many times this season we have played teams around us or teams on rotten runs of form and who needed to be hit hard and early to give us the upper hand in again but instead of that we just passively let them grow into the game, score and win 1-0, with us doing nothing at all.

On a similar theme… Selles not interested in attacking
Occasionally we went in front in games and Selles response was always to try and defend the hell out of it for the second half.  He failed to realise that whilst our defence is not the weakest part of the team, if it is put under pressure for 45 minutes with no respite, it will crack.  We need to attack, keep the ball and have a goal threat to take the pressure off as much as anything.

and Generally…

My Suggestion For the SFC Playbook

The Playbook is out of date.
The playbook, which we have been not using under Ralph, using under Ralph, not using again under Jone and then using again under Selles - is all about high energy pressing and as we have seen, it can’t be maintained endlessly and eventually before there is a drop off because the energy level of the players drops off.  Experienced players seem to become weary of it.  If you take the departed Nathan Redmond as an example, he went from player of the season to a player that most fans couldn’t wait to get out the door over the course of Ralph’s reign and he cited on a couple of occasions how hard it was to do the pressing all the time. The whole thing needs adapting. Stuart Armstrong at 27 was probably fit enough to do it but it’s 31 he certainly isn’t, so that’s another underperforming senior player.  The playbook relies solely on winning the ball high up the pitch as your attacking weapon.  Once other teams negate that you have to have something else and we don’t have it. The playbook has to be adapted or binned as in the Championship you have to go out and win over half of your games. Just staying in games it’s not enough.  It needs to be possession based and playing with pace.

Really poor players
My definition of a good Premier League footballer is one who can put in 3 decent performances in a row in the Premier League.   Not a particularly high bar but one which a vast majority of our squad can’t reach.  Youngsters by definition are inconsistent, but who over the age of 23 can honestly say they can put in three decent performances in a row – KWP, JWP, Adams (just about), Bednarek (just about).  You can add Lavia and Charly Alcaraz to that list as well as youngsters who are good enough now.

That leaves the following experienced players who don’t cut it to varying degrees: Maitland-Niles, Stuart Armstrong, Lyanco, Salisu, Djenepo, Diallo, Caleta-Car, Adam Armstrong, McCarthy, Perraud, Orsic, Onuachu, Aribo, Elyounoussi, Walcott, Bree

And the following youngsters who aren’t quite there yet but may be in the future: Bazunu, ABK, Larios, Edozie, Sulemana, Mara

Lack of Leaders
As has been mentioned already, experienced players leaving has shorn the squad of important figures.  Not just Oriol Romeu and Fraser Forster but also to a lesser extent Jack Stephens and Nathan Redmond who were looked up to by the younger lads.  Every successful squad in history as a core of experienced senior players but Rasmus knew best and they weren’t suitably replaced.

Home Form
Two home wins all season.  You don’t stay up with two home wins all season.  You don’t sell many season tickets for next year either.  The atmosphere at St.Mary’s is dire as there is no belief from the fans at all due to about 3 years of being poor at home. 

Form Against the Other 12
Here’s the points we got against the teams not in the Super League 6 and Newcastle.  We have to pick up the majority of our points against these sides, especially at home, where we have picked up 5 points out of 36.  9 points out of 33 away from home (at time of writing) is better but still dreadful.

	Home	Away	Points
Brighton	Lost 1-3 Bazunu masterclass	Irrelevant as we were already relegated	0
Aston Villa	Lost 0-1 in the drone game. Drone was more exciting than our efforts	Lost 0-1 against a Steven Gerrard team who had lost previous 6.  Pathetic lack of intent from Ralph.	0
Brentford	Lost 0-2 pathetically	Lost 0-3 but worth it for Nathan Jones press conference	0
Fulham	Lost 0-2 pathetically to confirm relegation	Lost 1-2 conceding a basic set piece goal in the 90th minute.	0
Crystal Palace	Lost 0-2 when Selles picked Aribo to start and no striker.	Lost 0-1 and barely had a shot.	0
Wolves	Lost 1-2 against 10 men, having been 1-0 up.  Jones masterclass.	Lost 0-1 thanks to Che’s handball from six inches out	0
Bournemouth	Lost 0-1 pathetic surrender	Won 1-0 quite comfortably because Bournemouth were shocking.	3
West Ham	Drew 1-1 which was fortunate.  Perraud’s judo move not given as a penalty.	Lost 0-1 pathetically after international break where Selles came up with picking 11 defenders.	1
Nottingham Forest	Lost 0-1 in the worst game ever.  Jones should have been sacked that evening.	Lost 3-4 when we had a go but threw in 4 soft goals.	0
Everton	Lost 1-2 to a Frank Lampard team.	Won 2-1 because Lampard that day, was worse than Jones.	3
Leicester	Won 1-0 because Brendan Rodgers was clueless and Leicester’s forwards missed everything	Won 2-1 when Che was clinical.	6
Leeds United	Drew 2-2 when we abandoned 3 at the back for 20 minutes when we were 2-0 down.	Lost 0-1 and did nothing.  Pathetic Selles masterclass.	1

And Finally….This Years’ kits
This year‘s kits are all absolute honking and we deserved to get relegated for the away kit alone, which would have been more apt if it was in various shades of brown.  It’s some comfort that in the future, these will be known as the relegation disaster kits.  I am being facetious… as kits made no difference.

Summary
So, there’s not one overriding reason we got relegated (unless you count ‘dreadful results’ as a catch-all).  We’ve basically made every mistake in the book.  It wasn’t so long ago that we were the model club if you were of similar size to ourselves and of course, Brighton chairman Tony Bloom held us up as a shining light that he learned from.  For his sake I hope he stops taking notes from us, unless he wants a blueprint of how to wipe millions off of your turnover at a stroke.
 
In short, we totally deserve to get relegated and bring on the Championship!

PS...

An important thing to remember is that this is all written based largely on my opinion on events that I could actually see. There are of course things that happen behind the scenes that I was not aware of. In the aftermath of the game against Fulham, it became apparent that there was another reason to add to the list.

The general dropping of standards
James Ward-Prowse, our longest serving player and captain was interviewed after the Fulham game had squarely laid the blame on the fact that standards have dropped around the training ground. It’s another indication of how beaten down Ralph had become that he allowed this to happen.  It’s another indication of how useless Jones was because he didn’t recognise it and I’m sure that it wasn’t this way at his perfectly oiled machine at Luton Town. Selles with his extensive training ground experience, which is the only experience he had, has been there all season and didn’t recognise it either or do anything about it. You could argue why JWP was unable to do anything about it bearing in mind he is the captain. I guess though that if you lead by example and players choose not to follow your example, that is an indication of how rotten some of the apples in the barrel must be and it also points at recruitment and whether enough research was done into the character of some players.  I've certainly felt this season that some are here purely for the pay day and are not particularly interested in doing the work.