Southampton’s slump: where has it all gone wrong for the Premier League’s model club?
“Sometimes you just need something to fly off somebody’s head, it flies past the keeper who can’t do anything about it and you’re off and running.”
Mark Hughes is convinced Southampton aren’t far off turning things around. They just need some good fortune, some decisions to fall their way, some momentum.
That is the stage that it has reached at St Mary’s. The Saints have gone from Premier League top-half regulars, Europa League competitors and EFL Cup runners-up to relegation fodder.
They head to Craven Cottage on Saturday to play bottom side Fulham in a perilous state, with a meagre eight points and a solitary win from 12 games.
The only reason the outlook isn’t even bleaker is the coincidence that three sides are worse off, with Southampton out of the relegation zone by virtue of a slightly better goal difference than newly-promoted Cardiff.
The trip to south west London may not be the worst thing for Southampton, considering they have managed only one league win at home in the last year and have beaten just Bournemouth, Everton, West Ham, West Brom and Watford in all competitions at St Mary’s in the last 19 months.
Lingering slump
Fulham have swapped Slavisa Jokanovic for a new manager in Claudio Ranieri after making an error-strewn start to the season despite a £100m outlay in the summer.
By contrast, having handed Hughes a three-year contract in May following a near miss with the drop last season, Southampton have instead made back-room alterations in a bid to arrest their lingering slump.
Vice-chairman Les Reed and technical director Martin Hunter were sacked earlier this month, with chairman Ralph Krueger saying the decision amounted to “constructive action” which would “provide new drive and direction”.
The club’s owner, Chinese businessman Gao Jisheng, who purchased an 80 per cent stake in August 2017, is said to be unimpressed and planning to take personal charge of the next managerial appointment should Hughes follow Reed and Hunter out of the door.
If Hughes were to be dismissed in the remainder of 2018 he would achieve an unwelcome distinction: the first Premier League manager to be sacked by separate clubs in the same year.
Model club
Their rise from the bottom of League One to the Premier League saw Southampton become synonymous with astute management, a thriving academy and canny recruitment. But gradually, over recent years, each of those facets has eroded.
Famously the Saints have sold scores of talent up the food chain and while the youth system which brought through the likes of Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale and Luke Shaw has not dried up, it has stopped producing such a high calibre of player.
Southampton have always backed themselves to identify new, undervalued players to make up for the high turnover, but it was never a sustainable strategy.
Players like Victor Wanyama, Sadio Mane and Dusan Tadic – themselves brought in to replace others – have since moved on and Saints’ magic touch, frequently credited to an in-house database called the “black box”, has deserted them.
That downgrading is evident in the management too. From the early successes of Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman, Saints quickly got bored of Claude Puel, despite an eighth-place finish and a close-run EFL Cup final, and veered into new tedium territory with Mauricio Pellegrino before landing on supposed safe pair of hands Hughes, who uttered the famous last words of “I don’t do relegation” in December while at previous club Stoke. They are now in the Championship.
Stay of execution
That spiral of decline leaves Southampton with a manager who arrived on a personal downward trajectory, a struggling squad filled with unconfident and over-promoted players and a restless hierarchy preparing to pull the trigger.
Saints once used to pride themselves on “The Southampton Way”, their supposedly unique identity, a different method of doing things, which is plastered all over their Staplewood training base.
Their current predicament, a result of years of poor decision-making, suggests that credo has long since faltered.
Last season Southampton waited until March, with eight games remaining, to press the panic button and sack Pellegrino.
Lose tomorrow and it’s unlikely Hughes will be afforded such a stay of execution; everything, even “The Southampton Way”, pales into insignificance to success on the pitch.