Southampton Hype

The biggest transfer story of the Summer is Southampton - a bunch of their players being picked up by some of the top clubs in the Premiership. At the time of writing, they've sold five of their better players for over £100m. And more may leave.

The question to ponder is whether this is a bad thing for Southampton (the prevailing view) or a rather good thing (my view)?

Historically fans of smaller clubs hate losing players, because it underlines their club's position as a feeder club to the bigger outfits. But in those terms, all clubs except the very biggest and best in the World are feeder clubs. When Real Madrid wanted Ronaldo there was little Man Utd could do to stop it. I doubt Southampton or their fans are very happy about losing so many of their players in so short a time - that is undoubtedly problematic, as it leads to a period of unsettled uncertainty and flux. Never the best thing in such a competitive league.

But modern football is modern football. The relationship between clubs and players has changed enormously in recent years. Running down contracts is a thing, and it just means that any well-run club simply cannot hang onto players and let their value run down without disastrous results. We're already at the point where most contracts for footballers outside of the big time are relatively short-term deals, and players simply flit from club to club looking for the best deal. The idea of a player sticking with a club throughout their career is becoming less and less common. I don't think fans or pundits have come to terms with the reality yet - that players move clubs a lot. These players used to get called mercenaries, but that description has died out now because it's simply become the norm.

I remain convinced that the best (and maybe only) way for any 'normal' club to succeed now is to sell their players at their highest value, and create or purchase replacements who are undervalued.

And there's little doubt in my mind that a number of Southampton players are at the peak of their value. Jaws dropped at the £33m paid for Luke Shaw at aged 18 - two solid if unspectacular seasons at left-back give little real indication to his valuation. Lovren's value has gone up 150% in the space of a season. £27m for Adam Lallana, who was playing in League One three years ago, is similarly surprising. Actually there's an odd theory with Lallana - if he is really worth £25m to Liverpool at 25, then he was probably worth even more than that to a top club at a younger age with more capacity to excel (as Shaw is at that price). But I'm not sure anybody really subscribes to that theory - the most likely and obvious truth is that Liverpool have paid well over the odds for Lallana, and full well know it!

One explanation for these high prices is the state of the transfer market in Britain. There is undoubtedly a lot of transfer money sloshing around, and prices have gone up as a result. But I don't think that is necessarily the primary factor here - after all there are still potential bargain signings coming in elsewhere in the league. But maybe the major difference is that the expanded list of big clubs battling for a Champions League place are, perhaps more now than ever before, desperate for proven quality over value. So while the 'normal' (ie not endlessly rich) clubs still need to operate in terms of value, those at the top are simply desperate to pay for 'quality', wherever that might seem to be guaranteed.

And there's something about the hype around Southampton that has created a sort of price bubble around their players. Something to do with the mystique of Pochettino as a progressive modern manager (though Southampton and many of their players were doing well enough before he came). Something to do with their early season form that made them the media darlings and designated surprise team of last season (even though their success was fleeting and they finished in mid-table just above Stoke). And something about the club's reputation as a hotbed for young talent, which has been building over years and is fed by the success of former youths like Walcott, Oxlade Chamberlain and Bale (who the club almost released at one point). I just think it's become the perfect storm where being a promising player at Southampton is suddenly enough to turn heads not just among the competition in mid-table, but from the biggest clubs in the land. And I also think this clamour for their players has been infectious, as if the big clubs are panicking over the pickings in the desperate assumption that they must get on board or risk missing out.

It sounds like I'm belittling the professional judgement of big clubs in Britain, but I'm really not. It's just that I think that clubs in the transfer market are considering imponderables in terms of ultimately valuing possible signings, and that this is a sign that they are more and more reliant on measures of short-term form than almost any other measure. It's all very well to search the World for technical ability, but at the end of the day the top British clubs are desperate for players who will hit the ground running and deliver in the first few weeks of their new seasons at their new clubs. As it happens I think that Shaw must be judged as a good player for Man Utd to have, whatever he cost them. Same with Lovren and Lallana for Liverpool.

What of Southampton? I would argue that if their plan was to produce players of great quality in demand at the highest level, then they are at worst a victim of that success. I speak as the fan of a club who would love for any of their squad to be considered worth £5m in the market, let alone £25m. I fail to see how this episode can be taken as anything other than a sign of the good health of Southampton and their methods. Their investment in their youth academy must already be in massive profit, with more to come. Their transfer strategy must be judged absolutely superb, with the few exceptions that are always to be expected. They seem like the current model for what a well-run club should be. Those predicting disaster in the wake of these sales seem to me wilfully oblivious to the reasons the players were worth that in the first place - isn't it more logical to expect that Southampton will repeat to at least some extent the process with new signings and new youth products.

I think their future looks extremely rosy. They have bought statistically the two best players from the Eredivisie, Pelle and Tadic, and in Koeman a respected player and manager with good experience of working in that arena. They've just loaned Bertrand who seems a very worthy short-and-maybe-long term replacement for Shaw. They still have Schneiderlin and Rodriguez among their prize assets, along with Fonte and Wanyama and Yoshida and others. And they may well have youth products to blood in the next season, of which Ward-Prowse is already a noted talent. As long as they don't syphon off the profits from their recent sales, they have many millions to reinvest in the squad in future, in the infrastructure of the club, to keep them healthy long into the future. Whether they can ever step up to the very top level is very debatable, but I can't think of another club in a better position to have a decent attempt over the next decade or so. And I'm in no doubt that they're in a better state to do that with £100m extra in their pocket.

Kevin Kampl - an elegant gem in the Austrian league

I watched Kevin Kampl play for Salzburg this week, and he's an incredibly impressive young player. The 23-year-old Slovenian plays with energy but also a swagger, looking eagerly for the ball in tight areas to take advantage of his incredible touch and composure under pressure. 2 assists in the match I saw against Rapid Vienna today, the second an exquisite little chip across tight from the byline that caught the entire defence by surprise.

He's strongly linked with Arsenal - I've seen some quotes where he talks about his dream of playing under Wenger. Fair enough, I can see how they're a great match. But how to go about valuing a talent like this - it feels like anything under £20m is a bargain, yet a club could pay that price and get a player who flits in and out of games. It's almost as if the player needs to exist for a season or two more at an intermediate club in preparation for being the real deal at the very top level.

There's little more pleasing though than watching a genuinely elegant player, who seems to find time in the tightest of spaces, plying his trade. I'll be watching a fair bit of Salzburg this season if he stays there. Actually I was fairly impressed with Rapid Vienna as well, with little of the financial clout of Salzburg but plenty of tidy ability in their side. It's always hard to rate leagues, and I usually use the English championship (a tough league I know really well) as a sort of measure of the level. Happy to say that on this evidence the Austrian league is somewhere above it in terms of quality, and looking at transfer records I see the Austrian game is (naturally I suppose) a common feeder for clubs in Germany. Maybe English clubs should be looking there more often as well, not just because of the quality but because of the value.

Loans and transfers...

Two bargain transfers this weekend have got me thinking about the loan system and whether it really works.

21-year-old Alfred Duncan joining Sampdoria from Inter Milan on a 2-year loan. Deals like this are very odd to me, because exactly what interest (other than financial) do Inter retain in a player who they've pretty much abandoned for the next two years? There's talk that Sampdoria have the option to buy along the way. I think the player is a raw talent with the sort of dynamic ability that reminds me a little of West Ham's Mo Diame. For the cost of a standard loan fee, and with the option to make the move permanent, I think it's a brilliant move for Sampdoria. It's hard to see a logical downside with this sort of deal.

Another 21 year old on the move that may prove a bargain is George Thorne's move to Derby from West Brom. Operating as the anchor man in midfield, Thorne seemed absolutely spotless last season on loan at Derby, and it just leaves me wondering about the loan system generally, and whether it ever suits the loaning club. What do West Brom want from loaning out the player if they're prepared to let him go after such a great loan spell? - his passing and performance stats over his 10 or so games are among the best in the championship last season.

I think the idea of a loan as being the chance for a club to give their young players playing experience is completely outdated. If anything, modern thinking seems to suggest that youths spend too much time on competitive football, and too little on the training pitch. And if clubs genuinely want a stake in developing their youngsters, they should make sure its their own coaches giving the guidance. No, the modern loan seems to me to happen to players that the bigger clubs just don't know what to do with - it's an admittance of defeat, rather than anything more positive I think.

It's happened at a much bigger scale at Chelsea in recent years. I think it's right they had well over 20 players on loan around Europe last season, including a bunch who would be in the first team at most clubs in Europe (Lukaku, Courtois, De Bruyne, Bertrand, Zouma etc). And it seems the same problem exists at that level - almost as soon as they're pushed out on loan, their actual prospects of ever playing for the first team are all but gone. Because if they genuinely had a shot they would never have been loaned in the first place. The absurdity of Chelsea's struggle for goals while one of the Premiership's star strikers (Lukaku) was on loan at Everton - what better evidence is there that 'something' isn't working.

I suppose the big clubs' excuse is that they are looking for players of the quality to take them forward, and that means a lot of misfires along the way. They don't want a Lukaku, they want a Drogba. They don't want a De Bruyne, they want a Messi. But it does mean that a huge bunch of players are meandering in their careers at bigger clubs that really don't know quite what to do with them. And that means rich pickings for absolutely everyone else.

The case against 'analysis'

From The Case For Less Sports by Ben Johnson

Sports are not — and probably should not be — about netting a championship trophy as the return on investment for optimally-leveraged resources. Nor should sports be about knowing more than your neighbor does about the footwork drills being run with aplomb by your team’s third-string quarterback, and hoarding that information in order to one day crush him in a dynasty fantasy league.
That’s not sports. That’s business. That’s WORK. Let’s stop working so hard, everybody. They’re just sports.

This seems to be a provocative call to bring discussion on sports back to a human level, in which I suppose we tell stories of the bravery and commitment of sportsmen to their craft, rather than considering the circumstances in which that craft was exploited by the controllers of the purse-strings for profit and success. Of course I think there's plenty of room for both, but then I would say that wouldn't I?

In football I've seen a similar case made by Danny Baker.

Anyone who takes football in any degree seriously and treats it like a science that we study – mainly the people who sit on sofas on mainstream television like [US Presidential monument] Mount Rushmore and pore over this stuff like Nostradamus like you can predict it, are wrong. It’s the same old thing. Football punditry is the most bogus science. 

You know, we [England] are not the best team in the world, but it is very hard to say consistently who is. Football’s chaos. If we played the World Cup again next week, we probably wouldn’t get the same results and we might do well. You cannot predict it.

I half-agree with both of these articles. I think the punditry on television is absolutely dreadful for the most part. But I'm not sure I particularly like the unanalytical approach that simply celebrates the fact that fans and players have met together in a place where sport happens to create amusing anecdotes for the likes of Danny Baker to recount later.

I think the reality is probably that the different approaches to looking at sport feed off one another. If the World were full of Danny Bakers we wouldn't need Danny Baker, and if the world were full of human stories about sportsmen then they'd stop being special. Baker is right that football is chaos, but that's part of the fun of trying to understand it.

Maybe the trick is not to forget that these are humans and human stories, and not to forget that football enthralls beyond our ability to solve it with science.

Why I think Enner Valencia is a bad signing

West Ham's latest acquisition, subject to work permit approval, is Enner Valencia the Ecuadorian forward who scored three goals in the World Cup this Summer. The fee is apparently around £10m rising to £14m based on appearnces, clauses etc. Here's the reasons I think it's a mistake at the price quoted.

- Short-term form bias. Valencia is clearly in the best form of his young life. The last six months have been incredible for him. But though it doesn't hurt his prospects, it doesn't necessarily follow that the rest of his career will be one long upwards curve. Regression to the mean is much more likely. Obviously you'd rather buy a player in form than out of it, but you pay a lot more for that privilege, and it's simply not a good enough indicator of future achievement.

- World Cup bias. The World Cup is notoriously bad for scouting players, simply because it can give off so many false positives. Valencia's brace against Honduras adds immensely to his reputation, but there are so many imponderables present in these International matches to really make a clear assessment. Logic dictates that while World cups can be useful for simply measuring things like effort, work-rate and pace, they are just not as useful for judging other aspects of performance like technique in tight situations, or under physical pressure, or at a different pace of play. Particularly in the heat of Brazil.

- The Mexican League. There have been some fantastic Mexican players in recent years - Guillermo Franco was one magician I saw first-hand in his declining years. But the record of measuring performance in the Mexican league in terms of the sort of talent it can deliver to Europe is very difficult to assess. Valencia's scoring record in the Mexican league (26 goals since the turn of the year) - what does it mean? How do we assess it? Maybe Allardyce and his scouts are Mexican league experts, but I have to reasonably doubt it. South America to the English leagues has very rarely been a smooth cultural journey, it seems to me, though much of that evidence is anecdotal. Admitting that we just don't know how a player like that would make the jump is fair.

- Buying at the top of a player's value. I think it's a fair assessment that Valencia will almost certainly never ever be worth more than he is right now.

- Valencia may not even be a striker. He wasn't considered one until this year. This could have both good and bad implications. It may mean he simply isn't naturally suited to the role, or it could mean that the new role has been the making of him. But I think it's something of a rarity for a winger/midfielder to suddenly become an effective striker. It's suspicious at face value.

- There's also the usual caveat that if this well known player, at the height of notoriety after the World Cup, was really worth the sort of figure West Ham have paid, then he'd be good enough for teams a lot better than West Ham. The price says that he really is a top player, but the reality is that he seems to have come to West Ham without much of a fight, with little genuine rumour of anyone else being interested. Again, this adds to my suspicion.

- One major fact - he was bought by Pacheco for less than £3m in January. Either they bought an absolutely outstanding player in what was one of the buys of the century, or he is overvalued at £14m.

- Then there's the Allardyce factor. A series of pacy, physically slight forwards have tried and failed at West Ham under his tenure - Baldock, Maynard, Vaz Te, Maiga, Petric, Borriello. Whether Valencia can break through seems unlikely, particularly as Allardyce has always favoured 4-5-1 and with his first choice very firmly Andy Carroll. And Valencia didn't play in a 4-5-1 at the World Cup - Ecuador played 4-4-2 in each match. My guess is that Allardyce will try to shoehorn Valencia in playing a wide role, and if this doesn't work Valencia may simply find himself festering on the bench.

The one factor that can positively affect all of this is if Valencia has been assessed, under some secret analysis that West Ham are privy to, to be a much much better player than anyone thinks. But West Ham's record of uncovering major untapped talent under the current regime has not even been patchy - it's been poor.

All of this is not to say that Valencia will be poor for West Ham - he may be great for the club. And it also doesn't mean that there isn't a price where a gamble on the player would have been a very worthwhile option. And as always, I'm ready to be proven wrong.

Newcastle's Progress

An interesting 12 months for Newcastle. Starting with media favourite Joe Kinnear joining the club as director of football. I think Kinnear is slightly underrated in terms of his managerial record which certainly deserves some respect, but I wonder why he was ever appointed - maybe just to be the eyes on the ground for owner Mike Ashley. He has been roundly criticised by fans and pundits alike for how little actually happened in terms of transfers, but maybe that was his remit all along. To do the dirty work of keeping costs down and keeping the staff honest. Newcastle actually had a pretty good season considering their problems in 12/13 - the French imports settled and mostly delivered.

Basically I think they've bought extremely well this Summer. Both Remy Cabella and Siem De Jong were very high up on my Summer Shortlist this year. Riviere wasn't but I don't really know why not, as I rate him as a very good prospect.

Cabella has the ability to potentially be a superstar at Newcastle imo. It will be very interesting to see how Montpellier can possibly cope without their 15-goal star player next season. I'm left scratching my head at quite how Newcastle were able to get him for £8 million - maybe it's because as a central attacking player he forces a team to build around him, which the bigger clubs simply can't commit to?

Siem De Jong seems less settled in a particular role - when I've seen him at Ajax he often looks like an attacking player who might well be a striker, but hasn't quite committed to the role as yet. Maybe that's his appeal, that he can play anywhere across the front and maybe in midfield, and still be a rugged, attacking threat. I'm not sure what he is yet, but I think he's very good.

I also like the signing of Riviere from Monaco, just announced at £6m ish. Riviere has the build and the pace of a potentially terrific striker, and maybe suffered from the sudden upturn in finances at Monaco in the same way that Sturridge suffered at Man City and Chelsea. Whether he will deliver on his potential is another matter, but given the state of the market £6m for a player with any sort of shot at the big time is very worthy business.

I just think quite simply that Newcastle have found value and quality with all three of these signings. They've also signed Colback on a free as a useful option in the engine room of the team, and have to tidy up after the loss of Debuchy to Arsenal. They're one of those teams in a weird position where fighting for Europe really isn't quite feasible, so safety and consolidation is really the only option. Keep making clever signings like this and they will keep creeping forwards as a club, and may well entertain more than a few on the way.

My Summer Shortlists

In a bid to understand the transfer market a bit better, I've been preparing a Summer shortlist of players for the past two Summers. It's basically a list of players that I suspect might be undervalued in the transfer market for whatever reason. In Summer 2013 I came up with a list of 50 players, and this Summer (2014) I expanded this year's list to around 200 names.

I am keeping the names on this list private - it's for me to learn, not a stick for critics to hit me with :). That said, I will reveal names on my lists as and when they're involved in transfers.

Note that these shortlists are not just a list of the best players I have seen - that would be fairly easy to prepare, and would contain what is basically a list of the usual suspects. Of course, were money no object any club could simply create a wishlist and then pick off those targets. But speaking as a West Ham fan, and as someone interested in how clubs build up their squad without an unlimited bankroll, I'm far more interested in value than I am in who the best players are (although the two are obviously connected in some ways).

What is value in football terms? I don't think there's any easy answer to that. A player may be available for cheaper than what would be perceived as their market rate, but if the market rate is open to question then the notion of value is going to be different to everyone. There are also times where notions of value change according to other considerations - if you need a keeper before the season starts next week, then you're more willing to overlook value just to get a body into the squad in time. English football is currently awash with talk of even tighter quotas of homegrown players, so the notion of value to English clubs of English players is completely out of step with other countries. I'd like to write more on value in the future.

So value, to me, is a bit of a moving target, and that's what makes it so fascinating to look at. But I do think 'market value' can be a different beast to what I think of as value - what the market values may or may not be correct. And I think a lot of transfer strategy is simply looking at the meta of market value and working out where your edge is in terms of exploiting it. For example, I think Newcastle United have decided that the market meta is undervaluing the French market, so they've gambled heavily in that area over the past few seasons.

What do I expect to get out of these lists of mine? Well I'm trying to learn what works and what doesn't when evaluating a player. But I'm also learning just as much about how I react to watching the sport - some players were on my list because of a few touches I saw of theirs as a sub, and others were based on watching many games over a longer period. I'm almost as interested in what you can learn about a player in a short time, as I am in what you learn over a long period. It may be that the more you know, the more you get influenced by false indicators of their worth or of their ability.

Ultimately what I'm trying to do is to improve my 'eye' for a player, the mysterious art or craft that is at the centre of many of football's biggest success stories. I'm also interested in how that deviates from what analytics can tell us about players, because I think that might be where the biggest edges lie in seperating true value from the market rates.

I'll be posting loads about these lists of mine, and how I think the market works, elsewhere on the blog I hope.