How Close Were We?

All Southampton fans, whether they blame the board, the media, or the players for this summer’s transfer activity, agree that an opportunity was lost.  We had a team that, if it had stayed together, could have progressed to the next level with the addition of a few high quality players.  But is this really true?    How many players did we need to add and could we possibly have signed the needed players?

To analyze this issue, I will once again be turning to Football Manager (FM).  I have already acknowledged the limitations of this approach, but it does provide the information I need to make judgments about the issue that are not purely subjective on my part.  In conducting this analysis, I will focus on the FM 2014 current ability (CA) of each player.  I will not pay much attention to potential ability (PA) because that is even more subjective.  I will assume that all of last year’s players would happily have stayed for this season without requiring a pay increase.

I have compared Southampton to three teams:  Everton, Arsenal, and Man City.  If Southampton was going to progress to another level, we needed to better Everton to get into Europe, better Arsenal to get into the Champions League, and better Man City to win the BPL.  I don’t think much beyond complexity would be added by looking at Man U, Liverpool, Tottenham, and Chelsea.

I have focused my comparison on the strongest first team using a 4-2-3-1 formation.  (We were unlikely to beat these teams with our superior depth, so our first team would have to be good.  However, all four teams have stronger benches than we do.)  I will compare our team at the end of last year, with the current teams because, after all, those are the teams we must beat.

Pos      Southampton            Everton                    Arsenal                      Man City

G         Baruc 142                 Howard 150             Szczensy 150            Hart 148

LB       Shaw 139                 Baines 160               Gibbs 145                  Clichy 148

CB       Lovren 150               Distin 160                Mertesacker 159       Kompany 171

CB       Fonte 130                 Jagielka 156             Koscielny 158           Demichelis 148

RB       Clyne 140                 Coleman 147            Debuchy 147            Zabaleta 160

CM      Wanyama 146          Barry 150                 Arteta 158                 Toure 176

CM      Schneiderlin 141      McCarthy 143          Ramsey 158          Fernandinho 155

AM      Lallana 152              Miralles 155             Ozil 171                    Silva 174

AM      Rodriguez 142         Pienaar 148              Cazorla 165               Nasri 162

AM      Rameriz 142            McGready 144         Walcott 159               Navas 160

ST        Lambert 142            Lukaku 151              Sanchez 162              Aguero 180

TOTAL           1566                      1664                        1732                         1782

Obviously, these numbers do not tell the whole story.  Shaw might have been a 139 in January but he has a lot of potential.  FM 2013 gives him a PA of 172.  Clyne and Lovren also have room for improvement.  But we are not the only team with potentially underrated players.  Certainly, Everton can make a similar claim.  Ross Barkley doesn’t even make their starting team because his CA is 139 and Lukaku and Coleman must also be viewed as having significant potential to improve.  On the other hand, Distin is getting pretty old and will probably be going down in CA.  But then again, so would Fonte, Boruc, and Lambert.

To catch Everton we need to add 98 points of CA.  How could we do that?  First, consider our actual summer signings. Tadic is a 146 so that adds four points.  Bertrand is a 140 so there is another point, but that eliminates Shaw’s potential from the equation so I will ignore Bertrand.  None of the other signings have a higher CA than the players they would replace from last year’s team.

Even if we look at our rumored signings, it doesn’t help much.  Marcos Rojo is a 139 which picks up 9 points on Fonte.  Javier Hernandez is a 156 which picks up 14 points on Lambert.  Put these three signings together and we are at 1593 and still looking for 71 points.  I don’t really see any realistic way that we could have signed the necessary players to get these points this summer.  We would have had to sign several world class or near world class players.  (If we signed Toure and Kompany it would have added 67 CA.)

Another way to look at the team involves some more subjective, but possibly realistic, judgments.  The plan to advance assumed that we wanted to retain Shaw, Lovren, Clyne, Schneiderlin, Wanyama, Lallana, and Rodriguez—because they were all going to improve significantly and/or were significantly underrated.  Let’s just pretend those two factors were worth ten points of CA each. That means we would have focused our need for improvement on G, CB, AM, and ST where we would have wanted to increase the total CA for those four positions by 28 points.  If we left goalie alone because we were not that far behind there and signed Rojo and Hernandez, we needed to sign an AM with a CA of 147.  Or we could simply assume that Rameriz would improve by 5 points.

I really do not think Rojo or Hernandez would have signed for us, but they might have if we kept the entire team together.  But it would have been pretty expensive.  It looks like Rojo is going to cost 20 million pounds.  Hernandez is, apparently, not wanted at ManU.  Maybe he would have cost only 15 million.  This means that to get to Everton’s level, using lots of favorable assumptions, we would have had to spend 35 million pounds.  This was doable, under Financial Fair Play and the Salary Cap, if Katharina Liebherr (KL) was willing to kick in the money.

However, we must recognize just how favorable my assumptions have been.  If Rameriz would not be good enough and if the other six players only improved an average of 7 CA instead of 10, we would be looking for 23 more points which would mean finding an AM with a CA of 167—someone between Cazorla and Ozil in value.  Cazorla cost 16.2 million two years ago, so someone like him would cost much more than that now.  Ozil cost 44 million pounds last year.  Very likely any such player would cost 35 million and I doubt KL was going to invest 70 million this summer.

Moreover, this would just be the start of the new five year plan.  To contend for the Champions League the very next year, we would have need to add another 70 points or so of CA—and all the favorable assumptions about the development of the players we already had would have had to remain true.  And, if we had qualified for the Europa League, we would have had to spend money adding depth as well.  Let’s compare our hypothetical 2015-2016 team to Arsenal and Man City.

Pos      Southampton               Arsenal                        Man City

G         Baruc 142                    Szczensy 150              Hart 148

LB       Shaw 149                    Gibbs 145                    Clichy 148

CB       Lovren 160                  Mertesacker 159          Kompany 171

CB       Rojo 139                     Koscielny 158             Demakelis 148

RB       Clyne 150                    Debuchy 147               Zabaleto 160

CM      Wanyama 156             Arteta 158                   Toure 176

CM      Schneiderlin 151         Ramsey 158                Fernandinho 155

AM      Lallana 162                 Ozil 171                      Silva 174

AM      Rodriguez 152            Cazorla 165                 Nasri 162

AM      Rameriz 147                Walcott 159                Navas 160

ST        Hernandez 156            Sanchez 162                Argueo 180

TOTAL           1664                            1732                            1782

We need 68 CA to catch Arsenal.  Probably we could expect more improvement from Shaw, Clyne, and Rojo but no one else was likely to improve very much. So we needed 50 to 60 more points of CA from new transfers.  In effect, we would have to replace three of our starting players with world class players. (If we signed Toure and Kompany that would be 57 CA—and a big mistake given their ages.)  This would likely require close to another 100 million of spending.  Even if KL wanted to kick in this money, we would be pushing the Financial Fair Play rules for the BPL, and very likely be wildly breaking the much more stringent FFP rules for UEFA.

Moreover, my analysis, so far, has ignored the salary cap.  We probably would have been fine this season, if our returning players didn’t ask for raises, but next season would be quite difficult.  We would probably have to sign 3 world class players and retain our old players (many of whom would need new contracts by now) for no more than 325K pounds a week.  Yet the type of world class players we would be signing would have each required a salary of at least 100K per week and, of course, many of our older players would be world class players now and want comparable pay.  A little bit of the increased payroll cost could have been covered by Europa TV income, increased commercial income, increased ticket sales for the Europa League games, and, maybe, increased ticket prices for all games, but it wouldn’t be enough. 

I will spare everyone an analysis of the impossibility of catching up to Man City in 2016-2017.  I think my point is clear.  We had an opportunity, with significantly more investment from KL, to push for Europe.  But it would have been expensive and virtually everything would have had to go right.  However, even if that worked, competing for the Champions League in the near future was just not feasible.  Moreover, if the push for Europe failed, we would have the increased expenses without any increased income to pay for them.  I think we all know where that can lead.

Instead, the only real hope for long term improvement was to do what we did this summer.  Sell some players for excessive profits and reinvest the profits on cheaper players of comparable quality.  Of course, it is an open question as to how well the Board has executed this strategy.  That determination will have to wait on events.