Why I was not Afraid During This Past Transfer Window: A Pollyanna’s Story.

Why did some Southampton fans and players believe that the club was self-destructing when many others did not?

I can’t speak for other people but I formed my opinion based upon what I believed were the logical deductions to be drawn from the publically known facts.  I always knew I could be wrong, but I chose to believe what I thought were the higher probability explanations for what was happening and, I have to admit, what made me feel better.  It made me feel better both about my club and because my ability to figure out what I thought was going on made me feel clever.  I have to admit, I was not as clever as I would have liked because, along the way, I made several incorrect assumptions—the worst and most foolish is discussed here.  

Please understand that in explaining my analysis, I have organized my thoughts better in retrospect than I did at the time.  My conclusions came to me over a period of months, but at each stage in the process I remained optimistic.

In any case, as things started to look bad for Southampton this past several months, there were only a limited number of possibilities:

1)      The people running the club were incompetent.

2)      The people running the club were competent, but not perfect.

3)      The people running the club were perfect.

4)      Events were out of the control of the people running the club.

5)      The people running the club had a good plan that they were following.

6)      The people running the club had a bad plan that they were following.

7)      The club’s precarious financial position would force a fire sale of players.

8)      The owner wanted to get as much money out of the team as possible and would sell players to do it.

9)      The owner wanted to sell the club as soon as possible.

10)   The people running the club were generally honest.

11)   The people running the club were liars.

12)   The people running the club were working together as a team.

13)   Some people at the club were working at cross-purposes with other people at the club.

Obviously, what was going on had to be some combination of these possibilities.  The easiest possibilities for me to eliminate were options 1 and 3.  No one is perfect or close to it and but the evidence that the management of Southampton was competent was simply too strong for me to ignore.  There were just so many bad decisions that were not made.  They did not sell anyone in the January transfer window when there would have been good money to be made at the expense of the team’s on field performance.  The people speaking for the team were saying, for the most part, the right things—whether they meant them or not.  The once exception was Hans Hoffstetter’s statement:  “Whilst I perceive that we have inherited a difficult situation financially, there are now clear and structured plans in place to progress the club and avoid a similar situation from occurring again," That statement did not help, but it suggested there was a plan in place and I don’t think anyone would have referred to a massive sell off as “clear and structured plans in place to progress the club.”

In any case, I had settled on option 2 early on. 

The next significant event was Les Reed’s statement of 25 April 2014.   In my view that statement clearly established that number 13 on my list was true.  So much of what Mr. Reed said was inconsistent with what we were reading in the press that there had to be people with inside knowledge, even if it was only player agents, working against the interests of the team as a whole.  Since this is not a detective novel, I will just say that over the next month or so, I came to believe that Mauricio Pochettino was no longer fully working in the best interests of the club.  I think he led the board on.  He knew that he wanted to leave the club, but just in case he did not get a job offer he liked, he wanted to keep his options open.  Had he intended to stay, he would have signed a contract extension before the end of the season to quiet down all the transfer talk.   I believe the board was naïve in this process but, because of how it played out, I concluded that option 10 was true and that, once MP and certain players left, option 12 was no longer true.

There were also financial issues to be considered.  In fact, my first substantive post about Southampton FC occurred on the daily echo board on 25 April 2014.  It can be found here.   Although I made the same payroll error here I made three months later on my blog, my analysis otherwise remains correct.  As a result, I believed that  player sales might indicate an intent to take out profits, but they might not.

However, I ruled out option 7 because quite obviously the club’s finances were fine.  The combination of the big TV contract, the successful season, and the ability to sell any one of a half dozen players for a good profit that would cover any possible financial shortfall meant that there was no need for a fire sale.  If the previously published financial report did not make that clear, Mr. Reed’s statement did.

Despite Mr. Reed’s statement, significant player sales occurred.  However, they did not occur until the new fiscal year.  This was significant to me at the time, although in retrospect, it was less significant than I thought, but it weighed against any profit taking theory.

I went back and reread Mr. Reed's statement closely and I realized, it promised much less than what we might have believed at the time.  In addition to the naivete about MP, the statement seemed to assume that other teams would not contact our players or their agents without the club’s permission.  I think they did. Or maybe the players, having been told that Southampton was a sinking ship, initiated the contacts themselves.  As a result, I think the board’s hand was forced and sales had to occur.  However,  the prices obtained were outstanding strengthening my belief in option 2.  Further, the sales were evidence that could support either option 5 or 6.  It was also evidence that option 4 was true for the early part of the summer, but the statements indicating that the club was scouting managers and players at all times was reassuring and convinced me that things were not too out of control.  Once Ronald Koeman was hired, I believed things were back under control.

However, significant player sales were inconsistent with option 9.  There are several reasons for this.  First, BPL teams were for sale and no one was buying. Sure Fulham sold for about 200 million pounds last summer, but look how well that turned out for the buyer.  You have to understand that when Americans buy sport franchises in major leagues, they expect them to appreciate in value—this whole relegation nonsense is very risky for an investor and, after Fulham, I believed it would be difficult to find a buyer unless the buyer was willing to treat the club as a hobby and pump in lots of money or unless the team was firmly established in the BPL.  Selling players and taking out the money was inconsistent with either type of buyer.  Therefore, once Shaw and Lallana were sold, I ruled out option 8.

Then the club starting bringing in players and claiming that the transfer proceeds would be reinvested in the team.  The board also told us that the club was not for sale.  Since I had already decided that the people running the team were basically honest, I was able to run out option 8 but there was no way to decide between options 5 and 6.  In fact, any final determination between those two options is still premature.  If the club remains intact in February and is not facing a relegation battle, then I will decide upon option 5.  If the club is relegated, option 6 would be my choice. 

Finally, somewhere along the way I formed the entirely emotional and subjective belief that Katharina Liebherr did not appear to be the sort of person who would simply destroy something that was important to her father just for a little extra money.  (Yes, I am calling a couple of hundred million pounds a little extra money.  She is a billionaire after all.)  I also thought she would probably enjoy owning a BPL team.  It sure seems like it would be a fun thing for a billionaire to do.

So, by late July I had decided that the people running the club were competent, but not perfect.  They had a plan they were following.  They were generally honest and were working together.  The club was not being looted and was not for sale.  You might notice that this was about the time I started my blog to make this point to other Southampton fans.

However, I always knew I could be wrong.  The board could have been lying to us.  The transfer fees always could have been intended for Katharina Liebherr’s Swiss bank account.  The team might have been sold for a pittance to an unsuitable owner once all the money had been taken out.  I thought these negative possibilities were very unlikely for a variety of reason.  I also knew that the people who believed these things were not thinking rationally because there was just no significant evidence to believe these theories and lots of reasons, including the ones I discussed above, not to believe them.

However, football fans are passionate and slaves to their own personalities.  A Chicken Little will always see that the sky is falling.  A Pollyanna will always know that things will work out for the best.  We have definitely had a Pollyanna of a summer.