I comment on Les Reed’s 38 minute long speech at the 2014 Global Sportstec Innovation Conference.

Although the speech has a great deal of significant information, it was presented at a Sportstec conference and, in some ways, is a commercial for Sportstec’s Sportcode software.  Here is a link to a video describing that product.  I am in no position to judge the quality of the product, but I can see how it would be useful to Southampton FC.  A lot of other teams use Sportstec products.  Manchester City has posted a video about their use of Sportscode here.  A list of Sportstec’s customers can be found here.    All BPL teams are listed as using Sportscode, except Stoke and Aston Villa.

I found it interesting that Southampton provides everyone with an iPad.  From Reed’s discussion of the number of personnel, it sounds like that is over 400 iPads.  Expensive.  But it could be worse.  What if they all needed two iPads like I do?

Reed explained a few things about which I had been curious.  Under current Rules, Southampton, as a team with a Category A academy, can buy, fairly cheaply, a young player from anywhere in England—so long as the player wishes to move to Southampton.  I have wondered why Southampton has not taken advantage of its reputation—both as a quality place to learn football and as a club that gives playing opportunities to young players—to buy more young players away from other teams.  Apparently, the club wants to focus on the south of England and scoop up all the best young players there rather than buy from other teams—although we did buy 15 year old Neal Osborn from Torquay United over the summer,  but Torquay is certainly within the Southampton region as defined by Reed.  Given Reed’s emphasis on there being a “pathway”, one would presume that means that the club believes that, down the road, there will be an opening for the 15-year-old goalkeeper in the first team—if he develops as hoped.  Of course, that is probably true for everyone at the academy.

Reed’s critique of the top down approach adopted by Chelsea and Manchester United is interesting.  Southampton believes that the manager must fit the Southampton system because the system will not change to fit the manager.  Thus, there are a whole lot of managers who will never be hired by Southampton, including, for example, Tony Pullis and Sam Allardyce.  It probably means that few world class managers would be suitable for Southampton—Pep Guardiola maybe, but not Jose Mourinho.  Most importantly, it means that when Ronald Koeman leaves we do not have to worry about everything suddenly changing.  The club will hire a manager that intends to play the same basic way so the players who are already here will still fit right in.  There will be no need to sell unsuitable players at a loss so that the new manager can overpay for his type of player.

This information is both relevant and significant to the evaluation I just completed as to whether Southampton can compete with the bigger clubs.  If Southampton will not be wasting money on pointless, but expensive, activities simply because a new manager demands changes, that will save real money.  To the extent the bigger clubs waste money in this way, it somewhat reduces the relative financial deficit Southampton faces in trying to compete with them.

A potential downside to the Southampton philosophy is that the club might be too resistant to change if the Southampton way stops working, but that is a problem for another day since it is working fine now.

One of the threads on Saintsweb (no link, sorry) has had a mini-debate on how much credit the current coaches and staff deserve for the success of our recent academy graduates.  People have pointed out that Luke Shaw, for example, arrived at Southampton in 2003 so current management was not responsible for recruiting him.  In fact, all of our recent youth successes were brought in under an earlier regime. This is inevitable.  No one is going to play regularly in the senior team before age 17 and few will play regularly before age 20.  If the best prospects are brought into the academy at age eight, that means that the current crop of young players must have arrived in 2002 through 2005.  Even if we now have the best spotters of young talent in the world, the first members of the first Liebherr class will not be 18 for five more years.

It does mean that the quality of the young talent being brought in now is unknown, but that will always be true.  Investment in young players will always have a significant element of risk.  Years might go by without a young player being good enough for the senior team.  We just have to hope that the club’s talent judging talents on the senior level are indicative of the club’s skill at the youth level.

Reed said that the academy, coming out of administration, only had six staff members.  The club as a whole only had 14.  It now has 56 full time staff with a number of part timers.  It seems very likely that the training provided by the much larger staff in the past five years must have been significant relative to the training that was being provided as the club was falling apart.  Of course, every Southampton fan should recognize the importance of what the staff did during that time.  Shutting down the academy would have saved money, but things would be a lot worse right now had that happened.

I was not previously aware of “The Coaching Manual.”  I signed up for my free membership.  I am hoping it will give me information that I, as a non-football playing American, never learned as a kid.  We shall see.  The real test will be whether I am sucked into paying the £5/month for premium content.