Talent identification and then excellent coaching coupled together and now we’ve opened our new training facility. We’ve spent three years building a state of the art facility. We have changed it from Southampton football training ground to Staplewood Campus because we feel that’s what it is. It is an environment of elite development—a specialist environment that takes youngsters from 8 years of age on a journey through to premier league football so we almost treat it a bit more like a university than simply a facility. All the facilities in there have been designed for the purpose of developing and creating this pathway and enabling youngsters to come through that.
We have a big analysis department. We have an internship program. So far our interns all end up getting a job
somewhere—mostly with us—we don’t like letting them go. They beaver away every
day at making sure we are sweating the technology that we’ve got. So the pitches are excellent. The changing
rooms, the hydrotherapy center, the auditoriums, the meeting rooms are
fantastic, but it’s about the people that are in them that make the
difference. We make sure we get good
people who are specialists who understand the philosophy and develop. We
develop our staff in the same way. We
get good at it. You might have thought
our players were attracting quite a bit of attention during this transfer
window. Believe me our staff attracts a
lot of attention as well. We see it as
vitally important that we keep our staff and keep them up to date and improve
them and improve their knowledge.
What is the vehicle which allows the strategy to be properly
implemented? It is essentially that it’s effective, clear, and concise
communication. When I went into the club
five years ago, I went in as a consultant.
The club was on its knees. The
academy was broken. There were about six
staff in the academy. They were doing
things from coaching in the evenings to painting the old metal stand that we
used to have just to keep the environment going—fantastic people—really, the
heart of the club. The rest of the club
was in a terrible state. The club had
just come out of administration and was very understaffed. The facilities had been run down and the
equipment and things had been run down.
We formed what we call a football development and support
center which basically describes the people who work in football at the
club. There were about six in the
academy— probably 14 people overall involved in football club five years ago in
League One with a ten point deduction—so not a great position to be in but a
great platform to build on. There are 56
people now in that football development support center—probably 70 or 80
overall including part time staff and scouts and coaches around the development
centers. There is a bigger price and
it’s been a massive investment but the product is there. You see it at St. Mary’s every Saturday when
the team plays because we also have a bottom up policy.
I said at the beginning it’s all about having a
philosophy. It’s about knowing what you
can achieve, where you want to go, and how to get there—not a secret, a philosophy. Then you have to have a strategy in place
which delivers that.
One of the big mistakes the clubs make is that they go top
down. I know for a fact that Chelsea
each time they have changed their manager they have been walls knocked down,
gyms moved, whole changes in philosophy and facilities based on the manager and
the senior staff. Louis van Gaal has
just gone into Manchester United and changed a whole range of things in terms
of facilities in order to do it his way.
I’m not saying that’s wrong. What I’m saying is that is a top down
philosophy. It is driven from the top
and then it trickles down and everybody follows that line.
We deliberately five years ago made a different
decision. This was based on our owner
who had taken the club out of administration, Markus Liebherr. He bought the club because he loved
football. He had an affinity with
Southampton through the docks, through his business. He loved community—big on community. He loved watching good football. So the philosophy was based on come redevelop
a team that will get into the premier league.
Play in the top of the premier league with 50% of our players developed
through our academy. Can we get a team
that can do that and be exciting for the fans so the fans enjoy coming and want
to be there every week to see good football?
That was where it started from and then was so what is the strategy to
put that together. It had to be bottom
up. It had to be if that’s what we want
to achieve at the end, this is where we have to start building now. So good techniques, good qualities, the
athleticism of the players, everything from 8, 9, 10, and 11 had to drive
towards that.
The style of
play: We use through our academy 4-3-3
as a basic structure in terms of the style of play. Not because 4-3-3 is the winning formula, but
because to play 4-3-3 properly you have to develop a whole range of things that
you don’t have to develop if you play 4-4-2 where the team is very, very
straight and structured and up and down.
4-3-3 requires rotation in midfield.
It requires fullbacks to push on.
It requires center backs to be able to split and have plenty of the
ball.
If you want to play entertaining football that people want
to watch you keep it on the floor and you play from the back. So we had to couple all that together with a
winning formula where the idea is to do it and do it really well. Bring in high quality players who have got
those techniques. Develop players who
will develop those techniques and do it really well. Do it better than the others. Put the whole thing together and do it really
well.
What’s the point of developing a player for 8 years in your
academy and then a new manager comes in and says we are not doing it that way
anymore, we play long ball? No
point. So our approach has been: Select a head coach who shares that
philosophy. Select a head coach who will
buy into that philosophy, that structure, who will carry on.
Mauricio Pochettino has left us for Spurs. He carried on on the success that Nigel Adkins
had in getting us promoted and developed that style of play which our young
players were able to step straight into.
That’s why Chambers, Shaw, Ward-Prowse, Sam Gallagher, players like that
who have come through the academy could step into the first team with
ease. They weren’t learning anything
new. They were just taking the next
step.
In recruiting Ronald Koeman to replace him, what did we look
at? Feyenoord. 50% of their team in the academy. 50% of the national team in Holland is from
Feyenoord’s academy. They play good football. They keep it on the floor. They play at the
back. They have a successful coach who’s taking a step further in terms of his
own reputation, in terms of trophies and winning things with a fantastic
reputation as a player who buys into exactly the same philosophy. So a smooth transition—not coming in banging
walls about, changing things because I am the manager and I want that pitch
turned down that way and so on. Come in
saying this is fantastic. What a great
place to work. The players coming
through are doing it exactly the way I would like them to it.
So you chose a manager who doesn’t believe in that, you are
putting all that you have done over the last five years in jeopardy. So we would have preferred not to have to appoint
a new manager, but we did so we went through that process.
What’s this got to do with what we’re talking about
now. When we appointed Pochettino, he
was a relatively unknown manager, but we wanted this manager who has got to be
able to develop the style and continue what we were doing in the academy. So we looked at a long list of coaches whose
reputations were that they worked well with young players, they developed young
players, and they are not frightened to put young players in the first team. That’s where the scouting recruitment
analysis department comes in again. It’s
not just players. So let’s look at their
teams. Let’s analyze their teams. Let’s see if it mirrors what we think. Let’s look at their style, their philosophy
and see which of these managers on our long list get on our short list based on
what they’ve done. Let’s look at how
many players they’ve brought through from the academies at their clubs into the
first team. Are they brave enough to do
it? What’s the average age of their
teams? Do they like working with young
dynamic teams or do they prefer experienced players who maybe on the way
towards the end of their careers? That’s
all done by that department. Clips and
everything put together, set down, and then when I get to a point where I feel
we have the right one, we visually show it to the board. This is the style of this guy. This is what he does. Visually looking at it through the technology
that we’ve got. Then we repeat the same
process when Pochettino leaves and Koeman comes in. So do your work.
Fans get frustrated and want to know why you haven’t
appointed a manager yet. We haven’t
appointed a manager because we want to get the right one and we are going to
take our time and do it properly and that’s the same with player
recruitment. So in that department we
have three sections. We have the junior
academy section youth recruitment. We
have youth recruitment to the academy and we have senior recruitment. All work into the same structures, same
philosophies and we go through this whole process. Natasha is a performance analyst. So she delivers all the stuff from training
and match performance with the coaches—does a great job. Her colleagues, we have two colleagues who
are recruitment analysts. They spend all
their day downloading film from all the leagues around Europe, getting video in
from all the different leagues, categorizing it, photo basing it so when we actually
scout and our scouts say there’s a player at Schalke that plays number 4—ba ba
boom—we’ve got it already. And if we
haven’t got it, we know where to get it and we get it quickly. We go through that process of analyzing or
being able to analyze our target players and do the right due diligence on them
to bring them in.
So you can’t do that unless everybody’s singing from the
same hymn sheet, all on the same page, know their roles. So we don’t have those incessant arguments with coaches and scouts saying I
brought in a good player but the coaching was crap or I’m a great coach, but
you’re bringing in crap talent. We don’t
have that. It’s a team they all work together
on those decisions. They can work
together because we have got the right tools to facilitate it.
We’ve created an environment where the technical ability of
the players is matched with the technical ability of the coaching and
development staff and we base a lot of our work on visual learning. We need the right tools to facilitate
that. Hence, the resources we’ve put
into the scouting, recruitment, and analysis department. We have a room in there called the black box
which is sealed off. It has got the
biggest TV screen I’ve ever seen. It’s
the place where the coaches, the manager, the heads of recruitment go in. All touch screen technology. We bring up a list of players. We talk about them. We show their profiles, their backgrounds,
and then, at the touch of a finger, you can go straight into whatever you clips
you want on them. That speeds up the
process. It’s a useful technology to put in what is complex program of work,
but make it easy to manipulate. So we
have invested in technology. We use a
lot of different technology. All of our
training pitches have remote control cameras behind the goals and on the half
way line. So Natasha can do her work
from her desk without going out there in the rain with the camera on her
shoulder unless she still likes doing that.
But it means every training session—whether it’s the under 8s, whether
it’s the under 12s, the 16s, the 18s, either playing or training—it can be
recorded through remote control. And we
do and that’s how we get all the clips and the content for their iPads and so
on and so forth.
Interestingly, enough, this conference has been put on by Sportstec. We have a long relationship with Sportscode and we worked a lot with Christian, Terry, and Jinx [?] over the years developing it. It underpins all those things. We deliver all those things. How do we capture the content? We have found the best technology to use is Sportscode because it is very, very adaptable. So everything in the black box has gone through the Sportscode system. Yeh, we have editing and Final Cut software that runs alongside it, but the actual work is done by the utilization of Sportscode because it is so adaptable.
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