verlaine1979

He's a central midfielder - definitely not another Mane. His highlights reel isn't up to much either compared to SM either, though he's only had one full season.

From a quick YT review, Jahanbakhsh looks decent. Looks quite sturdy for a winger - a bit like Chadli or Arnautovic before he was converted to a striker.

Wasn't there a rumour we were looking at Golovin before the WC? If so, almost certainly too late now, as he looks a fantastic player.

Even if that's the official word from Maddison's camp, what makes you think that he's not smart enough to give a diplomatic reason as opposed to an incendiary one that would immediately make him needlessly unpopular with another club's fans? This is very basic stuff.

There are three main sets of opinion on this thread. 1) It's the club's fault that he didn't come here - the board need to be sacked; 2) He chose Leicester purely for reasons of location and we have nothing to worry about - players who like the sunny south will choose us instead; 3) We lost out to Leicester because we only just survived relegation, our squad is thin and our financial standing is an open question - we're now only competing with the bottom 1/3 of the league for players. Only one of those three diagnoses of the situation is correct.

I'm not debating whether we're more attractive than Bournemouth and Huddersfield (I said they're our competition, but I'd expect us to win out against them most of the time if we want the same player). We're simply not a more appealing club than Leicester on any current criteria - we're less successful, we have a weaker squad, we struggled with relegation, we pay less, and I'm not sure our training facilities are really any better than the majority of clubs in the PL outside the recently promoted ones (and in fact they look quite dinky when compared to the very best). As for the whole 'selling a project' thing - it's just spin. Everyone talks about it and nobody takes a word of it seriously. Really all it possibly amounts to is a player weighing up a) how much are the club going to pay me and b) how likely is it that their sporting or financial fortunes will decline while I'm there. On neither of those counts do we score well at the moment.

They've got a better squad than us, better recent history, and probably pay their top players a significantly higher wage than we do. They also didn't just escape relegation by the skin of their teeth. Sad though it is to say, we're not going to be flexing our transfer appeal over Leicester, Everton or anyone like that this summer. Our competition for players are Bournemouth, Brighton, Hudds and the promoted teams.

Not covering himself in glory thus far.

Not sure I've ever actually seen Carvalho break into a run. A real walking-pace player.

Is there really no one else we could've picked for the squad other than Welbeck? For the fourth striker, you might as well gamble on someone who at least has a chance of bringing the unknown/changing the game.

If he has a good world cup and Chelsea still decide to let him go, someone like Everton or Leicester will come in for him and outbid/outshine the likes of us or Palace.

Of course they do. You just have to value the short term boost as greater than the risk of not being able to mitigate the long-term consequences of your story not panning out. At the time, we were in free-fall in the league and all our early-window promises about signings had evaporated. I can absolutely believe that the club put out a face-saving rumour about Promes on the understanding that in 6 months we'd either be relegated, or in a position to spin a further story about priorities changing etc.

If any sort of assured agreement to buy Promes existed, the club would have advertised it for the PR opportunity during an otherwise terrible transfer window (as Liverpool did with Naby Keita).

Blimey, that might be the most cogent and insightful analysis I've ever read from an ex-pro.

Long played 1580 minutes in the PL and managed 2 goals and 1 assist. Among PL strikers who made any meaningful number of appearances, there aren't many less productive. I appreciate his effort and he is surprisingly good in the air, but his record speaks for itself - he hardly ever scores and rarely picks or executes this right pass when he has possession. We simply cannot afford another season where Shane Long is our most-played striker. He should be a desperation third choice, getting about 500 minutes a season tops.

If we stop playing in such a way that our fullbacks are our main creative outlet, then he'll be fine. As it is, his consistent overhitting of crosses is certainly a significant contributing factor to our woeful performance in attack the past two seasons. Would love to know quite how many attacks petered out over the course of a season as a result of Cedric booming his cross straight over to the opposite wing.

If Hughes is playing hardball to get a better contract or agreements over transfer budgets, going on holiday in the middle of negotiations is certainly one way to assert yourself.

They signed him from Malaga.

Actually was at Alaves last season - not sure if that makes his performance look better or worse.

Barca also planning to get rid of Munir according to the Sun. 14 goals and 7 assists in all comps on loan at Valencia last year (10 & 6 in the league), and averaged 75 mins per game in the league. Probably out of our reach already, but that's about as good a performance as I can remember from one of those twenty-something Barca loanees.

Ahem.

Would be very surprised if the club were happy to write off £15m+ in just six months (which is probably the minimum we'd lose trying to shift him on now), regardless of whether it's the best thing for the squad.

Not exactly true about Lemina. He made league 23 appearances for Marseille the season before he went to Juve (as a 19/20 year old) and played around 60 minutes per game. Likewise the comparison between Gabbiadini and Austin's scoring records isn't exactly fair, as apart from a season on loan as a 17/18 year old Gabbi has only ever played at the top level. Unfortunately, we're unlikely to ever know how many goals he might have scored if he'd had a few seasons in the Wessex League to pad out his stats. As I said originally, I don't buy either of these arbitrary ideas as an outright recruitment policy. You only have to look at the long line of Dutch top scorers who have failed to make an impact in the PL to see that 'standing out' statistically in that league is no real mark of quality. On the flip side, if you were looking at Mane's stats in the Austrian league, he never finished as top scorer or top in assists, so we're perhaps overblowing the extent to which he was regarded as the best player in that league at the time. But to answer your specific question, I think both Lemina and Gabbi are significantly better players than either Cork or Yoshida. And while you're right that their profiles as players were different to the others you mentioned, I doubt we'd be in any better position if we'd bought the Scottish league's best midfield enforcer or picked up whoever was banging them in for Feyenoord instead.

Not to mention that Lemina, Gabbi (and to an extent Hoedt) were only in the reserves of larger clubs because they'd already stood out in smaller clubs and lesser leagues. What's being discussed in this thread isn't a strategy - it would just be an arbitrary filter on our recruitment with no predictive value.

Me: "Lots of clubs are pursuing this approach, but we're the only one called Southampton." CBF: "Lies! There's nothing unique about us!"