verlaine1979

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!"

Ah, so you really aren't terribly good at reading. You should just announce that up front - it would make communicating with you much simpler. Removing any confusing context from my original statement, what I said was 'we must be the only team pursuing strategy X who don't do Y'. In other words, far from portraying us as unique, my entire argument is predicated on the notion that there are other clubs doing the same thing we're doing, but doing it better. Everything else you said seems to be tedious blather, so let's leave it at that.

The key phrases in my post were as follows: "This is as much about the business model... as it is about the first XI" & "the only club trying to pursue this strategy". Read it again without ignoring them and you'll have the answers you seek.

Congratulations on your night superhuman achievement of not understanding a single word I wrote. Possibly not even the conjunctions.

This is as much about the business model (and thus long-term financial health) of the club as much as it is about the first XI. As has been pointed out earlier, we've been playing catch up in terms of attacking recruits in midfield for years, so perhaps best to leave that to one side for a moment. As far I can tell, we're pretty much the only club trying to pursue this strategy that doesn't spread a wider net when recruiting replacement talent. Look at how many young players Dortmund have brought in over the past two years as a result of selling Dembele, Aubameyang and Mkhitaryan. Same for Napoli, Atletico and others who've managed to maintain their status while getting picked over by bigger clubs. There's always the option to loan out if the squad gets too large (and make a very healthy profit as Chelsea have shown selling successful loanees). Going 1 for 1 risks both the footballing quality and the financial prospects of the club at the same time. The alternative is Nathan Redmond. Unfair to pick on him I know, but he illustrates that we've now got a squad that's only really worth about as much as we paid for it (accepting inflation). This represents a significant failure of our economic model.

Hang on, I thought the refusing to come on thing wasn't true? Someone on here said the real story was that Hughes had a go at Boufal for being slow to warm up in a game we lost, and that Boufal had a go right back by refusing to take the blame for a loss when he wasn't even on the pitch.

The major fault with our 'stepping stone' policy is that we only replace 1 to 1 when we sell a star. For it to work you have to sell 1 and replace with 2 (even if one of those two is just taking the opportunity to bring in a young prospect in another position), otherwise all it takes is one Nathan Redmond and your entire economic model breaks at the first hurdle.

Right, but one of those managers has won the Europa League three times, the French league once, multiple French cups and was named the European manager of the year in 2013-14. The other one did okay at Charlton for a bit.

Huh? Who is comparing Alan Curbishley to Unai Emery?

Quite - absolutely crazy to think that the club took a considered stance to spend more money on inferior players in the hope that they'd never have to sell them. Wouldn't make sense from any sort of perspective, footballing or economic. If anything, I think RK is saying that the club realise they're nowhere near as big as they thought they were, and that between the lure of bigger clubs and player power, there's no point cutting off your nose to spite your face by forcing players to stay. Obviously there are gradations there, but you should already have a good sense of which players will knuckle down (Schneiderlin, Wanyama) and which will go on strike for months (VVD, possibly Mane if we hadn't sold him.