verlaine1979

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.

As Tuchel has now proven twice, it does no harm to a manager to sit out for a year waiting for the right job to come along (and it's not as if most can't afford to with ease). Much more harmful to just immediately take whatever has been offered and risk a downturn in performance due to infrastructure problems at the club (even Mourinho's reputation is starting to get dinged a little by his failure at Man U). And it's not as if the likes of Klopp, Conte, Villas Boas, Mancini (and yes, even Mourinho) haven't been able to walk straight into the top clubs in the PL from the continent without serving any sort of apprenticeship at a mid-table team. It's clearly a myth that you need to serve and apprenticeship at a lower-PL club to get a job at a better one - in fact, if anything it was a huge negative for Moyes, who never managed to escape being thought of as a small club man - and who'd voluntarily sign up for an apprenticeship when they've already established themselves as a CEO?

Hang on, in what sense hasn't that been our model all the time? Trying to hold players to three years rather than two is simply a function of us starting to adopt five year contracts rather than four, and even then the VVD situation is probably a special case because the PR impact of it being Liverpool every single time was starting to undermine the club's attempts at branding. There has been no change in our recruitment model, just in the quality of its outputs, and for that the scouting group and transfer committee must take all the blame.

Even after a relative failure at PSG, Emery's stock is still way too high to come to Saints. Just like Tuchel, if he's smart he'll sit on his hands for as long as it takes for another big club to come knocking. Why risk genuine failure at a small club with limited resources? The list of managers with sufficient experience and profile to manage the top four in any of Europe's big leagues is very small (whether it should be is another question entirely) and as long as these people have sensible agents, we're never going to see them chancing their arm on two years at Saints as a stepping stone to the PL - they'll never need to.

I think the point about Stephens is that when he's up against anyone half good in the air, he loses almost every time. Sure, against a Bournemouth side whose strikers are selected more for pace that presence he'll mop up all day, but he's easily bullied by more physical players in a way that VVD in particular seldom was.

This is absolute balls. He's clearly an arrogant sort who is in the process of comprehensively burning his bridges with the club, but the one thing that always stood out to me was how aggressively (verging on recklessly) he always tried to get the ball back after he'd lost it. I'm not disputing that separate to that there were times when he just couldn't seem to be bothered with any aspect of the game, but I'd rate Boufal's commitment to getting the ball back after he's lost it has much higher than either Redmond or Tadic.

Was just saying this. His only trick is that little side drag, and it gets read every single time.

How does owning a provincial football club help your international business interests exactly? Sure, maybe if you buy a prestige club in a country like Italy where there's a slightly more forgiving attitude towards political corruption I can imagine it *might* do you a tiny bit of good, but even then I'm not sure the dots really connect. For some Chinese investors, clubs look a lot like status symbols or validation, but those have tended to be much larger acquisitions by groups with a great deal more wealth. By all accounts Gao struggled to raise the money to buy us, which doesn't really sound like the logical first step in a plan for international expansion. I think it far more likely that borrowing to buy income-rich sporting assets capable of paying off their own debt is a good way for rich Chinese to move money abroad.

Ignore me, we might still have needed a draw on the last day.

If we'd won today, a point against Swansea would've been enough to keep us ahead of them on GD barring a huge swing on the last day, no? Dropping those two points today hugely narrows our chances of survival.

Let's hope that doesn't feel quite as demoralising to the players as it does to the fans, otherwise Tuesday is going to be an f-ing nightmare.

Thing is, Lemina and Hojbjerg playing at their full potential in a well-coached side should be more than enough presence in the middle to give that team control of the ball.