What happened to the 'Southampton way'?

Between 2013-14 and 2016-17, Southampton not only finished eighth, seventh, sixth and eighth in the Premier League but also demonstrated a remarkable knack for developing or recruiting players to sell on to bigger clubs at substantial profits.

A certain mystique was credited to Southampton’s “black box”, a huge scouting database and video suite based in a windowless room at the club’s Staplewood training ground.

They even launched their new kit in 2017 with a video that cast their players as superheroes trying to stop a group of villains — and one of them looked and sounded an awful lot like Ronald Koeman, who had just left them to take over at Everton — stealing a device that “holds the secrets behind Southampton’s famous academy, tactics, transfers, all their future plans”.

But that approach — though usually described as self-sustaining — is unlikely to work indefinitely. You can’t outsmart the market indefinitely. Southampton soon found other clubs, with bigger budgets, looking and shopping in the same markets and their own hit rate started to drop.

The appointments of Claude Puel and Mauricio Pellegrino were far less successful than those of Mauricio Pochettino and Koeman; as for whether the problems began with the appointment of Puel or his sacking after a respectable first season, debate persists to this day.

ut there was no single turning point, more a series of twists that tipped the balance against Southampton and left them swimming against the tide. In an interview with The Athletic in 2021, the club’s former vice-chairman Les Reed suggested it was more a case of appointing the wrong coaches — Puel and Pellegrino — than signing the wrong players.

Reed “wouldn’t say the recruitment went bad in a dramatic way”. But often it doesn’t have to. All it takes is for one or two players, or indeed a manager, to struggle when they have big boots to fill. The whole dynamic changes. Often in, well, a dramatic way.

Chaudhari recalls being commissioned to produce a report on Southampton for a potential investor in the club. “Yes, they had been excellent at youth development, talent development and trading, but a lot of that was down to individuals who were at the club at the time, like Les Reed and Paul Mitchell, as opposed to being something in the DNA of the club,” he says. “For a club to really sustain that kind of success, those ideas really need to be institutionalised within the club rather than in the heads of individuals.”

There were changes in the ownership structure and changes in personnel behind the scenes, leaving Southampton scrapping to avoid relegation: from those four consecutive top-eight finishes to coming 17th, 16th, 11th, 15th and 15th in the past five seasons. With eight games left this season, they are bottom of the table and survival hopes are diminishing.

The mood around St Mary’s has deteriorated and like so many other clubs in the past, they have found themselves reactively hiring and firing managers from positions of weakness. Replacing Ralph Hasenhuttl with Nathan Jones very quickly looked like a mistake. Time will tell whether Ruben Selles, in his first senior management role, can rectify the situation.

Whether they stay up or not, ‘the Southampton Way’, which was trumpeted so often during those first four years after promotion, is no longer something held up for other clubs to emulate.  Others, arriving in the Premier League with fresh ideas and a more progressive outlook, have taken over that mantle. Southampton have become a cautionary tale. One of many.