Fixing Southampton Part One: Analysing the Problem.
At the end of the 2015/16 season, Southampton were the golden boys of the Premier League. Under Mauricio Pochettino and then Ronald Koeman, Saints finished 8th, 7th, and then 6th in three of their first four seasons following their promotion back to the top flight in 2012. That success was built on a foundation of smart managerial appointments, astute moves in the transfer market (assisted by their much-vaunted ‘Black Box’), and a steady trickle of talented academy players bolstering the squad, and it meant that Southampton were heralded as a model club who provided a blueprint for midtable sides to punch above their weight.
That summer Koeman departed for Everton and since then things have regressed at St. Mary’s. Claude Puel, Koeman’s immediate successor, lead them to a respectable 8th place finish and a League Cup final which, on the face of it, seems like pretty good going. Puel’s stultifying style of football didn’t sit well with home fans though and despite ending up 8th, his team finished 17 points (46 compared to 63) and 18 goals (41 compared to 59) worse off than they had under Koeman the previous year; their overall placing in the table might have been good, but their level of performance was significantly worse.
Puel was sacked a year into his contract and was replaced by Mauricio Pellegrino. His appointment proved to be little short of a disaster and Southampton, reluctant to pull the trigger and sack another manager so quickly, showed faith in Pellegrino for far too long and it almost cost them. They were dragged into a relegation battle and turned to Mark Hughes to pull them out of the shit. He managed it, just about, but they finished in 17th place with 36 points, scoring a paltry 37 goals in the process. The 17/18 season represents a nadir for the club since their return to the Premier League and they can perhaps count themselves fortunate to still be in the league.
So what’s gone wrong?
It’s easy to point out that they lost a pair of talented managers and then proceeded to make the wrong appointments to replace them. That is undeniably true and it has cost the club dearly. It’s far from the only reason, however.
A bigger issue, arguably, has been the total capitulation of their transfer policy. It mirrors the situation they experienced with their managers and reflects the cycle of modern football: a mid-sized club exceeds expectations and attracts the attention of the bigger fish who systematically pick off the brightest talent from the smaller club.
This is the case for almost everyone outside of the elite but smart clubs are less affected by this because their contingency planning means that they have replacements lined up when their best assets are poached.
Southampton seem to have lost their ability to do this effectively.
Initially, Saints coped quite well with the talent drain: Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, and Rickie Lambert were replaced by Ryan Bertrand, Dušan Tadić, Toby Alderweireld (on loan), Florin Gardos, Shane Long, and Graziano Pellè. The following season, Southampton were unable to sign Alderweireld permanently and turned to Virgil van Dijk instead and then picked up Cedric to replace Nathaniel Clyne. They also bought Oriol Romeu to pre-empt the departure of Victor Wanyama, who had been making noises about wanting to leave the club.
So far, so good. That same window they spent half of the fee they received for Morgan Schneiderlin on Jordy Clasie though, who made no impression at all during his time in the Premier League. From there on, the transfer record is considerably more wobbly.
Sadio Mané joined Liverpool and Saints coped with his loss by bringing in Sofiane Boufal and Nathan Redmond, while Pellè’s departure to China saw them sign Manolo Gabbiadini and Guido Carrillo in his place. The club also saw a repeat of the Wanyama situation with van Dijk and did the same thing, anticipating his loss by signing Wesley Hoedt and Jan Bednarek before the Dutchman had actually left. They’ve subsequently added to their CB depth by purchasing Jannik Vestergaard this summer.
Something they’ve done quite consistently is split the big fee they receive for an outgoing player between a couple of lower quality replacements who have untapped potential. Part of that is the reality of being a mid-table club — even if you have the cash and can pay a fee, it’s difficult to attract high quality players if you’re not playing continental football. Part of it is mitigating risk, as lumping a lot of cash on a player who turns out to be a complete dud is enormously costly for mid-sized clubs, so it’s understandable that they’d be wary of putting all of their eggs in one basket. Some of it feels like part and parcel of their process though — most of the players they sold on were brought in for very little, so perhaps their hedging is simply an attempt to replicate that in order to make even more profit.
In short, they’ve had far more misses than hits in the last few years and their gambles have contributed to the sorry state they found themselves in last season.
Losing talented players and staff and then failing to adequately replace them makes you worse. Who would have guessed?
But there’s something else going on, beyond the superficial issues. After all, there are ways to compensate for a lack of individual talent in football, and Southampton seem to have forgotten how to do that entirely. Of course, that’s largely down to the manager and their appointments have been shocking, but there’s a broader, simpler issue that seems to be a big underlying cause of their recent underperformance.
They’ve failed to adjust their tactical style to the make-up of their squad.
When trying to evaluate what the major difference between Southampton of 13/14 –15/16 and Southampton 16/17–17/18, it struck me that their best seasons coincided with them playing big, physically imposing, aerially dominant strikers and that since Pellè left they’ve not had that type of centre forward in the team (barring Carrillo but we’ll get to him).
Rickie Lambert was an intelligent, composed, technically competent striker capable of dropping deep to link play, and Pellè was more than just a crude battering ram, but the point remains that Southampton’s attacking approach and style of play was built around using the physical strength of these target men to occupy defenders, to make space for their creative players to flourish behind them, and to give the wide players someone to aim for with crosses.
The issue for Southampton is that they’ve no longer got that profile of striker and yet they continue to play like they have. They’ve not adapted their system to suit their personnel.
At least, that’s what it seems like from the outside. Anecdotally, it’s something I’ve noticed watching Southampton post-Koeman — they seem to work the ball wide and start chucking in crosses, despite not having anyone good enough in the air to make that a worthwhile strategy.
Looking at the type of shots PL clubs have taken over the last few seasons indicates that there might be something in this.
2015/16:
This was Southampton’s last ‘good’ season, so it makes sense to start here:
(As a quick explainer, “% of Headed Shots” is simply the proportion of a team’s total shots that came via headers and “% of Headed Goals” is the proportion of a team’s total goals that came via headers.)
The team who were most reliant on headed shots in 15/16 were, unsurprisingly, Tony Pulis’ West Bromwich Albion. They’re followed closely by Aston Villa who went like-for-like and replaced Christian Benteke with Rudy Gestede, and by a West Ham side powered by Dimitri Payet’s delivery from out wide and set pieces.
The rest of the table seems to match conventional wisdom, with Manchester United, Spurs, Chelsea, and Liverpool taking a lower percentage of shots from headers due to the wealth of attacking talent in their respective squads. It’s perhaps a little surprising that City and Arsenal are as high as they are, but that’s likely a product of having Olivier Giroud, and Wilfried Bony at their disposal during this campaign. Seeing an Allardyce-managed side so low down is initially shocking but is more understandable when you consider that Jermain Defoe was the focal point of Sunderland’s attack at that point.
101 of Southampton’s 519 shots came from headers, the 4th highest ratio in the league. Graziano Pellè took 29 headed shots in his 30 league appearances, accounting for roughly a 3rd of the Saints’ total. They scored 15 headed goals, the joint-second highest in the Premier League.
At first glance, you’d expect that the number of headed goals a team scored would reflect the number of headed chances they created, but there’s quite a lot of deviation in this, which is influenced by the quality of those headed chances, the attributes of the players available to each individual team, the style of football each club plays, and the team’s ability to finish chances from open play.
The two teams with the highest positive discrepancy were Chelsea and West Brom by a considerable distance. Given that this is the season where Chelsea imploded under Mourinho and ended up in 10th place, it would be easy to assume that the high headed goal % was a result of their failure to score their open play chances more than anything else. The reverse is true: they were deadly in the air, scoring the highest number of goals from headers in the league (17). On the flipside, WBA scored 12 headed goals (joint-6th best) but only scored 32 goals in total, pointing towards both the effectiveness of Pulis’ set piece routines and how poor they were at finishing other chances.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sunderland and Norwich have the largest negative discrepancy; Sunderland’s poor headed goals % is possibly a result of not having the right personnel to execute an Allardyce game plan, while Norwich seemed set up to dominate in the air with Dieumerci Mbokani and Cameron Jerome as their striking options but neither was able to cut the mustard at the top level when it came it converting chances. Norwich’s problem could well have been the quality of the headed shots they created though, with Matt Jarvis and, curiously, Nathan Redmond as the team’s suppliers from out wide.
Southampton’s % of headed goals was around 7% higher than their headed shots %.
This look at how reliant teams were on creating chances from crosses by evaluating the proportion of a given team’s key passes derived from crosses broadly matches the % of headed shots table from above.
Palace were creating the most shots from crossing situations but weren’t scoring them at a similar rate, which perhaps explains why they targeted Christian Benteke the following summer.
Southampton sit 5th for cross reliance with 30% of their shots originating from deliveries from out wide. Their success in this season was built on their ability to generate chances from crosses and on their ability to convert headed chances at a high rate.
16/17:
The Claude Puel year sees a slight drop in reliance on headed shots but there’s not a huge amount of difference in Southampton’s approach to creating chances:
Fernando Llorente’s arrival at Swansea sees the Welsh side’s reliance on headed chances skyrocket, rising from roughly 15% in 15/16 to just over 25% in this season; over a quarter of the shots Swansea took in 16/17 were headers.
WBA rank highly once again and are weirdly consistent, with ~37% of their goals coming from headers in both seasons. Palace’s acquisition of Benteke works a charm — they brought someone in who fit their existing playing style and he helped them execute it better. Stoke signed Bony on loan and Peter Crouch made 28 league appearances which perhaps explains the shift to a higher percentage of headed chances and Alvaro Negredo’s loan at Middlesbrough ranks them into the top 5.
Pep Guardiola’s arrival causes City to rely less on headers than they did under Pellegrini, while Jose Mourinho’s appointment sees Manchester United’s % of headed shots move in the other direction. There’s a shift in approach away from headed chances for Bournemouth and Arsenal, although Arsenal continue to convert these chances at a scintillating rate while Bournemouth’s ability to score headers seems to dry up.
Southampton slide into the middle of the chart but although that might seem like a change to their attacking strategy, their reliance on headers was largely similar under Puel (~17.5% of chances were headed) and the last season under Koeman (~19.5% of chances were headed). To put it another way, Southampton were 10th for % of headed chances but scored the second lowest number of headed goals. Without Pellè, Southampton scored 4 of their 96 headed attempts compared to 15 of the 101 they took the previous season.
Both Southampton’s and Palace’s dependence on crosses was virtually identical in both seasons but the arrival and departure of a target man affected their fortunes in drastically different ways. Swansea effectively double their reliance on generating shots from crosses as they cater to Fernando Llorente.
17/18:
Burnley’s push into the Europa League comes on the back of an increased proportion of headed chances, courtesy of Chris Wood and Ashley Barnes, and Brighton similarly established themselves in midtable thanks to Glenn Murray’s aerial prowess and the quality of Pascal Groß’s delivery.
As WBA sacked Pulis and moved into the brave, new, Pardiola era, their reliance on generating shots from headers drastically decreased but their overall % of headed goals remained the same, largely due to the fact they were hopeless at creating and scoring high quality chances from open play. Arsenal continue to convert headed chances clinically despite taking relatively few of their total shots from headers. Chelsea top the league in headed goals with 17, but otherwise find goals quite hard to come by.
Southampton are 5th for % of headed shots, with around 19% of the shots being headers, a figure that is comparable to Koeman and Pellè’s last season. They scored 7 headed goals — an improvement on the Puel season but nowhere near enough given how many headed chances they created.
Their dependence on creating shots from crosses drops slightly but is still the 6th highest in the league. Burnley and Brighton’s successful seasons were founded on their ability to maximise opportunities derived from wide areas and the Allardyce effect sees Everton shoot up the table.
Swansea’s % of key passes from crosses drops quite a lot but not down to their 15/16 level. You could argue that they are suffering from the same problem as Southampton — their style of play and their squad were built to create chances and score goals by crossing the ball to a physical target man. Swansea lost both their primary creative outlet (Sigurdsson) and their main striker (Llorente) but failed to adjust their approach enough to compensate for those losses. Instead they tried to play in broadly the same way they had done the previous season, just without the right personnel to execute that game plan properly.
The way Southampton create shooting opportunities has barely changed since that 15/16 — they’re still heavily reliant on headed chances and crosses even though they no longer have a player in the mould of Graziano Pellè to capitalise on those sorts of chances. Factor in the reduced quality of their wide players — Sadio Mané vs Sofiane Boufal and Nathan Redmond — and you have one potential explanation for why they’ve been such a blunt instrument going forward for the last two seasons.
So how do they avoid falling into this trap again? That’s Part Two…
