Tin Pot FC: Part One

We’re now a year into the Stratford relocation experiment, and it seems fair to say things could have gone better.

The transition to the London Stadium itself was handled appallingly; from problems with the retractable seating, to issues with stewarding, and even in-fighting amongst our own fans, the last 12 months have been plagued by incidents caused by a startling lack of thought about how to accommodate supporters into our new surroundings.

An underwhelming season on the pitch admittedly didn’t help matters. After two separate periods of flirting with relegation, Bilić conjured good spells of form over Christmas and then again in March to steer us to an eventual 11th placed finish. The problem is that this probably wasn’t an accurate reflection of the quality of our performances over the course of the season: had Sunderland and Middlesbrough not been so egregiously bad, and had the rest of the teams between 8th and 18th not been equally poor, we would — and perhaps should — have been in serious danger of going down.

Obviously, this was an enormous disappointment, given the regression from the 2015/16 season. While a frankly dreadful transfer window in summer 2016 contributed to this, let’s be honest: the regression had more to do with 2015/16 being an overperformance rather than 2016/17 being an underperformance.

The last season at the Boleyn went far better than anyone possibly could have anticipated as we finished 7th, just 3 points (and a chunk of goal difference) away from qualifying for the Champions League. But it should be noted that during that campaign we picked up 25 points against sides who had finished in the top 6 in 2014/15 and would go on to finish in the top 6 the following season.

That’s not to say that those results should be discounted (we played very well and were probably good value for a few of those), but putting them in context is important. Along with Spurs and Leicester, we were probably the biggest beneficiaries of the shambolic mismanagement of Chelsea and Liverpool (picking up 4 and 6 points from them). As well as enjoying some good fortune (the 2–1 win at the Etihad where we were vastly outmatched), we took advantage of a competitive pre-season in the Europa League which help us catch Arsenal out on the opening day and capitalised on some divine intervention from the footballing gods manifested in the shape of a Winston Reid header in the 3–2 win against United in the final game at the Boleyn. And that’s not even mentioning that we were inspired by a player having one of the finest individual seasons in recent Premier League history.

That’s not to discredit Slaven’s achievements, but Chelsea and Liverpool, and City to a lesser degree, were always going to improve, our luck was definitely going to run out, and the Payet factor was surely going to diminish (although perhaps not quite in the way it eventually did). All of which is to say: as impressive as those results against the top 6 sides were, it was highly unlikely that they would be replicable.

In fact, if you take those 25 points away from from our 15/16 tally of 62, we’d have ended up in 11th place on goal difference… almost exactly where we found ourselves a year later.

Basically, we’d had an exceptionally hot season when teams above us had been stumbling. But rather than using that as a springboard to establish ourselves as a perennial top 6 contender… we failed to build on it at all. Last summer represented a fantastic opportunity to do just that — the first season in our massive, shiny new stadium, with the allure of continental football (subject to an ability to beat Astra Giurgiu) and one of the most exciting, creative players in Europe in our side — and we squandered the chance by wasting the window chasing unrealistic targets, causing us to end up with the dregs of what was left on the market.

Problems settling into new surroundings, a series of high-profile PR blunders by the board, and a haphazard recruitment policy — it all points to a lack of foresight and strategy at the club.

“Quality Over Quantity”

Which brings us to the start of this summer. With the free transfer of Pablo Zabaleta the only signing confirmed as mid-July came and went, the whisperings of discontent among fans threatened to boil over into outright frustration. Then, in the space of a week, West Ham announced the loan signing of Joe Hart, in addition to the permanent signings of Marko Arnautović and Javier Hernández.

These deals signalled a clear change in approach from the club with regards to transfers. Having felt as though they’d had their fingers burnt the previous year, the board decided to pursue targets who fulfilled two criteria.

The first of these was that they were looking for quality, not quantity. This is an understandable position to take: with the rigours of a potential Europa League campaign ahead, the club spent the summer padding out the squad with players to ensure there was depth for a Thursday-Sunday schedule.

In the end, the European football failed to materialise and the players signed for cover proved to be substandard, so it’s fair to say that adopting this approach failed. It makes a lot of sense, then, to focus instead on signing fewer, more talented players who could immediately improve the starting XI. Therefore, two questions needed to be asked of the new signings with this in mind:

1. Are they an upgrade on what we’ve already got?
2. Does the money spent on an upgrade reflect the difference in quality?

Let’s go through this:

Joe Hart

1. Probably the most debatable point on this list. It really depends on whether you think Hart’s last season at City and his loan spell at Torino represents a poor run of form or a player on the decline. It also depends on how much value you place on his status as England’s number 1 (hint: it should be absolutely none) and how highly you rate our previous ‘keepers. For my money, Hart is better than Randolph but not Adrián.
2. Supposedly we’re paying half of Hart’s wages in addition to a £4.5m loan fee… which essentially amounts to paying the entirety of his wage. That strikes me as a lot to pay for a position that wasn’t a really a pressing issue within the squad, but selling Randolph to ‘Boro for £5mil and replacing him with Hart is probably a good deal, if a little short-sighted. It just depends on whether you think it was worth rocking the boat for:

Hart kept us in the game against Palace and is probably the only reason we came away from that game with a point. Beyond that, he’s been unspectacular and it’s becoming increasingly easy to pity him, considering what he’s had to deal with in front of him.

Pablo Zabaleta

1. Here’s what I wrote immediately after we signed him: “At 32, Zabaleta’s legs are starting to go and, as the season progressed, he increasingly found himself out of favour at City. Playing full-back for a Pep Guardiola side requires a different skillset compared to playing full-back for West Ham, so lack of game time in Manchester might not be as ominous as it first seems. It’s still unclear whether Zabaleta has joined as first choice or as cover, but Byram was shaky defensively at times and offered relatively little going forward last season, so while Zab might not be marauding up and down the wing for 90 minutes, he could add some stability to a position that has been a problem for a long time. At the very least, it frees up Michail Antonio/ Cheikhou Kouyaté from having to cover at RB and he can’t possibly be any worse than Alvaro Arbeloa.” I was wrong about his legs going — Zab’s been one of our few defenders to emerge with some credit from the start to the season (notwithstanding the two penalties he’s given away) and has provided energy and competence whenever he’s played. His tendency to pick up foolish yellow cards is infuriating, though.
2. You’d have to imagine that the lack of a transfer fee meant a substantial signing-on fee for Zabaleta. His wages aren’t going to be cheap either, but he’s only on a two-year contract so, if he’s picking up what we were spending on Arbeloa, this is probably a good deal for the club in the short-term.

Marko Arnautović

1. Like many, I had my reservations when this deal was announced and he’s done little to disprove that in the first 11 games of the season. He’d been the best player and primary creative outlet for a similarly-sized Premier League club for the last few seasons and his output was solid, if unspectacular. Across his four seasons with Stoke, Arnautović averaged 5.75 assists, 5.5 goals (he had one season where he scored 1 goal, followed by a season where he scored 11) and 41.5 key passes (passes that resulted in a shot on goal for a team-mate). For a bit of context, his 6 goals and 5 assists last season is roughly in-line with what our wide players produced, and his 45 key passes left him ranked 23rd in the league — one fewer than Andros Townsend (46), nine fewer than Manuel Lanzini (54), and a staggering twenty-one fewer than Dimitri Payet who racked up 66 chances, despite only playing 18 games. In terms of tangible influence, Marko isn’t an enormous upgrade on anything we already have, underlined by the fact that Robert Snodgrass outperformed him in terms of goals+assists (7+5) and chances created (54) even though Snodgrass was fucking abysmal from January onwards after he moved to Stratford. I suppose the caveat is that Arnautović has been playing for the only club with consistently worse strikers than ours, so if you give him some quality players to feed, his output might improve.
2. The price perhaps more reflects his value to Stoke City, given his importance to their attacking play, rather than his actual market value, but £20m (+add ons) seems excessive for a player who doesn’t represent a substantial improvement on what we’ve already got. I certainly wouldn’t be rushing out to make him our record signing and making him one of our highest earners. He’s probably actually a better player than Snodgrass and Feghouli, so you could argue he represents an improvement to the squad. Then the question is, could the Arnautović spent better/ more efficiently elsewhere? Having a scan around Europe reveals Hakan Çalhanoğlu (similar stylistically, almost certainly more talented, 5 years younger) moving to AC Milan for ~£20mil, Maximilian Philipp (also 23 and member of the German squad that won the under-21 European Championships) moving to Dortmund for £17.5mil, and even someone like Bruma (pacey Portuguese winger) going from Galatasaray to Red Bull Leipzig for £11mil or Dani Ceballos going to Real Madrid for £14.5mil. Similarly you’ve got the £11mil Watford paid for Richarlison and the £14mil that Lyon paid for Memphis Depay. If you bundled together the money went spent on Snodgrass and Marko, you’d get somewhere near what Liverpool paid for Mo Salah. There is definitely better value to be found out there, but maybe £20mil is just the price of an above-average established forward now.

Javier Hernández

1. While I’ve got a feeling his performance might decline quite rapidly, Chicharito is unquestionably a substantial upgrade on every other striking option we’ve had at the club probably since Carlos Tevez (sorry Carlton!). While he’s never been someone who’s relied on outright pace, he’s been dependent on his agility to score goals — short, sharp bursts of movement to manufacture space inside the box, rapid changes of direction to evade his marker. He’s not exactly an athlete who takes supreme care of his body (unlike, say, Jermain Defoe), so the worry is that as he ages he might lose that cutting edge physically which will cause him to fall off the cliff face. I think we’ve already seen glimpses of this in his struggles to surge on through balls beyond the last defender on numerous occasions. Another issue is that he isn’t going to contribute much other than a threat inside the 18-yard box, so making enough chances for him to be properly effective is an obstacle to overcome. He would have been ideal a year ago with Payet in the team. Despite all of that, it’s worth bearing in mind that our top league scorers over the past 5 seasons are: Antonio: 9, Payet: 9, Sakho: 10, Nolan: 7, Nolan: 10. Hernández scored 11 last year, and he and Leverkusen both had a bad year. Even if he just replicated that poor season (by his standards) for us, I’d be very happy. The bar for success at West Ham is very, very low and with 4 goals already, he’s well on his way to clearing it.
2. £16 million is a very tidy deal. ‘Boro spent slightly less than that on Britt Assombalonga and Villa spent similar amounts on Ross McCormack and Jonathan Kodjia last season. £15 million basically buys you a top-end Championship striker now. Last year, Arsenal spent £17mil on Lucas Perez. Spurs spent £18mil on Vincent Janssen. Leicester spent £17mil on Ahmed Musa. Chicharito hasn’t got to do much to look like good value. His wages are a major factor, but we freed up a lot by selling fringe players this summer and a three-year deal isn’t a massive hindrance.

The course correction in transfer policy was evident back in January, so we can also extend this basic analysis to our two signings in the winter.

First off, José Fonte has not been an improvement on anyone we already had in the squad, but poor squad planning had left us ill-equipped when we moved to playing 3 central defenders and we needed an extra body so Kouyaté wouldn’t have to fill in. As Bilić clearly didn’t feel that Oxford was ready (and Ogbonna had been playing through an injury), an interim solution needed to be signed. Spending £8 million and giving a massive 2.5 year contract to a 33-year old was not the best way to go about this.

Then there’s Robert Snodgrass. Despite the fact that Payet had moved on, we weren’t really desperate for another forward player in the immediate future — as evidenced by the fact that Snodgrass spent large portions of the second half of the season sat on the bench. Theoretically, he was brought in to replace Payet’s set piece delivery but he didn’t exactly excel at that and contributed little otherwise. This deal wreaks of a panic buy to appease the fans and the fact that he’s been sent out on loan and seemingly burnt his bridges indicates just how poorly thought through this deal was. The fact that they paid £10mil and gave a 3.5 year deal to a distinctly average player is the kicker.

Aside from Hernández who has the potential a game changer, the rest of the signings are either short-term fixes or minor upgrades that have been acquired fairly expensively. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about not spending money — I find it a bit weird when fans use their rival’s transfer activity as a stick to beat them with. Really, what’s the difference if you’re spending £40mil or £60mil at this point? — but wasteful spending becomes a problem if it doesn’t actually manifest in an on-pitch improvement or if your previous deals prevent you from buying better players in the future.

Which we will undoubtedly have to do. While these signings could make us competitive over the next couple of seasons, in two years time we’re going to be in a position where we need to refresh large portions of the squad.

Depending on what we do with the Reece Oxford, Reece Burke, and Declan Rice (more on that later), the vast majority of our back four is going to be in their mid-thirties and almost all of our wingers/strikers are going to be comfortably the wrong side of thirty as well.

We need to be careful that we don’t find ourselves in the situation Manchester City have found themselves in this summer. By allowing all of their full-backs age, without signing adequate replacements in the interim, they released Sagna, Zabaleta and Clichy at the end of their contracts and also sold Kolarov. That left them with no full-backs on the books and meant that both Spurs and Monaco were able to bend them over the barrel in negotiations for their players because they were aware of City’s desperation.

The thing is, preventing this from happening would actually require some foresight and long-term planning and… I just don’t think we’re capable of that.

Think about how we conducted ourselves over the last 12 months. For the life of me I cannot understand why we sold James Tomkins, beloved academy product and solid performer, to Palace in the summer and then went and signed the decaying corpse of José Fonte for roughly the same amount of money the following January.

Tomkins wasn’t always first choice under Bilić and often found himself filling in at right-back, so perhaps he wanted a guarantee of more starts in his favoured position and when Slaven couldn’t promise him that, they allowed him to move on as a gesture of good faith, with Reece Oxford being elevated to a more prominent role within the squad.

If this is the case, then the manager needs to be held responsible for this oversight. By starting his second season playing the same in the same way as the first (failing to anticipate the fact that opponents would find us out) and then switching to an in-vogue 3–4–3 shape when things went awry, Bilić helped manufacture a situation where we didn’t have sufficient depth in a key position — a situation made all the more frustrating by his seeming reluctance to use Oxford at all, as well as the fact we’d allowed a player who would have slotted in nicely to walk away just months earlier.

The change in formation and approach caused problems for some of our other signings, too. André Ayew had primarily operated as a right winger or in a false 9-type role for Swansea and then shortly after buying him, we switched to a formation that didn’t utilise conventional wingers and that required a different type of central striker. Which is farcical, really — West Ham made Ayew their record signing and then couldn’t find a way to properly fit him in the first team. It’s only over the last three games that we’ve figured out how to actually use him effectively. Sofiane Feghouli fell foul of a similar problem, while the change to a two-man midfield meant that Nordtveit found his opportunities limited as well.

Furthermore, none of these signings have addressed the fact that we’re painfully one dimensional in attack and in transition. There is a glaring lack of pace and we are desperate for some dynamism — which is why Masuaku and Fernandes looked promising in their brief appearances.

The final question to ask is:

Have any of these signings actually moved the needle? Are any of these players going to propel us to the next tier?

And the answer for me is no.

Most of them are sideways moves. Hart and Hernández are good enough to be squad players for top 6 sides, but the rest of these moves are about firming up our position in mid-table. At best, they can catapult us to the top of that 8th-17th mass of clubs; at worst, these players are here to make sure we don’t get sucked into a relegation battle. These signings are all about consolidation and by purchasing players in the 28–32 age bracket, it’s obvious that the club are focused on the next 2–3 seasons and ensuring that we retain our Premier League status.

Which is fine. It’s just not particularly ambitious and runs out counter to all of the “big club” posturing and rhetoric that is rammed down our throats constantly. And, honestly, finishing in the top half of the table is our ceiling without smart investment in young players who could develop into elite level talent — we need to start taking a risk on players who are on their way up rather than on their way down.

The thing is that we could be so much more.

(continued in part 2).