Southampton are a mess — and it is entirely their own fault

55 days ago, Sport Republic decided that Nathan Jones was the answer to Southampton. The task first and foremost was to bring stability to the club, and to galvanise a group of players who had become visibly deflated under Ralph Hasenhüttl. As with any new manager, a bounce is anticipated — a tangible reaction to the changing of the guard as a new era beckons, with hopes of new fortunes and success.

Fast forward to today, and Southampton have never looked worse in the Premier League era. Fans of older generations will raise Steve Wigley as a worthy adversary to Jones as Saints’ most disastrous manager; those of the younger generation will remember the bleak times under Mauricio Pellegrino. But with four losses from four in Jones’s first taste of Premier League football, zero goals from open play, and about 50 long balls played per minute by central defenders who quite simply look like crumbling every single time they line up a hoof to our unsuited, aerially-ineffective forwards, it’s hard to look past him as the club’s biggest blunder to date.

So, why Nathan Jones? We all asked the question. People might have bought into the idea that he could turn it around at Southampton after a couple of interviews — after all, you’d do well as a manager to not be told that you ‘spoke well’ in your introduction to a club’s support — but it was blindingly obvious that this was never going to work. When Hasenhüttl was sacked, who thought Jones was the perfect candidate to step in and revitalise the club? Not a single soul… apart from the one whose decision counts. Well done, Rasmus.

Let’s go back to the start. Jones comes through the door and does his interviews.

“We’ve got to get results, but Sport Republic look deeper than results. They are going to dissect things, they want substance… The lure was what Sport Republic want to build here. It’s parallel to a lot of the metrics I did at Luton, and that was the big thing for me.

“Let’s address any elephant in the room. I’m not the biggest name they could have gone for. But the substance is in the work and that’s what gave me the confidence to come here.

“They looked at a lot of people and I came out high on their list in terms of what they specifically wanted to build.”

Firstly, Sport Republic want substance, Jones says, and he reckons it’s in the ‘work’ — this, presumably, is the work that is done on the training ground to provoke an upturn in results and performances on the pitch. From what we can all see, Jones has had a solid eight weeks to install his way of playing into this group — about as long as a typical pre-season — and they look absolutely hopeless. Southampton are by quite some distance the worst team in the league, and there are no indications that the ‘work’ Jones boasts he brings to the table brings substance of any kind. If you’re playing shit, 60s style football, the ends have got to justify the means — you have to get results. We’ve not even come closing to deserving a win, and we have looked significantly worse than every Premier League side we’ve played under Jones. In fact, our best performance under him actually came at Anfield, a couple of days after his appointment — that’ll be because he hadn’t had time to go and stamp his mark with his ‘work’. Then, in more than one interview, he was patting himself on the back for being on the touchline and taking the team in the game. It’s literally your job.

Then, the metrics. The metrics that Jones was so quick to reference every time he was quizzed about what brought Sport Republic, and more specifically, Rasmus Ankersen, to the conclusion that he was the man. Jones is big on numbers, and this in itself is not a bad thing. After all, it was an analytics-driven approach at Luton that helped them punch well above their weight and financial standing to achieve a lot of success.

The problem is that we have had zero communication on what those metrics are. What was seen at Luton that Ankersen and the decision-makers — if there are any now — saw that was firstly comparable and secondly transferrable between the job he did there and the situation Saints find themselves in? We don’t know, and with every passing game as Southampton get worse and worse under Jones, it becomes increasingly baffling.

Jones routinely fell back on the underlying numbers at Stoke. He was an absolute catastrophe there, but in most press conferences throughout the season, referenced that the results did not tell the full story. But with six wins in 38 games and plenty of Stoke fans labelling you the worst manager they’ve had at the club — and it looks like we’ll be sharing similar sentiments — it’s hard to argue your case. Data is an extremely useful tool if it is not the solitary lens through which you view and experience football — games are won not on spreadsheets despite their clear and undoubted value, but by a marriage of visible reasons to trust a process, building relationships with players and effective usage of the numbers in front of you. That didn’t happen at Stoke and it’s not happening here either.

Southampton do not have a very good squad of players, all things considered. There are good young players, some very good senior players, but there are weaknesses all over the pitch. There’s plenty to be said about how Sport Republic have built this squad — not that building a group of high-level footballers is actually their intention, but instead to harvest a collection of assets with high resale value — but one thing that is abundantly clear is that it’s not built for long-ball football.

Nevertheless, Southampton have attempted 250 long passes under Jones — the second most in the Premier League — since his appointment. Saints recycle the ball around the pitch with zero purpose or pattern, until one of the central defenders is instructed to clip a ball over the top to either Ché Adams or Adam Armstrong. Neither of these players are even remotely good in the air. Adams is extremely powerful and excellent with his back to goal, but the ball either sails over his head half the time or he is faced with a taller centre-back, creating a mismatch and a straightforward turnover of possession. I wish I could delve into a bit more about how we play and what we do with the ball in the final third, and look at defensive shape, and the identity we’ve developed… but it doesn’t exist. Jones has had two months with the players and there are no patterns in the final third, the defence is still leaky, and there is no identity whatsoever. The only thing that you can really say is that we’re just shit — everywhere.

Jones talks in riddles and neither the supporters nor players respect him — that much is already abundantly clear. After the 2–1 loss to Fulham, he noted that we have set up with three central defenders because we are not the most aggressive, physically imposing team in the league. That came after Fulham had just scored a winner from a set-piece and after he’d left out Duje Ćaleta-Car again — the most experienced of Saints’ centre-backs, and a player who won 77% of his aerial duels for Marseille last season, which put him at the very top of all players who played for more than 2,000 minutes across Europe’s top five leagues.

In his place, Lyanco. No-one can deny his passion or commitment, but that is absolutely as far as it goes with him — he is at worst a calamity of a footballer, and at best a loveable idiot. There is no reason why he should play unless there is an injury crisis, as he has proven with disastrous performances time and time again, yet he has been one of the first name on Jones’s team sheets. He handed Fulham a penalty on a plate just before the turn of the year, and four days later played a hospital pass to Mohammed Salisu, who couldn’t stop Brennan Johnson knocking it to Taiwo Awoniyi for Nottingham Forest’s goal last night. Maybe it helps Jones knowing that there’s a player out there who’s just as out of his depth as he is.

What Jones has come out with in pretty much every pre or post-match presser has been filled with nonsense, and if the fans are confused, you can bet that the players are. Body language is subjective and open to interpretation, but as the entire Saints team moved back into shape ready for kick-off after Forest’s goal last night, they looked despondent, with their heads down. Jones, meanwhile, was gesturing on the touchline, being the shouty little man that he is, trying to look busy while his two assistants — one of whom does not possess an A License and the other who was playing for Oldham Athletic in League Two last season — were discussing their next steps. Not one player turned to look at nor listen to Jones when he was throwing himself around his technical area. If the allegations that the players found Ralph Hasenhüttl overly animated and emotional during games are indeed correct, what must they think of this guy?

The players should take a portion of the blame for where we are, because there have been too many passengers this season and too many playing below their usual level. It’s hard to have sympathy for them, but when their new manager is insistent upon saying “they” instead of “we” every single time he’s asked about the moments that led up to his dreaded arrival, it’s easy to see why they don’t respond to him. You’re the manager of this football club. You have had the time to make changes, and to your credit, you have. We are a million miles worse than we were under Hasenhüttl, and that is really quite something. Sacking him wasn’t the wrong call, but appointing Jones? It’s hard to think of much worse a decision we could have made.

Jones is also insistent upon telling us to lower our expectations because it takes time to turn things around, and that he’s only been here for three or four matches. He’s been here for three or four matches only because there was a World Cup break — an absolutely golden opportunity that any manager coming in midway through a season would relish — that provided him with weeks to work with all but two of the first-team squad. He’s not new; he’s not just come through the door. He’s had more time than he deserved already. I’m of the belief that, within reason, it is never too early to sack a manager when the red flags are already so prominent; but you can absolutely sack a manager too late. He should have gone after Brighton toyed with us and made us look like a League Two team — the signs have been there for all to see.

Jones is a problem — perhaps Southampton’s biggest, in fact, such is the extent to which he is dragging the team down. But where the club find themselves is not entirely of his own doing, and ultimately, you’d be hard pressed to find many managers who have spent their entire careers in the lower tiers of English football who would not jump at the opportunity to manage in the Premier League. I don’t blame him for taking the job, even if he is trying to make himself the victim of it all. I blame Sport Republic, who despite early optimism over Southampton finally achieving a positive net spend in a transfer market, have made a mess of every single major decision.

We all know about the apparent pursuits of Gonçalo Ramos and Cody Gakpo in the summer. Clearly there were attempts to resolve our glaring weakness in the attacking areas, but these either came too late in the summer or were not seductive enough to the selling clubs or players themselves. Regardless of the reason for any move for attacking reinforcements breaking down, it was still insufficient, and tainted what could have been Southampton’s best transfer window in quite a while.

Hasenhüttl made countless mistakes that resulted in his justified dismissal, but he was forced to cope without a natural goalscorer or an attacking player with star quality, and in the games in which the margins were fine, it cost us, and ultimately, cost him his job. Ché Adams is a good player but he is not a good goalscorer, and the weight of the burden he is shouldering is too much.

Sport Republic left it too late to sack Hasenhüttl, with the decision over his future drawn out and leaked to the media with the unravelling of his tenure in full focus for a number of weeks leading up to his departure. So, less than a year into the owners’ reign, they’d already made two major failures: failing to address the one crucial position of the playing squad that was lacking in the summer, and then leaving Hasenhüttl to be a sitting duck while they went back and forth over whether or not they fancied replacing him or not, as results continued to worsen and the mood among Saints fans soured.

The third major mistake is then appointing Jones. I’m not going to waste more of my time or yours talking about the guy. But the blame lies with those who are responsible for identifying him as the perfect candidate and pursuing these things — if what has been reported is to be believed, that was Ankersen’s responsibility, and it was his choice. How’s it going, Rasmus?

But just wait. On the one-year anniversary of Sport Republic’s takeover of the club, they might be on their way to their fourth major mistake. They failed to land a forward in the summer, and Saints have paid the price dearly, so you would assume that there are one or two players lined up to come right through the door promptly when the January window opens. They had four months to negotiate with clubs, attract key targets, and set about making this squad competitive in the Premier League — they even had the benefit of six weeks during which they didn’t need to worry about Saints losing. But no, nothing. Mislav Oršić appears to be joining us from Dinamo Zagreb, which I think is actually a very good signing, but why was this not done ahead of the Forest game — the biggest we’ve had since Swansea away in 2017/18? We will sign more players and they will strengthen the squad ahead of the second half of the season, but the ownership had to have these incomings ready sooner, and they had to ensure that they were given the best possible chance of featuring in what is the most promising run of fixtures of our season. Perhaps the thinking is that they won’t need much integration as the attacking players’ roles will only consist of high balls being pumped up to them or over them under Jones.

Then, we come to the existing board. Martin Semmens and Toby Steele. I found it particularly strange that more wasn’t made of Semmens apparently playing an instrumental role in selecting the club’s new owners. He mentioned that there were in excess of 20 possible suitors, and many of them may well have been even more disastrous than Sport Republic are proving. However, is it not a bit strange to anyone else that the chairman of the football club is… helping to pick his own boss? It seems like that type of situation wouldn’t typically occur.

The fan forum at the start of the season pretty much set the tone. Semmens, sat on his high horse, responded to a supporter who quite rightly put to the panel that he spent his hard-earned cash following the club up and down the country, all for nothing most of the time, and Semmens responded by telling him that he does the exact same. You don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with that exchange, but it’s another reflection of how the club’s hierarchy is incredibly out of touch with the feelings of its supporters. The shit light show last night was only another iteration of their prolonged disdain for the fans’ desire to, really quite simply, have a football team they can be proud of and enjoy watching every week. That is because it’s not a priority.

We have heard on countless occasions that it’s important we convince players that playing for Southampton is good because it means they can go to a big six club in a couple of years time. Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mané, among others are the main examples used. But two things are important: those players were signed to make the team play better, not chiefly because they possessed big resale value, and those two players were poached by big clubs for big fees BECAUSE they excelled in a good team. Do the people running the club think they’re going to still fetch £50 million or so each for Armel Bella-Kotchap and Roméo Lavia if we finish bottom of the league and go down? Not a chance. Selling players for high prices is conducive to them helping the team play better and flourishing in the right environment. Ensuring that players are recruited for that primary purpose is essential.

But it’s not. And Toby Steele has said as much. “We need to sell players to be net profitable. And I think the squad we have now enables us to return to that profitability in the next two to three years.” We know from his lies about the Itchen North debacle and a lot of what he’s said in the past that, really, he doesn’t know much about what the common football fan wants from their club, but he has stated there that he thinks we’ve got a nice, profitable squad for the next couple of years. You’d think that a board so obsessed with numbers and pound signs would, you know, appreciate the cost of relegation and how their masterplan to buy low and sell high, even with little care nor acknowledgement of the team’s development, can derail a club.

Matt Crocker departed recently, and no-one really knows why for certain. Maybe he left for a new challenge elsewhere, maybe he was pushed by Sport Republic and their desire to have complete autonomy over the running of the club when it comes to footballing matters, or maybe it was just that he came in to reinvigorate the academy, and it was job done for him. Either way, that’s one of the very few figures we had who had clear experience and footballing expertise gone, and to my understanding, this means we have no director of football and no head of recruitment, after Joe Shields decided he’d entertain the Chelsea fans on Instagram rather than the Saints ones for the foreseeable future.

To say that the club is a mess is an understatement of epic proportions. January will bring some form of positivity with fresh faces coming in, and hopefully they’ll be enabled to make an impact by way of a managerial change that sees their strengths played to. Southampton, though, are out of touch and heading in one direction — it’s hard to see where the next point comes from, and it’s hard to have any faith whatsoever that those at the top of the club are taking it seriously enough to make the necessary decisions to preserve our Premier League status. Light shows and long balls won’t do it, though.