I have read quite a few posts after mine but not all but I thought I would just clear up a more sensible explanation of how I and many others see things.
Yes there are quite a few that seem to have forgotten about "The Southampton Way" and have fallen in love with "this season's" performance every year. "The Southampton Way" is a long term plan though and league position/Europe lasts for a year and means nothing the next.
So yes there are a great many that are distraught we have lost Koeman because he has achieved a lot in his tenure. You cannot argue with the league positions.
However there are people like me that while chuffed to bits with the rise and rise since Markus Liebherr bought us are fully sold on "The Southampton Way" because for a club of our size we cannot compete with the budgets of clubs with a much larger established fanbase. Yes we might be close to you in the Deloite "Rich List" but that is mainly down to the TV money. If Everton get back to the top 6 for a couple of seasons they will blast away from us because of that established fanbase buying up more merchandise again and Everton being a much more marketable product than Southampton is at the moment. If Everton stayed in the bottom half and we qualified for Europa for the next 5 years we would still not have built up a global brand as large as Everton still has. That is reality.
When an other poster talks of us being run like a bigger club they are right. This isn't about anything so simple as just as having a DOF or using a few kids. It is from the ground up that everything in this business has been linked together to make sure that every drop of potential is utilised.
From Sport Science through to the way we are trying to branch out commercially everything is linked up as if we were already a huge organisation and in that way it is run as a big club.
"The black box" is in essence just a buzzword and has been described as if it is purely an scouting tool where the reality is it is much more than that. It is the hub that all the other departments feed off. Where people might preceive it as purely a scouting tool the reality it is a hub of stats that monitors players across the world as well as every player of all ages on our books. It contains details from every training session, every match, every fitness regime. Everything that all of our players of all age groups do. That means if we lose a player then we know exactly what that player gives us in terms of stamina, yards, positioning, how they interact with each different team mate and we can zone in on players from around the world that match those stats or improve on them BUT the important thing is that we can also monitor from what we already have in all the age groups that actually we have a player that near enough fulfills or even exceeds what the analysis says we need for that replacement. It might mean a player that it is not so obvious from playing in a U18 or U21 game that they are what we need there comes through in analysis.
That is the gripe with Koeman in my eyes. There were grumblings (leaked by ITKs so heresay to nobodys like us) about his lack of involvement with the academy bordering on an apathy towards the quality within the academy before Christmas.
The knub of it as was mentioned earlier is someone was quite right when they mentioned Harrison Reed, JWP and Targett not pushing on. Is Targett as good as Bertrand? No, Is Harrison Reed as good as Wanyama? No, Is JWP as good as Davis? No. But how are they to push on without gametime. Bertrand, Wanyama and Davis are and should be first choice however there have to be some games where the others get real game time and not notional cameos at the end of games for the sake of it so that they can develop.
So is Koeman a good manager? Yes undoubtedly. Will he take Everton back up to the top 6? Probably. Will the youngsters already established in the side be given a chance? Yes they are established. Will he bring through youngsters to give them development? Unless they are superstars from the start you might have a hard job convincing him to give them real game time.
No sour gripes from me. If I was choosing what I want Saints to be for the next couple of years I would be selfish and say F the kids. We might be able to get 2 more places up in the next few years and give Koeman the cash. However I nearly lost my club 7 years ago and I buy "The Southampton Way" totally and therefore am not overly fussed Koeman leaves. We cannot do what you are doing because you have that base to support that kind of outlay as long as it works. We could not do that.
I do hope we still finish higher than you because thats what football fans do but take any Saints fan that warbles on about us being as big as you for what it states. Moving to Everton at this moment is a step down short term because of one years results. Long Term he is moving on to something that has a higher potential ceiling that we aspire to reach at some term in our future.
