Building a team.

[pauliewalnuts]

Not the on-pitch team, the rest of them.

I was thinking about this last night. Over the last few months, it looks like we've - belatedly - understood the importance of having a team which goes well beyond the manager.

So, in the MON era, MON was the only person on the football side with clout, he was basically (rightly or wrongly) allowed to run it as "his" club.

Then over the course of the next few years, we saw what happens, firstly when you invest so much responsibility and power in one person only for them to fuck off, and secondly, how things pan out when there isn't any continuity beyond the current manager and his immediate team.

So, Houllier and Gary Mc turn up. Houllier gets ill, GM goes, back to square one. McLeish comes in, with Peter Grant. Goes, back to square one.

Then Lambert with his left hand and right hand men. Who promptly turn out to be a couple of arseholes. They go. Lambert stays, gets Roy Keane drafted in. That - in the world's least surprising turn of events - doesn't work out. He goes, Lambert is left on his own.

This is where it looks like things start to change, and it coincides pretty much with Tom Fox arriving. We start to hear about Paddy Reilly more often. Then we hear about performance analysts. Then we see Sherwood beef up his team - Tony Parks, then Kevin Mac, then Mark Robson, then Ray Wilkins. Then we've got a sporting director. We've got scouting people.

It looks suspiciously to me like finally, five years after being given a grade A example of what happens when too much power is vested in one person, we've started to understand that running a modern top flight football club is a complex business, and that if there is ever to be any continuity beyond the man sitting in the manager's chair on match day, you have to build up a significant supporting team.

I've heard a few things from and about Tom Fox that I haven't been hugely impressed with. I thought sponsors of the level of the likes of Quickbooks, for example, would be banished as he punted us into a higher commercial league. I don't like some of the stuff I've read about him following SCG meetings, I understand the importance of building a brand and what not, but I'm not in thrall to it as much as he seems to be.

Similarly, I thought he left it too late to get shot of Lambert (which we got away with, just about), and I was far from convinced by the Sherwood appointment - I still am, in fact.

However, it does look, finally, like we've started to realise that we've been running the club a bit too much like a - phrase from the past - corner shop, for a bit longer than we thought we had.

If this change is of Fox's doing then even on the basis of what we've seen so far, he deserves credit.

[old man villa fan]

Well, somebody has been putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 4 on how a club should be structured.  From past experiences, it is clearly not Lerner.  So unless there is somebody in the background pulling the strings, Fox seems to be the obvious person.

[N'Zimidy]

God knows what Tom Fox thought when he rocked up at B6. Coming from a club that had its shit together in Arsenal, Villa must have seemed non-league standard with only Lambert and a couple of coaches running the entire show.

[villan from luton]

I like what Tom Fox s doing, the club needs it

[Monty]

This was always the problem. You get the feeling that if, hypothetically, Sherwood did a MON and fecked off at 2.59pm on the opening day of the season, that a new manager/head coach/Uberfussballtrainermensch type could take over with minimal fuss.

[Steve67]

The American, the German and the Irishman (and Tim the Englishman), sounds like the beginning of a joke don't they? However, I honestly think that they will take the club forward and stop up from being the laughing stock we have been for the last four years.

[paul_e]

I've said for ages you need to plan for when a manager leaves before he arrives so you know he fits with what you want the club to be long-term.  The whole club needs to be built around a specific style so the scouts and community coaches are looking for the right players to bring in, the coaches are training players in the right way and new coaching staff should all have a track record with that style.  Get it right and you can go from being a club struggling to stay in the professional leagues to being a mid-table premier league club, this is what Swansea should be praised for.

[Villa in Denmark]

Sounds a bit like a discussion we had a few days ago on a different thread.

I think we pretty much agree on him and what he's trying to do; maybe I'm a little to keen too see "green shoots of recovery"
I'll stand by closing comments there.

I'm not saying he's the puppies plums, but he has an air of competence about him,and after the last 4-5 years god knows we need some of that.

[Percy McCarthy]

Very good OP paulie. It's all about good management. That's not me talking about 'the manager' - I mean the scouting, the contracts, maximising the value of whatever resources we have. Hard to believe, in the world of shit we were already in, and why we were in it, we allowed TSM1 to buy Shay Given and give him that contract, and let TSM2 set up the bomb squad. Those are the type of things we must learn from if we're to progress. We've also had good money for lots of players over the last few years, but replaced them badly. And also, like you say, no continuity in the actual team manager department.

No over-arching philosophy, no joined-up thinking, too much lurching from one thing to another. I think we will reap the benefits of recent changes and I'm impressed with Tom Fox too.

On the sponsors, it's all about the bottom line surely?

[OCD]

Some things that were being said during the season about what was going on off the pitch were very promising and for a long time it felt particularly cruel that we might be going down at such a time. We scraped survival and we've lost/losing a couple of key players but because we seem to have the off-field sorted out, we're so much better placed to deal with it than we maybe ever have been.

Paul-e's right in saying Swansea (and Southampton) have shown the way forward by establishing a blueprint. In fact, if you look at some team's on the continent you can see that the likes of Barcelona have led the way in this regard. There's probably other foreign examples too but somebody who knows other leagues better would have to comment. Porto and Atletico Madrid probably, maybe some German sides too.

[ozzjim]

I will reserve praise for how we line up first week in September. We have bought in 45m in sales so far this summer and spent about 17 so far. The strides of the pitch are very good but we need to invest another 30m on the pitch fit them to have any meaningful footing as they will be in the championship if we don't.

[Chinchilla Bathhouse]

I've said for ages you need to plan for when a manager leaves before he arrives so you know he fits with what you want the club to be long-term.  The whole club needs to be built around a specific style so the scouts and community coaches are looking for the right players to bring in, the coaches are training players in the right way and new coaching staff should all have a track record with that style.  Get it right and you can go from being a club struggling to stay in the professional leagues to being a mid-table premier league club, this is what Swansea should be praised for.

Couldn't agree more.  We desperately need to start thinking long-term and build some foundations that will keep us stable whoever comes and goes over the next decade and beyond.  We can't keep lurching from one management team to the next every couple of years with no apparent care for consistency.  Swansea are the perfect example of what can be achieved if you've got a clear philosophy and then employ people who can implement it right across the board.  Since Martinez put the foundations in place they've been through several managerial changes and not one of them has seriously disrupted their progress.  They don't even need star names to make it work now; they simply appoint people (on and off the field) who fit the philosophy.  It makes for a seamless transition whenever change is required, and has indisputably been successful.  That's the position we need to get ourselves into, where one man's sodding off doesn't throw the whole club into turmoil.     

Compare that to the drastic lurches in personnel and the downturn in fortune we've had due to our lack of vision.  O'Neill to Houllier to McLeish, for example, has got to be one of the silliest chains of managerial appointments ever seen.  It's like staging an Eric Clapton gig, then when he has a hissy fit and storms off because you wouldn't splash out on a new plectrum he wanted, you go and drag Winifred Atwell on stage to continue his set with his guitar.  After her (frankly sacrilegious) version of Layla you shell out millions on a grand piano for her.  She starts playing her own stuff and she's sounding good, but then has a funny turn, so you cart her off and get snooker's Steve Davis to finish the set.  He's just chuffed to be there but has no idea how to play music at all so he just delivers a lecture on mortgage lending rates, which is really shit and boring, so the audience boos because they've spent a fuck of a lot of money to watch this rubbish.  With better planning we could have bought Eric that plectrum (if we hadn't let him waste so much money on mediocre ones in the first place, and then go out and buy more mediocre ones to replace the first lot) and if he still wanted to be a twat about it we could have binned him off and replaced him with Jimmy Page or Robert Johnson or Roger Whittaker, or someone else who was a great guitarist.  I'm sorry, I've got no idea where I am now.  Oh yes, Swansea.  We should be more like Swansea, that's what I think.

 

[paul_e]

I will reserve praise for how we line up first week in September. We have bought in 45m in sales so far this summer and spent about 17 so far. The strides of the pitch are very good but we need to invest another 30m on the pitch fit them to have any meaningful footing as they will be in the championship if we don't.

I don't like seeing things like "If we don't spend another £xm we're fucked" because that's a symptom of the problem.  If you're badly organised and have no vision then you need to spend big money every summer to stay still but there are enough clubs in the top leagues across Europe who's net spend since the turn of the millenium is virtually nil to show that oit's not the only way to be.  If this summer we spend another £15m on 2 players but both fit exactly what we need (let's say Oubare and Praet for example) and they're part of a side that finishes 10th then we've spent enough.  The key things is that will fill the gaps in the squad properly, I really don't care how much it costs to do that and I don't see that it matters.  Hell if Sherwood decided that Andre Green was ready to come in and be Benteke's replacement and it proved to be correct then fucking brilliant, even if that means we didn't bother signing another striker at all.

[OCD]

I like how Swansea have appointed somebody who's been at the club a long time and really gets it. Appointing Michael Laudrup was actually a bad move for them as he was taking them away from their philosophy but they seem stronger now. Sometimes there's comments on here about appointing someone like Laursen, Petrov etc. and it's rightly not taken seriously. With the right infrastructure at the club though, it might one day be possible to appoint someone who has been at the club a long time and is a natural leader.

[ozzjim]

I will reserve praise for how we line up first week in September. We have bought in 45m in sales so far this summer and spent about 17 so far. The strides of the pitch are very good but we need to invest another 30m on the pitch fit them to have any meaningful footing as they will be in the championship if we don't.

I don't like seeing things like "If we don't spend another £xm we're fucked" because that's a symptom of the problem.  If you're badly organised and have no vision then you need to spend big money every summer to stay still but there are enough clubs in the top leagues across Europe who's net spend since the turn of the millenium is virtually nil to show that oit's not the only way to be.  If this summer we spend another £15m on 2 players but both fit exactly what we need (let's say Oubare and Praet for example) and they're part of a side that finishes 10th then we've spent enough.  The key things is that will fill the gaps in the squad properly, I really don't care how much it costs to do that and I don't see that it matters.  Hell if Sherwood decided that Andre Green was ready to come in and be Benteke's replacement and it proved to be correct then fucking brilliant, even if that means we didn't bother signing another striker at all.

I can see where you are coming from and I agree, and take back the money spent, but would maintain that we need to bring at least 4 more players of the quality of Amavi and Guere' reported quality or we will be in big trouble. I like Fox, I like the fact we have a sporting director and I like that we are looking like with Reilly we actually have some semblance of common sense about the way we are targeting players coming in, but we finished 17th, and lost 6-1, 0-1, 4-0 in our final 3 games, with the players who are yet to be replaced, and we are 3 weeks from the season kicking off. Building a team behind the scenes is a great step forward, but it has to be matched on the pitch. I think it has at coaching level now, and scouting finally, but the team has to show the fruit of that machine.