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With time a scant luxury nowadays, most managers are content to solely polish front of house.
Ralph Hasenhuttl wants to install new foundations.
The well-documented SFC playbook was the first piece of tangible evidence that played into the idea of Hasenhuttl thinking different to most of his contemporaries. While some modern day coaches focus purely on the here and now, the Austrian aims to establish an eventual lineage to his methods.
Hasenhuttl wants to win in the present. More pertinently, he wants the club to win in the future. It is perhaps a selfless task he’s currently performing, one where success may be accrued later down the line and attained by another manager. Hasenhuttl knows Southampton, a club that is bludgeoned in limbo due a chairman who followed some opaque instructions from the Chinese government, must stay ahead of the curve to endure the rigours of the Premier League.
Saints cannot buy success or take shortcuts to silverware. Their lack of affluent ownership means they must continue to evolve their infrastructure to keep up with the chasing pack, and god knows who else comes on the scene. This includes bespoke methods on the pitch and maximising commercialisation off it. Their modus operandi must be to enhance every single facet of the club as much as their financial might precipitates.
A significant element to future planning for Hasenhuttl, Martin Semmens and Matt Crocker is to maximise the talents of the academy. This is, potentially, the most advantageous resource a club of Southampton’s ilk can possess. Getting the academy right has the power to extract substantial profit margins, unmatched in any other sector of their business.
The remodelling of Southampton’s oldest youth age group is a move that first unfolded in Holland and Germany, where the likes of Ajax would have their reserves and first team training on side-by-side pitches. Saints’ repackaging of the under-23’s to the B-team replicated the key aspects of the continent’s approach to youth football. In what is essentially an archetypal reserve team, they now mirror first team sessions. The purpose of this alignment is to develop the same footballing principles and enable a better, more seamless transition into the Premier League squad.
In early 2020, Ralph Hasenhuttl made his feelings known to Martin Semmens in regards to the chasm between the under-23’s and the first team squad. Hasenhuttl felt the gulf between the two sides had grown so vast, it would require an irrational amount of coaching time to even think of trusting a young player in his squad.
Southampton’s coaching staff would find a number of academy graduates step-up into first team sessions and make early, promising waves. However, a common theme began to develop among those players. Performance levels in training could not be sustained for long enough to warrant match appearances.
Hasenhuttl and his coaching confidants soon analysed the cyclical pattern and swiftly acknowledged the reasons as to why. It was widely accepted the two youth sides did not possess the finer nuances of the first team’s high-octane brand of football.
A young player’s performances were tailing off due to the lack of muscle memory and tactical comprehension in performing the core principles. Key points of contention concerned player’s intuition in knowing when and how to press, the positioning required within the 4-2-2-2 system and the proficiency to pass the ball quickly and vertically.
The return of Matt Crocker coincided with the club’s evolution in academy set-up. It is understood the wheels were already in motion before Crocker was formally appointed Director of Football Operations in January 2020. However, under Crocker, the concept of the B-team would be now fully implemented.
16 months later, early fortunes of the B-team have been, to quote Crocker, “very, very mixed.” While those inside the club accept the transition was always likely to take time to fully reap the rewards, results have done little to halt suspicions that the club’s production line has become stagnant.
This season, both team’s finished bottom of their respective leagues. More troubling, though, is both ended cut adrift from the other sides in their divisions.
“When you see in the moment our B-team, how they are playing and the development of some players, it’s not going the way we wanted to see and it’s tough,” said Hasenhuttl last week.
Tough is one word to assess the B-team’s form this campaign and especially since the turn of the year, where, like the first-team, results has completely nosedived. They are winless in their previous ten games, conceding 40 goals in that time.
Leicester City were Southampton’s closest rivals at their foot of the Premier League 2 division 1 table, six points ahead. The fact they’ve remained largely entrenched in last position for most of the season, enduring the type of malaise that only gets worse the longer it goes on, is the feeling a 10,000 metre runner gets once they’ve been lapped for the first time.
A paltry total of 16 points in 23 games has taken the shine off some progressive periods, most notably the 5-2 win against Manchester City in November. But, for the most part, it has been a season plagued by inconsistency and scoreline beatings.
The next rung upon the academy ladder hasn’t faired much better, either. The under-18’s have also struggled to turn off the defensive tap, punctured and leaking to such an effect that they’ve shipped in a mammoth 71 goals in 23 games. They’ve also accrued six points fewer than the B-Team, finishing on just 10 points.
Forgive this writer if he’s spinning the thread bare, but the under-18’s do have a couple more reasons for optimism at this moment in time, winning two of their final ten matches. Not exactly dazzling form, admittedly.
A perceived shortfall of strength in depth amongst the B-team has been cited and regularly bemoaned at the club since the turn of the year, with fluctuating levels of performance underlining a gulf in ability between players. There is a growing feeling that those who’ve shown incremental developments this season, have had their progress somewhat checked due to a clear talent schism emerging in the squad. The more precocious talents often find themselves playing in a team that is visibly not on the same level.
It must be said Southampton place greater emphasis on football maturation than results. Performance levels in games are more incentivised than picking up three points. Nevertheless, no Premier League or category one team, despite it’s current period of destabilisation, should be suffering heavy defeats as regularly or as routinely as the B-team and the under-18’s do.
While the framework of the B-team will be steadfastly stuck to by the core decision makers in Crocker, Hasenhuttl and Martyn Glover, regular hammerings are unlikely to placate supporters’ concerns. Particularly when it comes to identifying the next generation.
There are caveats to both side’s treacherous seasons, though. At risk of sounding a little too like Hasenhuttl, a lack of alternatives in the first team squad has meant players who were previously sounded to be key figures of the B-team, have made up parts of the first team composition. For example, the likes of Dan Nlundulu and Will Ferry have been occupying two of the nine allocated bench slots in recent times.
Not only has the threadbare nature of squad weakened the overall strength of Hasenhuttl’s bench, but also blunted the success of B-team manager, Dave Horseman. Crocker, who spoke in detail on the academy in a fans forum last week, proffered further mitigating reasons.
“I felt they were good for the first half of the season,” said Crocker. “I look back to November when the first team beat Newcastle on a Friday to make us go top of the league. Then we (B-team) beat Man City at home 5-2 with probably what you would call our ‘B-team players.’
“There’s been a few around the environment that haven’t stepped up and grabbed the opportunity. They’ve been up (in the first team) probably because of circumstance rather than deserved opportunities.”
Since the departure of Nicola Cortese, who held a strong desire to possess a starting lineup made up of solely academy players, the youth set-up has been allowed to decay, with no real structure or clear pathway into the manager’s plans. Upstairs upheaval and continual instability at the club has meant the academy was long neglected.
Under Les Reed and Ralph Krueger’s guidance, the club altered strategy, aware of apparent shortcomings in producing homegrown talent. They opted to set aside a portion of the transfer budget in remuneration costs of the overseas scouting department, extending searches across the rest of the United Kingdom and Europe. Concerted efforts were made to prize promising youngsters away from smaller clubs on the continent.
It is understood Saints paid €1.5 million to Genevan-based outfit Servette for Alexandre Jankewitz in 2018. Two years prior, Yan Valery was bought for €400,000 circa from State Rennais.
Despite the pair’s ostensible talent upon signing, the issue with the change in approach was the negative impression it gave to talent closer to home. Some former youth players and coaches believed it sent out undertones of scepticism in regards to their own work at Staplewood. They felt it undermined the excessive amounts of toil coaches put into developing regional players from adolescence.
Martin Semmens hinted at similar concerns only last week, admitting, “the club can’t keeping buying talent. At some point you’ve got to produce it.”
As previously stated, a common retort of Hasenhuttl is to cite a ‘lack of alternatives’ in press conferences. While it’s assumed he is attempting to convey frustrations over a lack of transfer budget, it should be also viewed as a slight on the players coming through the ranks. It is believed that if Hasenhuttl felt he had ready-made alternatives arriving from the B-team, exasperations over his paper-thin squad wouldn’t be repeatedly brought up.
Inside the club, Alex Jankewitz is one of the few players deemed equipped, technically and tactically, to make the step into first team football.
However, the relationship between Jankewitz and Hasenhuttl is reported to have soured over the winter, at a time when the squad was beset by injuries. Jankewitz featured little, causing the tension between the two relevant parties to grow.
Since early January, there has been been misgivings over the Switzerland under-21 international, after Jankewitz expressed his disappointment in not being selected in the starting XI for the team’s FA Cup tie with Shrewsbury. A subsequent transfer request only complicated an increasingly fractured situation between player and club. A decision will be made on the 19-year-old’s future this summer.
Despite a severe downturn in results across all age groups at the club, Southampton’s commitment to Hasenhuttl is unlikely to waver in the coming seasons. Both parties remain earnest in progressing the club forward for the duration of the Saints boss’s contract.
This means Hasenhuttl will have carte blanche to mould the squad and therefore the B-team, how he sees fit. Crocker will provide a sounding board and offer suggestions, but the playing style and potential pathways into the first team will be down to Hasenhuttl. A responsibility not many manager’s want, or indeed get, in modern football.
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