Here’s a Picture of Ross, Which Hasn’t Been Used to Hype Up his Work

Ross Wilson finally left the Saints after many weeks of
rumours and joined Glasgow Rangers. My initial reaction was “See you later
Ross. Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out“. For me anyway, Ross
Wilson will forever be associated with the second, less successful era of Les
Reed’s time at Saints. Is that fair though?

When I look at Saints struggles over the last three seasons as a whole, the
finger of blame inevitably points at the departments that Wilson has been
involved in. Recruitment since 2015 has on the whole, been garbage with us
really only having signed (and retained) two players who will have increased in
value, those being Hojbjerg and Redmond.  Since then we have signed a load of players
who have been average at best and who aren’t performing well enough, we will struggle
to get any money for and who are hanging around stinking out the accounts,
meaning we struggle to move them on and try again. Wilson’s arrival at Rangers
is being hailed as some sort of triumphant coup for them and It seems always
every media release has a picture of Ross with Moussa Djenepo, who is looking
like he might be successful. They don’t use a picture of Ross with Elyounoussi
or Lemina or Carrillo or Hoedt or any of the other complete failures that we’ve
wasted big money on. Van Dijk has been touted as a massive Ross Wilson triumph
but that one happened just six months after Wilson joined and so I do wonder
how much input he actually had into that one, bearing in mind Les Reed was
still there and Koeman was the manager.

Is it totally Ross Wilson’s fault that the recruitment has largely gone to pot?
Let’s rewind a bit.

The transfer of the set us back, certainly on the pitch, was when we tried to
replace Graziano Pelle with Charlie Austin. This is where we first went down
the cheap and cheerful route. Austin cost £4 million because he was in the last
year of this contract and everybody seemed irrationally excited about the fact
that we secured this striker for such a low fee. However, we paid peanuts and
we got a monkey. We certainly didn’t get the target man striker who could lead
the line like Rickie Lambert had done and Graziano had continued. Ever since
Pelle left, it is no secret and no mystery that we have struggled to break
teams down especially at home. We don’t seem to have a clue of what to do
against teams who sit tight and defend deep against us. When you have a big
target man you have the option of going over the top and it’s an option we
haven’t had since we went for the cheap replacement.

Having had a bit of a moan about Wilson’s record, the question remains – has the
recruitment department has been fighting with one hand behind its back? Almost
certainly yes. There have been better players linked who we seemed to be in
pole position for but for some reason it hasn’t happened – James Maddison who
went to Leicester and a couple of years ago, the Rickie/Graziano replacement we
never had – Sebastien Haller, who is now tearing it up at West Ham.  Were we penny pinching over a few quid?  Back in the days when we were plucking
players out of Europe and turning them into superstars, it was a little bit
easier. If you go with the basic truism of ‘you get what you pay for’ then five
years ago, an absolutely top level player would cost you about £50 million and
your level 2 player, the kind of player that would use Southampton as a
stepping stone to greater things, you could buy for about £15 million and we
did and we did very well. We signed players that would later be later sold on
for huge money like Van Dijk and Mane or we signed players like Wanyama, Pelle
and Tadic who did a good and effective job for us and help turned us into a
club that regularly finished in the top half. 

Times have changed and top level player will now cost you £100 million plus and
therefore the level of market that we want to be in will also have roughly
doubled so you need to be paying £25 to £30 million to have the same success
rate as we had before. The amount of money we spend on a player has gone up a
little bit but it’s only gone up to about £18 or £19 million so I would suggest
for that money, you are dealing with level 3 and hence players like
Vestergaard, Hoedt, Elyounoussi, Lemina. Is it any wonder things are falling
away?  It’s a simplistic way of looking
at it I grant you but I feel it holds some water at least.

Whilst we’re on the subject and looking back at the transfer window from the
summer. We spent £15 million on a striker from the Championship and that so far
hasn’t worked and we spent roughly the same on a winger who looks incredibly
promising but unfortunately he’s been injured for most of the season. We needed
players in those positions and we needed a centre half but do you really think
that Ralph would’ve wanted to wait to the last second of the transfer window to
sign Kevin Danso who as I write, has not played one game in the position he was
bought in for. I’m sure that he would’ve rather spent a bit more and maybe
secured Willi Orban who was his captain at Leipzig and by all accounts a strong
defensive organiser. Instead, we have padded out an alreaedy over-padded squad again with players
who are not immediately making the first 11 any better.

This brings us on neatly to Chairman Gao. I’m sure that Gao bought the club
because he liked the business model of Premier League TV income and the
sideline income stream of signing a player for £15 million and then selling him for twice or
three times that amount couple years later. Hasn’t really worked there has
it?  What Gao needed to do first was draw a line under the mistakes that
we made before he joined and fund some proper recruitment so we were recruiting
players at the right level and not a lot of mediocre players who are as far as
Gao is concerned, money down the drain. All he’s done with his austerity
approach is to keep funding the decline by forcing us into signing third rate
players who ultimately don’t achieve much either in terms of being sold on for
a profit or contribution to the team itself.

Maybe a bad example but I had a sharp intake of breath when
Villa signed Tyrone Mings for £25 million but in the true spirit of get what
you pay for, if they sell Mings to Manchester United next summer, what do you
think the price will be? It will be £75 million plus. Villa spent some serious
money on their first choice target, and he triples in value in one season,
Saints on the other hand, needed a transfer deadline time extension to get a
loan deal with a get out clause for a 20-year-old centre back and we all expect
him to be the answer to our defensive woes. 

I also think Gao needs to start funding things properly at some point because
if he doesn’t, it’s not inconceivable that Ralph is going to walk.

Ralph joined Southampton because he wanted to further his career and one day be
manager of a really big club. That’s fair enough. We have got to remember that
Ralph has managed a team to 2nd place in Germany in one of Europe’s top
leagues. That’s a level that Southampton are never going to get to, so he is by
far and away above our level and it was a major coup to get him to join. In my
opinion, we are letting him down at the moment with the squad that is available
to him. He is not a miracle worker and we are basically playing this season
with the same squad as last season so why should it really be any better? Our
squad is odd – when we sold Matt Targett, I assumed that Jake Vokins was ready
to be the back up to Ryan Bertrand but he’s not ready to even play in the Carabao
Cup – I can’t imagine Ralph was happy going into the season with only one left
back.  We have only three central
midfielders who are all one-paced.  We
have five centre backs and you could basically pick any two of them out of a
hat.  Sure, Ralph has made some decisions
that have seemed strange on the face of it in the opening weeks of the season
which have raised a few questions but if things don’t change in January or at
the latest next summer, then I can’t see Ralph being here too much longer.  I guess it’s a case of whether he agreed in
advance to a low-budget, treading water season this year.  His stock was high at the end of last season
and it is slightly lower after the start we have made this season. He won’t
want that to carry on but if we as a club don’t give him the tools to work with
then that’s the only way it’s going to go. 
.

So after my initial celebration at the departure of Ross Wilson, I now kind of
think that he was a symptom of the problem as much as he was the problem itself
but he certainly shouldn’t be lamented as a great loss.  His CV reads like it belongs to one of those people you don’t recruit when you are looking at them on LinkedIn.  A bit too young but has had lots of jobs and not been outstanding at any of them though it says he’s brilliant.  It was interesting
hearing that Saints want to replace Wilson with a ‘player trading expert’. It
won’t matter who this player trading expert is unless we give them a suitable
budget to work with.  No one of course
wants to go into huge debt but there does seem to be many clubs around who are
spending their money more wisely than we are. Looking at transfer fees paid is
of course, not an exact science because it doesn’t take into account length of
contract or how desperate the selling or buying club was at the time but I do
believe that in the main, you do get what you pay for and the self sustaining
approach that we appear to have is certainly not going to improve things
quickly. Maybe we should all temper our expectations accordingly.