Squad Building In Global Soccer

Kliq

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Mar 31, 2013
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This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and figured I would write down all my thoughts and start a new thread and see what my fellow SoSH posters think.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of squad-building in world soccer, and the success and failures that different teams have had; particularly the failures for bigger clubs with more resources, and the success by smaller clubs with fewer resources.

I’ve only really closely fallen world soccer for about a decade or so, so a lot of the comparisons I feel like I make in my mind are to how things are done in American sports, which has a completely different economy and my experience following American sports I think sometimes colors my views on what they are doing in Europe, but I still don’t quite understand all the dynamics in play. So what I’m saying may be completely off base.

In general, I find the practice of team building in major soccer to be extremely wasteful and inefficient. As an outsider looking in, I don’t understand some of the general philosophies that go into squad-building in soccer, which seems rife with commonly made mistakes, wasteful expenditures and impatience.

We all know the financial gap between the handful of biggest clubs in soccer and everybody else is growing to what feels like unsustainable levels, and by extension, the gap between the EPL and teams from other leagues, is growing as well. And yet, we have plenty of examples of teams with only a fraction of the resources of other clubs being able to beat out their wealthier rivals. When it comes to the biggest trophies, such as domestic titles and Champions League, those trophies are still won by the football 1%, but whether it is a head-to-head matchup or teams finishing ahead of another in the table, there are numerous examples of poorer clubs beating out much larger enterprises.

How can this be? How can a team like Brentford be competitive at all with teams like Manchester United and Chelsea when they have a microscopic fraction of their financial resources (Brentford have a net spend of £781,000 over the last five years, Chelsea have a net spend of £654 million)? How can a team like Lille beat out PSG for a domestic title in France? How can a big, well-supported club like Schalke fall completely out of the Bundesliga?

To me, it seems like this all comes down to inappropriate use of resources and a complete lack of patience in developing a broader sense of team identity. I’m sure there are logical explanations for all of these things, but the more I study global soccer, the more I am confused by some of its standard practices. I think the issues come in a few different ways.

One is the short life of managers. We all know how quickly managers get sacked in world football. No matter where you are on the table, if you are performing below expectations, the manager is at risk of being fired. 7 out of 20 managers to start the season in the EPL have been sacked and we are only halfway through the season. A few more are clearly on the hot seat and are only a few bad results away from getting the boot.

The culture around managerial sackings is ruthless and teams are incredibly impatient. If a club thinks it should be contending for the title and they are not, the manager can get the boot. If a club thinks they should be in Europe and they are currently on the outside looking in, they can get the boot. If a club is hovering around the relegation zone, they are most definitely getting sacked.

This is largely a reflection of the financial game. Being in Europe is critical for business in global soccer; teams need to qualify for that lucrative competition or else they are taking a big financial hit. The same case is obvious for avoiding regulation, the gap between being in the top flight in a Big 5 league vs being in a lower division is astronomical, and teams will do anything to stay above it.

When I first started seriously watching soccer, I figured that the managers couldn’t actually be that important. They seemed so fluid and transactional, a manager can’t really be THAT important if teams are constantly firing them and looking elsewhere, and the same handful of names shuffle around the biggest teams, right?

Clearly, this is wrong. The consensus is that managers and the tactics they employ are of critical importance to football success, and choosing the correct one is an incredibly important decision for a football director or board to make.

That makes the practices around managers at the highest level feel contradictory. Everyone agrees that managers are important, and the tactics they select and the system they implement requires time to develop, and teams need to have them in order to be successful. Yet few managers are given the proper amount of time to implement a system, bring in players that fit it, and really develop a culture and identity if they are not giving out immediate results. Managers are important, but they aren’t so important that clubs will stomach a down season or perhaps even two to get them on the right track; everyone seems to expect immediate results and if that doesn’t happen, the seat starts to get very warm.

Another fact is player transactions. More than any other sport I’ve followed, it seems like the performance of players in soccer are dramatically tied to their current team, whether that be how a player fits in a coach’s system, familiarity with teammates, quality of competition, or any combination of those factors. A player can be outstanding for one side, drive up their value to an extremely high and speculative amount, and then immediately be disappointing in how they perform for their new club.

This is why it feels like the biggest expenditures teams make really struggle to click at the desired level, and how the big clubs can fall behind their impoverished counterparts. The big clubs have money, but if they are blowing it on Nicolas Pepe, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Eden Hazard, Paul Pogba, Tanguay Ndombele, Philippe Coutinho, Romelu Lukaku, etc. it helps even the playing field. But no matter how many times some of these clubs get bitten (like Chelsea) they will continue to spend record amounts of money to get the latest shiny toy in the window, hoping the success they are having somewhere else can translate to their current environment.

This leads to an incredible amount of waste, and a major squandering of institutional advantages the big clubs have. Smaller clubs with fewer resources are naturally forced to have more cohesion in their make-up, even if they are constantly shuffling around managers to avoid sinking below the tide; and that gives them a chance to level the playing field in some regards against their bigger opponents who are assembling all-star squads with little cohesion.

The smaller clubs are also much more likely to find bargain talents because that is where they shop. Teams like Brighton are able to find huge value in players like Karou Mitoma (purchased for £3 million) and Moises Caicedo (purchased for £5 million) because that is where they generally have to find talent; as opposed to the big clubs who are constantly looking to purchase the next young superstar from the top clubs in Portugal and Holland.

In short, the constant allure of expensive new talent and the consistent shuffling around of players from squad to squad lacks cohesion undermines team chemistry and familiarity, both from a teammate perspective as well as understanding how a player will fit within a coach’s system. Teams are constantly in the hunt for a splashy new signing, alienating previous splashy new signings and starting from the ground floor when it comes to building a sustainable winner.

I am really impressed with how Arsenal, after years in the wilderness, have emerged as a powerful, dynamic squad. After going through a few managers and spending a lot of money, they committed to Arteta and while it was hard and his seat got very hot, they stuck with him and in turn, he developed a system and trust with the players that sees them reaching their potential.

Arsenal have spent money, but they’ve wisely built their squad by finding quality deals (Odegaard for £35 million, Martinelli for £7 million, Saliba for £30 million) while also committing to letting younger players time to develop like Saka and Marinelli, something that is hard to do on squads with Top 4 aspirations. They also let a player like Xhaka, who many fans wanted gone from the club years ago, to get a chance under Arteta to turn things around, and he’s been a rock for them all season.

This is getting quite rambly, but the TLDR version of this is that I find the current way most soccer clubs go about organizing their franchise to be wasteful and impatient, and the demand for instant results leads to clubs drifting along without a clear direction, leading to horrible results, embarrassing finishes in the table and relegation.

I’d be interested in reading what other people think about the direction the game is going, what recent trends can tell us, and if the future of the game is just more dramatic versions of roster turnover and excessive spending.
 

Mighty Joe Young

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It’s inefficient because the pressure on clubs is unrelenting and massive … completely alien to North American sports.

They don’t make enough money from gate receipts given the competition. They HAVE to avoid relegation , or make the European places or win the league or CL or Europa league dependent on their place in the pecking order. So patience is an extremely rare commodity. If Jurgen Klopp wasn’t who he was he would have been sacked a couple of years ago when they lost five straight at home when all their CBs were hurt. And he would be sacked this year as well. The CL was worth £100m to Liverpool last year and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll make it this year. But having a rep as one of the best managers in the world helps.

I think it’s all about the pecking order - or more accurately the club’s self perceived place in that order. They spend accordingly - and usually unwisely. And spending usually means deficit financing. So when their expectation aren’t matched with results they panic.

I think it’s the clubs that don’t fall victim to this pressure that are the best examples of well run organizations … the Brightons and Brentfords of the PL. They are great at identifying and developing young , more or less free, young talent. But who knows whether their ownership would be patient enough to weather a bad run of results … regardless of the reason (injury plague for example).
 

Morgan's Magic Snowplow

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Great post Kliq (and not just bc of the kind words about Arsenal).

I think one additional root cause is that soccer is a sport where how the pieces fit together - as opposed to just the individual quality of the pieces - is really important. If a sport like baseball is on one end of the spectrum, where the quality of a team is really just the aggregate quality of the players, soccer is on the other end. Player quality obviously matters hugely but a well constructed team with pretty good quality will beat a side with more quality but no cohesion.

I also think that if you take out the top 10-15 players in the world the difference in quality between the next 200 or so isn’t really that massive. Don’t obsess over buying the very best players, obsess over buying good players that fit together and can all play the same style of football.

I think you lay out the reasons why teams end up without much cohesion pretty well. MJY’s point about the pecking order is well taken though. Football fans are obsessed with status. The reason Arteta needed to be fired for many people (both opposing supporters and some Arsenal supporters) wasn’t that the club was losing money but that finishing 8th was embarrassing and the club needed to maintain standards. I engaged in countless arguments on an Arsenal board about this, arguing that it was stupid to care about standards or status and the important thing was whether he was building toward something. But people are really stuck in this mindset. If you have a bad year, you’ve gotta go because big clubs don’t stand for having bad years.
 
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Zososoxfan

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World football is also far more asymmetrical than US sports. What I mean is that a major club might be competing in 3 competitions (domestic league, domestic cup, European competition) whereas smaller clubs usually aren't competing in an international competition. It means less fatigue, more cohesiveness, and more time for preparation on a weekly basis. So if a major club was somewhat "lucky" to qualify for European competition the previous season and this year doesn't have the squad depth to maintain that level of performance, it shouldn't be totally shocking that a smaller club might finish above them the following season.

There's also just so many clubs in the 3rd and 4th tiers of world football competing for the same talent. We tend to focus on the top 5-10 biggest clubs because realistically they're the only ones competing for the most prestigious trophy--UCL. There's a second tier that could threaten for it, and have a big wage bill, but don't have the depth, continuity, and more nebulously history or pedigree. But after that (so now we're talking about Crystal Palace, Brighton, Brentford, Leeds, but also Atalanta, Monaco, Villarreal, Benfica, etc.) there's a glut of clubs with approximately similar values and squad quality. Those are still fairly big clubs, and as you go farther down the hierarchy there's more competition. So to return to the US sports analogy, there's a ton of "independent minor league teams" developing talent in a competitive environment, all with the expectation that their best and most promising players will get snapped up to return a profit to the club.
 

OCST

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Relegation pressure is an unknown in American sports. It drives so much of the instability you're talking about. Everton is Exhibit A.

FWIW, I think pro/rel for, say, North American hockey - which could easily accomodate at least 3 tiers with the existing minor leagues - would go a long way toward curing the ratings malaise for that sport.
 

coremiller

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One problem with being patient with managers and squad building is that, sometimes, the team is struggling (relatively) because the manager is building something for the future (e.g. Arsenal under Arteta), but sometimes the team is struggling because the manager is just not very good or is a bad fit for the squad. A counterexample: Despite purporting to be in the midst of a youth movement/long-term squad building plan, Chelsea fired Lampard, hired Tuchel, immediately improved and won the Champions League a few months later.

It can be difficult in real time to know which boat you are in. And of course it's always faster and cheaper to change the manager than to change the players.
 

Morgan's Magic Snowplow

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One problem with being patient with managers and squad building is that, sometimes, the team is struggling (relatively) because the manager is building something for the future (e.g. Arsenal under Arteta), but sometimes the team is struggling because the manager is just not very good or is a bad fit for the squad. A counterexample: Despite purporting to be in the midst of a youth movement/long-term squad building plan, Chelsea fired Lampard, hired Tuchel, immediately improved and won the Champions League a few months later.

It can be difficult in real time to know which boat you are in. And of course it's always faster and cheaper to change the manager than to change the players.
Yup, this is really important. If the manager matters a lot, you can't afford to just stick with a guy through thick and thin. It's all about your ability to evaluate the work of the manager and that raises the question of who is doing the evaluating in terms of the footballing directors and owners.

All of which leads to another point, which is that there are aspects of how football works on the business side that make it harder than American sports to maintain a clean line between the ownership or business oriented executives and the footballing decision makers. In sports with salary caps and CBAs and lots of bright line regulation, it's relatively easy to maintain that line. Almost nobody loses money year to year. A team has an operating budget, there are very strict guidelines about how contracts and other things work, and within that budget and those guidelines the General Manager can largely call the shots about sporting decisions, maybe consulting with the owner as a matter of course but with a lot of leeway to make the big calls. You might get a Jerry Jones or Daniel Snyder owner that wants to meddle, but that's largely an individual problem. European football is a sinkhole financially and the Wild West in terms of financial agreements and negotiations. When teams are constantly negotiating paying huge transfer fees for which they might need to borrow money (or go into the owners pocket) and contracting with players and agents in all sorts of shady ways that aren't governed by a clear set of regulations like a CBA, there is a big incentive for owners themselves or business-side executives to get heavily involved in the footballing decisions. You get these people like Daniel Levy, Ed Woodward, Raul Sanllehi, Toddy Boehly, Florentino Perez, Marina Granovskaia, etc that aren't really football experts but are waist deep in the football-side of the operation and that often compromises the ability to make good decisions.
 

Mighty Joe Young

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Getting back to the original question of how minnows can compete with megadolons …

I was listening to a Liverpool podcast this morning on the current mess. One little tidbit really stood out for me. I think it was Honigsberg relating a convo he had with Peter Kravertz (Klopps #3). He basically said that incoming transfers have a real danger in destabilizing the side - simply because it can take months for them to completely grasp what their new responsibilities are and to mesh with their new teammates. (This convo was last year)

It really accentuates the value of 100s of games of teams playing together .
 

Kliq

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Great post Kliq (and not just bc of the kind words about Arsenal).

I think one additional root cause is that soccer is a sport where how the pieces fit together - as opposed to just the individual quality of the pieces - is really important. If a sport like baseball is on one end of the spectrum, where the quality of a team is really just the aggregate quality of the players, soccer is on the other end. Player quality obviously matters hugely but a well constructed team with pretty good quality will beat a side with more quality but no cohesion.

I also think that if you take out the top 10-15 players in the world the difference in quality between the next 200 or so isn’t really that massive. Don’t obsess over buying the very best players, obsess over buying good players that fit together and can all play the same style of football.
I agree that how the pieces fit is critical to success in soccer more than any other American sport. That is what makes the practices around building that cohesion seem so backwards. If cohesion, both in the system a manager has implemented and in how individual players perform in that system, are so important, why does the game see so much churn between managers and players? Everyone acknowledges that it takes time and persistence to work these things out, but the economics and prestige of the game force teams to make radical changes quickly if they are not seeing immediate results, which most of the time seem to just prolong the suffering.

You're point about only the Top 10-15 players in the world really mattering is an interesting one. There was little chance that a player like Haaland would flop at City, he just feels too good to fail. Anthony at United? Enzo Fernandes at Chelsea? Darwin at Liverpool? We'll see.
 

Mighty Joe Young

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Perhaps it’s because the people responsible for the massive churn are not the people tasked with getting the players to play as a team. I mean, does Boehly have any clue how long it will take Potter to integrate five or six new signings in a single window? I’m guessing the answer is no. If Potter can’t get Chelsea to the CL places this year he’s out - which is insane.

Liverpool trying to integrate Nunez and Gakpo has caused all kinds of knock on problems. No wonder Klopp resisted adding new midfielders last summer.

Maybe this is not a universal concern. Some teams and managers use a very simple game plan which is more suited to plug and play players.
 

Morgan's Magic Snowplow

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Perhaps it’s because the people responsible for the massive churn are not the people tasked with getting the players to play as a team. I mean, does Boehly have any clue how long it will take Potter to integrate five or six new signings in a single window? I’m guessing the answer is no. If Potter can’t get Chelsea to the CL places this year he’s out - which is insane.

Liverpool trying to integrate Nunez and Gakpo has caused all kinds of knock on problems. No wonder Klopp resisted adding new midfielders last summer.

Maybe this is not a universal concern. Some teams and managers use a very simple game plan which is more suited to plug and play players.
I think Boehly has largely approached building a football club like he would approach restocking a baseball team. Acquire the best players you can and as much young talent as possible, put them on long contracts to spread out the financial pain, and assume that it will all fit together fine and that you can easily flip assets down the line if necessary.
 

coremiller

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Cohesion is important, but it's also necessary to keep turning over the squad. Players get old or injured or lose effectiveness. Or they get sick of playing self-sacrificing roles necessary to make the team work. Or they want to leave for more money. Or they just get tired of the manager. Only a very few clubs can consistently afford to either let players run down their contracts and leave for free, or extend older players at high wages well past their primes.
 

Kliq

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Yes, that is a good point Coremiller. I've noticed in soccer the cliff comes really quickly for some players, especially those that rely on pace (gestures towards Son and Salah). That leads to necessary turnover if you don't want to be stuck with an expensive player who is past their prime.