By going to Southampton, "inexperienced" Nathan Jones gambled again and he’s on his way to losing… again
The Southampton project has shown some promise, but it looks like it will ultimately crash and burn.
The Premier League is insanely competitive. Every year you have to shoot up, like if this were a pinball machine launcher pull, and hope to land further than as many other teams as you can. Contrary to the conceptualization of teams becoming “stagnant”, viewing clubs through what was their league position the previous session, it should not be forgotten that each season is a fresh slate of 0 points to start for everyone. Of course, we view it through the lens of teams having an assumed finishing position, since some teams are impossible to dethrone because of their indestructible power. All applicable to the Big-Six teams, let’s say. For everyone else, there’s really no such thing as “plateauing”. You’re going down as soon as you start significantly, or even slightly, faltering. Every year that Stoke City finished 9th through the middle part of 2010’s decade, that was an incredibly good job done. But it’s hard to conceptualize an identical result to the last as “progress” – even though it absolutely is. Because again, for as strong as a team as you might have, the slate is wiped clean from one season to the next. It’s a race and the bottom 14 teams in the Premier League start at enough of an “equal playing field” for one to see clearly how there isn’t some position you’re just given. It’s progress because you start from zero the next season. And you have to shoot up higher than the rest if you want to finish where you once did. Everyone’s coming after your spot. You might be finishing 9th and wish for more, but to survive is to win. It doesn’t matter that Stoke finished 9th in 2016-2017. They blinked the following season and went to hell – got relegated and that’s been it.
Southampton were left as the most prominent inheritor of that Stoke baton. Southampton have been a story of fantastic success, even if a lack of a meta-narrative around them has unjustly made them feel lackluster. If it all ends at the end of this season, it will have been 11 consecutive seasons in the richest, highest-grossing football league in the world. They’ve made money, they’ve been sold twice, they’ve played a cup final, they’ve finished one of those seasons 6th and played in European competition (just as Stoke did, too, funny enough). They’ve had cult classic teams, they’ve been marvelous to watch at times, whether it’d be with Pochettino, Koeman or Hasenhüttl. They’ve afforded to get really derailed such as the year they thought it was a good idea to hire Mauricio Pellegrino, probably because his name was close enough to the other Argentinean dude and therefore those vibes would come back. They didn’t; not even a little bit. They finished that season with Mark Hughes, who started it at Stoke, and fended off a relegation that Stoke did not… fend off. What interesting and exciting times those were.
Obviously, it didn’t last because the club was kind of all over the place, being overly cheap, not having that clear of a direction and Hughes himself having lost a lot of his own luster, of his own touch. Got subsequently replaced when it rapidly became clear that it wasn’t gonna work. That’s when Southampton made the move that would mean five more years of Premier League football for them. They hired a Bundesliga runner-up-with-newly-promoted-Leipzig manager. They hired Ralph Hasenhüttl. At the end, it ended in tears because life demands so much, effort and commitment. And luck and knowhow and ability. In sport, in football, at this level of the game, it has to be relentless. Or you will be eaten alive, which is kind of what is happening to them now.
It's hard to fight collective, popular opinions. Especially with Gavin Bazunu in goal, Lyanco in defense or Che Adams in attack. When there was still a chance, to refreshen, to double down on all of the team’s positive traits and trends, the (new) powers at be decided to do a 180º and go young. Super young. Too young. It might’ve worked out, but the problem with such a move, with such an integral, philosophical change, is that you need to back it up with money, time, patience and belief. All that was decidedly given was only the first of those four things as is proven by the 30 million pounds they went and splashed all over Romeo Lavia and Manchester City. Hasenhüttl was not only fighting the change in the sporting project, he was fighting against time, the huge amount of it that he had already spent at the club. And he was fighting against perception, the collective, ever-growing in popularity amongst the Southampton faithful feeling that the team was irredeemably stuck under him. Because results, after such a core shake up to the team, had not just maintained themselves where they were but had gotten unsurprisingly worse. Why unsurprisingly? Because a team that needed actual, current-day-and-not-future improvements, didn’t get them. Yeah, Lavia is great and so is Bella-Kotchap; they were still having to play with ever-weirder combinations of Che Adams, Adam Armstrong and even less prolific strikers than them, up front. It was bad. It still is.
Hasenhüttl had squeezed so much out of it what he had that there just wasn’t that much more to squeeze out. It wasn’t a lack of a coaching ability that was shown close to relentlessly by him in his previous just about five years as manager of the team. Nathan Jones, even if people will probably miss the forest for the trees over-focusing on Jones himself, has shown just how complicated it is to get results in the Premier League with such an overly young, discombobulated team.
Which finally takes us to the Nathan Jones component of all this. Of this fascinatingly layered story of football decisions, stagnation, fighting off decay, beating all (or enough of) your rival teams again, season after season because it doesn’t stop. Sport goes on, life goes on. Just as Jones’ sporting life has gone on from Luton Town – twice. The discourse around him has been, even if not entirely unexpected, pretty wild and quite over-the-top in moments. Especially emanated from the voices of people that are fine pundits but just not that extra sharp of football analysts. On an episode of a football talk show that shall remain nameless, right at the turn of the turn of the year, the narrative lazily became “Southampton have made a mistake because they’ve hired a manager without Premier League experience”. Whoo, that magical power, that fix-all guarantee of success. Except, obviously, it is not. These people, when pushed back on it, would probably say that it isn’t either. But their flawed arguments end up implying it. There’s this ridiculous notion that if you just go out and hire Sam Allardyce or Roy Hodgson in the year 2023 that you will have an overwhelmingly better chance of success. What that position very conveniently ignores, amongst other things, is how catastrophically bad it went for the last two teams that went down that “tried and tested” road in West Brom with Allardyce two years ago and Watford with Hodgson last year. It’s not to say that those managers were never very good and effective at the job of football coaching – they were. But time moves and both of them were retired when they accepted those last coaching positions.
The problem with “he has no Premier League experience” argument is that in a macro sense it is a circular argument. Since you should not hire managers without “Premier League experience”, you will never hire anyone new. Until everyone who once had “Premier League experience” is dead and there’s no one left. I’m of course being silly and facetious by taking the argument to its extreme. But it is the natural conclusion of it. Because many times, for people making those kinds of points, even managers from other top European leagues (even if they’ve actually won those leagues!) aren’t good enough either because the Premier League is so great, so especial, so incomprehensible in its wonderfulness that basically no one can crack it, of course. I guess the only allowable way to get into the Premier League is by getting promoted with a team and not getting relegated before you eventually make the jump to a bigger team.
It’s not even like hiring Nathan Jones was hiring some guy from the 6th division that was wildly unprepared to make the jump to the Premier League. This is a guy who finished in the Championship Promotion Playoffs last season with Luton. Five spots in the pyramid just out of the Premiership. Who had taken Luton up all the way up from the 4th division. It’s unbelievable that people latched on to the lack of experience thing. It really is. Nathan Jones might not be good enough, might not be that good of a fit here, might have specific weaknesses in his coaching ability, but at some point, you have to prove it. That he’s coaching in the Premier League now with Southampton instead of with Luton, let’s say, next season, is a perfectly sensible thing that has happened. Hiring a manager who is up-and-coming, by all accounts bright, who has had pretty much unstoppable success with a team that is sitting right outside this mystical, magical land that is the first division of English football, is actually a good decision. It’s trending badly, it very likely will end up being a failed decision, but the process behind it, the thought and justification for it, was not wrong just because they end up losing. You end up losing because in sport someone must lose for someone to win. Someone making a better decision than you, someone having more resources than you, doesn’t make your decision the wrong one.
It might have been a mistaken one, a misstep, however, for Nathan Jones. Again, all that same logic applies from his perspective. It’s a Premier League head-coach position. There are very few of them and staying put at little old Luton will just not guarantee you that success. No less because the day you start losing, if you do, even little old Luton will kick you to the curve and move on. Because we like processes, but like three points better. As my good friend, UEFA PRO licensed coach Lorenzo Manchado says, there is something to be said about a “captain” staying with his boat until the end, about staying until it sinks, until the bitter end. One can make one’s own judgement on the moral merits of each decision like this, in this case in football, and that is probably its own conversation that deserves to be had separately. But it is understandable, logical, that Jones decided to say yes to Southampton’s proposal. For as sort of illogical, wildly distorted and unfair to ourselves that regrets can be inside our minds, you want to jump on whatever you believe to be the best opportunity and situation that presents itself to you at a given time.
Ultimately, though, this particular one seems like it will end badly. For both parties. A club relegated; a manager jobless. It really has not worked out thus far and the bare minimum in these situations is basically for it to work out. The thing, however, about getting worn out about a manager as excellent as Ralph Hasenhüttl, is that you’re bound to miss him when he’s gone. I haven’t gone swimming in Southampton Twitter to skim and see if that actually is indeed the case. But I do know that the feeling towards Nathan Jones is not one of great empathy. Because if Hasenhüttl’s stoic, sometimes cold and distant disposition can hinder and ware on sympathies and feelings of good will, someone of Jones’ tense, frantic energy (he has been seen from time to time with his fingertips individually bandaged because he will have bitten his nails to such a point as to create blood-ridden wounds) is likely to sit weirdly with a crowd used to winning at a higher rate than this one in the Premier League for over a decade. If he’s winning, all quirks become endearing – look passed at the very least. But he’s not. Not by much, since the team is competitive enough, is fighting, is feisty, can string together some not insignificant passages of play. But it ultimately is proving insignificant.
Rory Smith of The New York Times, on last week’s Thursday episode of The Totally Football Show, said about being in the press box and watching Jones in action on the touchline of the Carabao Cup second-leg semifinal in Newcastle: “When something happens that Nathan Jones doesn’t like, he jumps up and down like Yosemite Sam”. Those are things that easily get under people’s skin when things aren’t going right. People, and football fans in particular, like seeing emotion but also calmness, control. Characters such as Jones, in hard times, end up being frowned upon because that’s exactly what overreacting, overgesticulating causes: for things to be frowned upon. People, at least the more the cynical and sour of us, think that someone like this is just doing it for show – just to trick us about how they care more than they actually do. All things that might play against him in the court of public opinion, as Southampton remain anchored at the bottom of the table with just 15 points won. That double-legged semifinal affair against Newcastle in the League Cup was an interesting contrast to what this season is otherwise transpiring as. Contested, tight, ultimately lost because Newcastle are operating on a generally superior level tactically to them and because, more than anything, have better players.
It is precisely players which Southampton went out seeking in the transfer market this past month of January in hopes of things finally pivoting back in the right direction. They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. That is precisely what the club has thought to itself and tried: scrambling as many eggs into the bowl as possible and see if on Nathan Jones the frying pan something edible can be cooked, something that doesn’t end up all stuck at the bottom, through their lack of effective fire-power, through their defensive inconsistencies, through Bazunu being the supposed answer to their half-decade-long goalkeeping questions only to end up being kind of worse than all of his predecessors.
All the fresh, quality produce, still, is mostly there. It’s just a lot of ingredients, some of them extravagant, some of them Luton Town right-back James Bree (I guess we’re doing cheese with the omelet). Some of them a huge black pepper grinder that might be just that little bit of spice that balances it all out. His name is Paul Onuachu, he stands just above two meters tall, has made a habit out of scoring goals in Belgium and looks like a ton of fun. Alongside him have come Argentinean midfielder Carlos Alcaraz, as the sort of chimichurri to throw over everything, just like he seems capable of being on top of everything that happens on the pitch from his central on-field position; and also Kamaldeen Sulemana, a Ghanaian winger who more than any food ingredient is more like a can of effervescent Red Bull or something that is gonna go along this dish of football (James Ward-Prowse is the fork with which you eat this omelet, in case you’re wondering, because how couldn’t you wonder). But, just like Jones’ energy, everything feels frantic, almost tearing at the seams, not yet clicking on the field.
Days like the one we saw last weekend feel like horror written on the walls. Player for player, taking away coaching, good internal dynamics, momentums positive or negative, the value of group familiarity and the such, you look at Southampton’s squad and wonder… is this worse than this Brentford team that has just simultaneously glided by and mauled them 3-0? Brentford might be the most optimized team in the whole of the division. Maybe even more so than Arsenal, Brighton and Newcastle. But remove all other factors, go player by player, and there’s not that much of a disparity. Yet one team sits 7th the other one sits 20th. And that’s why the game ended how it ended, three-goals-to-nothing. Which goes to speak about how many complexities make up elite football. It’s not even that Thomas Frank good, Nathan Jones bad. It’s that Thomas Frank is extraordinary (another guy without Premier League experience until a year and half ago!) and that Nathan Jones outside of Luton we’re, at the bare minimum, not sure.
Interestingly, he already had a previous “outside of Luton” experience. Four years ago, when Luton were in the 3rd division and Stoke were freshly relegated to the Championship, Jones made the same equivalent jump. And crashed and burned in horrific football fashion. Took the reigns of a promotion contender that was severely underwhelming halfway through the season and with Jones then went it on to win only 3 of his first 21 games. And just 2 out of his subsequent last 14. The circle, in a way, might close off in a quite twistedly, unsatisfyingly satisfying way. Southampton down where Stoke are, middling in the most middle of Championship midlands, now well below Luton, where Nathan Jones will probably end up back again at some point. After he again gambled and might, again, lose.