Southampton’s Struggles: Is It Naïve or Brave For a Promoted Side to Play Possession Football?

Southampton have stood out for their commitment to possession football and playing out from the back since their promotion to the Premier League, but it has yielded just a single point over their first seven matches.

Love or loathe their style of football, Southampton are one of the most interesting promoted teams we’ve seen in the Premier League. You might not like the way they play, some may even call it boring, but they have a bold approach and – so far – they’re sticking to it.

Are they naïve? Perhaps. Do even some of their own fans wish they’d switch it up somewhat? Quite possibly. But football doesn’t do one-size-fits-all and there’s no plan, system or philosophy that’s utterly foolproof – it’d be pretty dull if there was such a thing.

Every manager, fan, player and pundit has their own thoughts about what is the right, necessary or best approach. Saints manager Russell Martin is no different, though he’s probably more headstrong than most. The 38-year-old is unashamedly himself and pretty dogmatic in how he wants his Southampton team to play.

After earning promotion to the Premier League with last season’s Championship play-off final win over Leeds United, he addressed how there was already chatter about Saints needing to change their possession-based approach to survive in the top flight.

“For me, if you win this way, it’s the best way,” he said. “There’s no right or wrong way but it’s what I believe in, it’s what we believe in. And we finally won something doing it… so I guess it will be some form of validation for some people. I love what we do and I’m not going to change and I’m sure it will start – it probably already has – [people saying] that we won’t play this way in the Premier League and all of that stuff, the scrutiny and the intensity that will come with that. It is up to us to prove ourselves right and make sure we embrace it without losing who we are.”

Whatever happens over the remainder of the Premier League season, Martin will always have 2023-24. To his credit, he came into the club in June 2023 with a plan to play a certain brand of football and guide Southampton to promotion: he achieved both.

Further to that, the style of play he managed to impress on Saints was the most extreme possession-based system that we’ve ever seen in the Championship.

Their 666.7 passes per game, 597.8 successful passes per game, 89.7% pass accuracy, 66.1% possession, 344.5 passes in the opposition’s half per game and 85.5% pass accuracy in the opposition’s half were all the highest on record in the Championship (excluding play-offs) by any team over a single season (since 2013-14).

Granted, you could argue they fell short of their primary target of automatic promotion, with a run of three defeats in their final four matches of the regular season allowing Ipswich Town – who themselves had only been promoted from League One a year earlier – to pip them. But they got the job done in the end.

Martin has mostly stuck to his principles during the early weeks of the Premier League season as well. While their average possession figure has decreased somewhat after having only 41% of the ball against Arsenal last weekend, it’s still fair to say they’ve had plenty of it generally, with their 57.4% over the first seven matchdays topped by only four clubs.

They may no longer be top dog when it comes to ball retention after making the step up, but their numbers aren’t far behind. Only Manchester City and Liverpool have more than their 552.9 passes and 486.9 successful passes per game, they rank fifth for average possession (57.4%), and only Tottenham have had a higher proportion of their goal-kicks end in their own penalty area, highlighting how they’re determined to play out from the back.

Going back to 2003-04, only two newly promoted teams have ever had a greater share of possession over a full season in the Premier League: Leeds United (57.8%) in 2020-21 and Swansea City (58%) in 2011-12. That same Swansea side are also the only promoted team over the same period to average more passes per game (557.5) in a single season than Southampton are at the moment, though Saints’ successful passes per game on average is greater than the Swans’ (474.7).

Saints are also on course to set a new high for pass success (88.1%) by a promoted team since 2003-04; however, it’s obviously worth recognising that just because a team dominates the ball, it doesn’t automatically mean they’re in any way better than another.  

It’s all well and good having lots of the ball, but if you can’t put it in the net or if you keep conceding, is it really the best way to approach a Premier League survival bid?

Southampton have one point from seven league matches this term, and their fixtures haven’t been among the most difficult. In fact, using the Opta Power Rankings to calculate fixture difficulty, their opening five games were deemed the fourth easiest. Sure, they have since faced Arsenal, who are quite good if you haven’t heard, but across the board results have been poor.

That sole point they’ve collected was against fellow promoted side Ipswich, who equalised in the 90th minute at St Mary’s last month. They’ve lost to 3-1 to Bournemouth, Brentford and Arsenal, 3-0 to an out-of-sorts Manchester United, and 1-0 to Nottingham Forest and 10-man Newcastle.

Their next few fixtures after the international break look like they could be crucial. While no one will expect them to take anything from a trip to Man City on 26 October, before that they host Leicester City, then Everton visit St Mary’s in early November before Saints go to Wolves – the only team currently below them in the table – a week later. Fail to show signs of life in that run ahead of the next international window and it’ll be difficult to see them plotting a way out.

It all begs the question; are Saints and Martin right to stubbornly stick to their guns regarding their style of play if it doesn’t appear to be bringing results? Or should they abandon their principles in the hope they can scrape some points together with a defensive setup?  

There is no magic recipe for retaining your Premier League status, though the six promoted teams with the highest average share of possession in their first season in the Premier League (since 2003-04) have all stayed up. We probably shouldn’t read too much into that given the clubs ranked seventh to 12th in that respect were all relegated and it’s highly unlikely that having 50% of the ball as opposed to 49.8% of it over a season was actually the difference between relegation and survival, but it’s an omen Southampton might cling to.

Southampton clearly aren’t the first team to earn promotion from the Championship playing with a strong philosophy focused on possession and/or playing out from the back. We’ve already mentioned Leeds and Swansea, and there was also Daniel Farke’s Norwich City, Vincent Kompany’s Burnley, Marco Silva’s Fulham, Scott Parker’s Fulham, Slavisa Jokanovic’s Fulha… you get the idea.

Not many have successfully stuck around in the top flight for very long without watering down that approach somewhat – look at Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds, for example; electric in their first season back before spending two seasons battling relegation, ultimately dropping back to the Championship in 2023.

Social media discourse around Southampton’s style at the weekend brought focus on Brighton, who, as most would agree, are a completely different beast to the Seagulls side that earned promotion in 2017. They didn’t finish higher than 15th or accumulate more than 41 points in their first four Premier League seasons.

Under Chris Hughton they fought for their Premier League status for two seasons before starting to transition towards a more obviously forward-thinking way of playing with Graham Potter’s appointment ahead of 2019-20. But that too was a process, eventually leading to Roberto De Zerbi’s arrival and a sixth-place finish in 2022-23, the highest up the English football pyramid that they’ve ever ended a season.

The graphic below shows the evolution of Brighton’s playing style since being in the Premier League…

The next graphic outlines how Southampton have already managed to implement a considered possession style this season…

Again, there’s not necessarily a right and wrong way to do things, but in hindsight, Brighton’s gradual process saw them establish a platform to build on year after year and they’ve become one of the league’s best entertainers; some have suggested Southampton are trying to skip ahead straight away without laying strong enough foundations in the Premier League.

Of course, the counterargument is Southampton do actually have a history of playing in a similar way in the top flight. Perhaps not always quite as extreme, but Mauricio Pochettino, Ronald Koeman, Mauricio Pellegrino, Ralph Hasenhüttl and Nathan Jones all, with varying degrees of success, valued having possession and wanted Saints to play out from the back.

Nevertheless, there is unmistakably a trend whereby promoted teams are often aiming higher in terms of how they play, regardless of whether history suggests it’s sustainable or not. But why?

If Martin enjoyed the success of promotion with this philosophy, it can’t be surprising that he’s not deviated; that’s the way his team knows how to play and that will have been taken into account with their summer recruitment as well.   

Martin has already answered questions about changing course tactically, telling The Guardian at the very start of the season that they are “working towards something, not away from something; working towards being better all the time, improving, growing, learning, rather than just: ‘We have to stay up, that’s it.’”

And in fairness, remaining true to what got him to this point seems understandable in his own personal context. Framed on the wall of his office at Southampton’s training ground, he has a Pep Guardiola quote from after he won the 2011 Champions League. It says:

When we win, the game model seems good and is not questioned. But bear in mind, we won’t always win. Then doubts will come. That is the moment when we will have to trust the model more than ever because the temptation to move away from it will be very strong.

In that respect, some will feel it wouldn’t be a great look if Saints suddenly abandoned their philosophy once life got a little tougher, but there’s also an argument that simpler, defensive styles of play are more limiting in the long term, with Martin himself insisting before that you don’t get away with “winning ugly” for long.

It’s also not entirely unreasonable to have a more cynical point of view with respect to the managers themselves; more and more top clubs want managers who play expansive, possession-based football. Southampton might get relegated, sure, but a bigger club may then still take a punt on Martin. Kompany ended up at Bayern Munich after getting relegated with Burnley, for instance.

Maybe there’s more of a balance to be found in how Southampton approach possession; perhaps Martin’s team are too set in their ways and aren’t as good as they think they are at what they do – who’s to say?

But fortune favours the brave and Martin cannot be accused of lacking belief in his ideals. Whether they’re strong enough to keep Saints up, only time will tell.

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