Football Managerification

Fresh from Ipswich winning the 2034 Champions League final, you cast your eye over your squad. In amongst the entirely fictional players, you see Dane Scarlett. Since signing permanently in 2025, Scarlett's played 300 games for the club, scoring more than 250 goals and winning a dozen major trophies. He is maybe the best striker in world football. Unfortunately, he is also now dead to you. For on the 24th March 2034, Dane turned 30.

Such are the ways of Football Manager. You're blazing through months, years, decades in the blink of a weekend, so you're always thinking years and years ahead. No sooner has a player entered their "late" 20s (26), you start plotting which Brazilian starlet is going to replace them. The "game with all the spreadsheets" (as my partner calls it) encourages such behaviours in its players, the algorithm promoting raw attributes and youth over experience and track record. If you're looking at the right high numbers for pace, acceleration, finishing, composure, determination, flair, whatever, the lad's going to be dynamite, even if he's only done it in the Czech reserve league.Of late, I wonder if some of this attitude has infected a lot of real life football clubs. As the data around football becomes ever more detailed, the search for new talent can be that bit more forensic. With stats on sprints, pass type, dribble type, ball recoveries and more, you can see whether a kid in Wolves U21s or Ferencvaros is in the top percentile for progressive passes in his age group and recruit accordingly, even if their track record in men’s football at your level is non-existent.

The rise of "player trading" as a medium-term transfer strategy intensifies the pressure to sign players without even 50 appearances under their belt. Back in the day, Marcus Evans seemed to regard keeping star players for as long as humanly possible as his greatest personal gift to any manager, but now everyone knows how Brighton and Brentford made it big. Buy well, develop well and (crucially) sell well. Rinse, repeat, until you've built a giant mountain of gold, all ready to throw (judiciously) at your next big thing.

But selling well means signing unproven talent. You can only get a return on investment if the player you sign is showing something they've never shown before. If you sign a 20-goal Championship striker and they score 20 goals for you, you've got what you paid for, their asset value hasn't gone up. If you sign someone yet to score a goal in men's football and they do the same, you've conjured fifteen million quid out of thin air.So, player trading means that every elite level player you sell needs to be replaced by 4 or 5 guys who've never done it but might do it. Ideally, they should also have as few miles on the clock as possible, because the real premiums get paid for kids with 10/15 years of football still to come. Even passing your twenty-first birthday potentially knocks a few million off your price tag, lowering the ceiling that potential suitors project on to their target. Late bloomers like Wes Burns or Cameron Burgess might as well forget a big money move because at 27/28 the return on investment is already zero. So you end up buying like in the Game with the Spreadsheets - young, unproven and with attributes.

For me, the transfer strategies of our two most recent victims – Southampton and Blackburn – do reflect a bit of “football managerification”. In the 2010s Southampton earned something of a reputation for selling well. They nurtured talents from their academy, from under-developed overseas markets, then made huge profits selling the likes of Morgan Schneiderlin, Adam Lallana, Luke Shaw, Sadio Mane and Virgil Van Dijk. These stacks of cash were then used to recruit excellent new talent.

Until they weren’t. Last Summer they splurged heavily on highly-rated teenagers. Surveying the market, their recruitment team seemed to fix on one under-developed pool of talent. The Big Six greedily hoover up all the best young footballers, but so good are their first teams that none of these kids can get any minutes. With Jadon Sancho’s move to Borussia Dortmund as the model, Southampton clearly reasoned that if a medium-sized Premier League club were to swoop in there, they could get future elite players at a knock-down price. Substantial fees were spent on Gavin Bazunu, Romeo Lavia, Samuel Edozie, Juan Larios, then more on Shea Charles this Summer, none of whom had any substantial experience of men’s football.

As player trading this business has already worked out for Southampton. Romeo Lavia’s £58m sale to Chelsea will pay for the whole job lot of them, even if they take bad losses on the other four. However, as squad building it looks a whole lot less clever to me. Southampton’s dreadful 2022-23 campaign was finally euthanised in May, with two games to spare as they finished bottom of the Premier League with 25 points. Now, it’s not that you can attribute that finish to the kids - although Gavin Bazunu being the worst starting goalkeeper in that league and possibly the league below as well probably didn’t help. What’s really damaging is the refusal to bring in enough players who aren’t mainly potential.

Potential is great. Return on investment is crucial for clubs without infinite resources. A little bit of data (who doesn’t love a nice green Wyscout dashboard) and a little bit of risk is a wonderful thing, but too much Football Managerification can get you in big trouble. Because sometimes you need someone who will definitely do the job to a high standard every week. No infinite ceiling but no low floor. Lots of Southampton fans thought the writing was on the wall for the club when they sold the consistent Danny Ings to Aston Villa in August 2021 and never really replaced him. You need the Danny Ingses of the world. They give you a structure that your “football manager wonderkids” can thrive in, they give you guarantees in a world of punts and risks.

Which brings me to Saturday and the latest episode of 2023’s happiest accident, Massimo Luongo’s January free transfer to Ipswich Town. When the ball dropped to Massimo (AHA!) in the seventy-eighth minute (and it always drops to him, because he’s here, he’s there, he’s every fucking where), you trusted him. As Kieran McKenna put it in his post-match interview, “when the ball bounces to him, he’s one of those players you just think will find a way, and he found a way to put it in the top corner”. Massimo Luongo is all substance, all guarantees, no question marks, nothing unproven. He reads the game, he does the right thing, he keeps the level constant.   

He was not, I imagine, our first choice signing when we went looking for midfielders last January. That he started training with us in December and didn’t sign papers until mid-January suggests to me that we’d have rather signed Jack Taylor. Taylor would have been the football manager signing. The younger player, with greater potential, things still to prove and scope for a big transfer profit down the line. Second choice perhaps, but Mass was exactly what we needed. Someone whose level would never be in doubt, who had been there and done that.

Cheap, too. Big Six Premier League sides quickly cottoned on to the Jadon-Sancho-Gambit and have upped their prices accordingly. A Massimo Luongo-level 19-year-old from Arsenal’s academy probably costs you £5m+ these days, from Man City’s academy several times that. Wolves bid £15m for Adam Wharton, the poor waif chasing Luongo’s shadow for most of yesterday’s game, and Blackburn said no thank you. Where on Earth is the scope to build a functional Championship with those sorts of prices? Now that everyone is desperately chasing big money future sales, solid career peak professionals seem to me the best value area of the market. No one else wants a Luongo? More fool them!

Although Alan Hansen may have been famously wrong when he said “you win nothing with kids”,1 you can definitely make a mess without a bit of experience. Blackburn are the youngest team in the league and it showed. Stretching the game into constant rounds of attack and counter-attack when you’re clutching a precious point in front of a raucous crowd of 29,000 looks pretty damn silly to me. Talented, great fun to watch, but probably the most naïve opposition performance I’ve seen at Portman Road in a long time. What they would have done for one of our two grizzled midfield veterans, both Morsy and Luongo in that absolute sweet spot where their physical gifts aren’t diminished but their reading of the game is at its apogee. Blackburn could have had either player had they wanted, but their current strategy is apparently orientated towards “developing assets” from the academy. A red flag if ever I heard one.

You can take experience too far, of course. Sheffield Wednesday’s current predicament dates in no small part to a recruitment strategy based too heavily on ready made players with no room to grow. Striking that balance between having a spine that knows intimately what everyone is supposed to be doing, but with enough prospects to keep the team developing and the revenue flowing, is incredibly tough. At times it felt like we tried (and mostly failed) to chase the latter at the expense of the former this Summer. As it stands though, we may have found a wonderful equilibrium. Players few others wanted, playing the football of their lives, a mix of ages from 19 to 34. In that mix, the Massimos are just as important as the Leifs.

Massimo Luongo v. Blackburn Rovers

Goals 1

Shots 1

Accurate passes 39/51 (76%)

Chances created 4

Touches 69

Successful dribbles 1/2 (50%)

Passes into final third 8

Accurate crosses 1/1 (100%)

Accurate long balls 1/3 (33%)

Dispossessed 0

Tackles won 3/6 (50%)

Blocks 1

Interceptions 2

Defensive actions 11

Recoveries 8

Dribbled past 1

Ground duels won 8/12 (75%)

Aerial duels won 2/3 (67%)

Was fouled 2

Fouls 2