The Weekly Think Tank: Puel in or out? That is the question.

This season has been a roller coaster showing both ineptitude and quality by the Southampton team. The question that has been dissected all season long has been: Puel in or out? The question seems to be a little more complicated than originally meets the eye. After all, the future of our club is at stake.

So, what exactly does a manager mean to the squad? This has been a question that I have been asking myself for years. A manager seems to be the brains and the tactician behind everything football related with the club, but how much of an actual say in results does the manager have?

A manager, in my eyes, is a lot more respected in the eyes of the psychological mindset of players. When you are needing that extra one or two percent, you will be able to decipher which managers are better than the rest. It is easy to look at a match and say: “it was thanks to ‘insert manager name here’ that we won, his tactics were spot on”. Were they spot on? Or is that the easy way to say that the team played well and things just happened to fall in the right place for them.

Football is a game that is so dependent on margins for success it is hard to look at analytics at times. We need to look at reasons other than the stats for why teams have won or lost.

There are a few managers in the world that we can look at and truly say: “They are the reason why their organization is winning”. There are a lot more individuals on the other side of things: being the scapegoat of the organization. The manager of an organization is always the first reason to why a squad is failing. There needs to be some sort of change so the easiest thing to do is point at a manager and fire them instantly.

This will catch up with the players extremely quickly at the first scent of downturn. When there is speculation about a manager departure within the organization, why would you continue to battle for that manager? When the public perception is down on the manager it is easy for things to snowball out of control. That is why you see the instance such as Claudio Ranieri and Arsene Wenger. When the players lose the fight for a manager, any team can look like they don’t belong in the Premier League.

I am not, by any means, saying that a manager does not do anything for an organization. A manager is one of the most stressful jobs in the world. The amount of pressure that goes into preparation and what happens behind-the-scenes is beyond anything that I can fathom. I just am curious about how much influence they really have on the outcomes of the games. It is up to the manager to max out the potential of their team, and that requires just as much push as it does pull. The players must be fully invested in their manager if they want to find success.

So, what do these things say about Claude Puel? It seems as though every match is a different story. One match, Southampton look as though they could be a top 5 team, while another match, they look as though they are scraping for relegation survival. We need to know where our players lie in the mindset of our manager. If our players are all in on Mr. Puel, what does this say about our roster? If our players all not all in on Puel, what is our next step?

These sort of things take a lot of dissecting. You need to understand the psychology of your team and prioritize whose opinions matter most within the locker-room. It is almost more important to figure out who you are planning on keeping in the transfer window, or who your top priorities to keep are, before you make a decision on the future of your manager.

For our perspective, asking Virgil Van Dijk on his opinion of Puel and how having him, or ridding of him, would change his opinion on his stay with the club. Although these seem like fine margins on whether we keep a manager or not, that is the game of football management.

On the result’s side of things, we can say Puel has had an excellent first-year. He was brought late into the offseason and was given a roster that he himself did not have any opinion on. That is a difficult task to be given a roster and told “I don’t care what you think about this team, take them and guide them to victory”. Puel obviously had a tough time figuring out who his preferences were in the lineup, as you saw from his excessive rotation at the beginning of the year.

Puel seems to have figured things out though, having quite the second-half of the season. He has found a team that he feels maxes out the potential of the squad, which also makes the fans happy. He has been on such pins-and-needles all year, it is so easy to rock the boat between Puel in or out. It is easy to see though, that he does have the respect of most, if not all of the players. Puel has rejuvenated our youth program and is leading us down a road we should be happy with.

I think it is wise to give Puel an offseason to see what he can do. The players seem to respect him and that should be the top thing for the organization to evaluate. We don’t even know what Puel thinks of his roster. For all we know, he could hate all of the players, but we will only know with giving him the opportunity.

He has surpassed what most people’s expectations should have been for the year. Obviously, we want to strive for success year after year, but you need to have rebuilding years. Just make sure those rebuilding years don’t take us a step back. This year we have taken a large step forward considering last summer’s transfer moves. A step that I believe will lead us to success year after year. For me, it is an easy decision: Puel In.