The Project - What Now?
The football project, now only mentioned sarcastically given our current league postion, started as an attempt by West Ham to replicate what happens at 3 of Europe’s most successful and progressive clubs: Lyon, Arsenal and AC Milan.
Lyon and Arsenal both avoid signing name players for high transfer fees and instead develop youth players from within. They both look to sign players at their optimal age 20-23 for low fees (matured enough to know they’ll be able to cut it and young enough to get their best years out of them). Much like the famous Ajax teams they all play the same quick passing style with inter changing positions from youth team right the way up to the first team allowing them to intergrate immediately. Part of their respective projects is to be ready to sell and know when the best time is to cash in on a player. Lyon have sold Essien and Benzema for £25 million each and Arsenal in the last few seasons have sold Adebayor for £25 million and Henry (at age 29) for £16 million.
Before selling they have both tried to make sure that there is a new player already in the squad ready to make the step up. Clichy slotted in straight away and had a few seasons experience under his belt around the first team when Ashley Cole was sold to Chelsea.
AC Milan are leading the way in sport science. Some of the Milan Lab’s methods remain secret but they are extending the careers of players by 3 or 4 years. Most of Milan’s squad is over 30 and Paolo Maldini retired age 40. Technical skill isn’t enough in the modern game you need to be an athlete and that means: management of injuries, nutrition and supplements, how you train your body and how regularly.
During the summer Julien Faubert returning from his loan, trained at the Milan Labs in an effort to regain fitness. He worked hard, perhaps sensing he was at a cross roads in his career and lost the excess weight he was carrying. He again showed the speed he had when we signed him for £5 million.
Has it been worth it for these clubs?
Arsenal haven’t won a trophy in 4 years but they reached the 2006 Champions League final and they’ve qualified for the Champions League every season whilst only spending a fraction on players of what Chelsea, Man Utd and Liverpool have.
Lyon who had previously been a small unattractive club have won the French Ligue 1 championship for the last 7 seasons in a row and even more impressively than that, they’ve done it with 4 different managers. This indicates that who the manager is, is not as important as how the club is being run overall.
Alan Curbishley is a better, more experienced manager than Gianfranco Zola but he was reluctant to work with a technical director. Manager’s only stick around for 3 or 4 years and that’s if you’re lucky, so if you let them handle all the transfers when a new manager comes in he’ll want to sign his own players. You have to rebuild all over again which can be costly. Crowd sourcing theory means that you’re more likely to reach the correct decision in signing players if there’s a group of people involved rather than just 1 person making the decision.
Football is SMALL business
Some supporters think West Ham has everything in place to be turned into a force if a billionaire were to take us over: http://westhaminvestment.blogspot.com
The truth is football clubs aren’t an attractive prospect, they are small business. Although a lot of money is made out of football by other people (newspapers, television, sports companies, web sites) the clubs themselves have trouble making money. This is called appropriating your worth.
40 out of England’s 92 league clubs have experienced insolvency since 1992. Some more than once. When Alan Sugar tried to keep Tottenham living within their means in the 90’s they made about £2 million profit a year. Most clubs in England have debt and are not making a profit.
Looking at the big clubs in the Premier League, Chelsea and Man City are both billionaire toys being used as status symbols. Neither has any chance of turning a profit whilst they’re spending like they are. Their spending on transfers forces everyone else to spend more to keep up. When the Glazers took over Manchester United they loaded the debt from the takeover onto the club. Man Utd are nearly £700 million in debt paying about £60 million a year in interest. Liverpool have a debt of £350 million.
Football clubs rarely go bankrupt and it’s usually the owners who lose out but if the rules stay as they are another Leeds situation where a big club gets plunged down the divisions with no money to get back up quickly is likely.
The only sustainable way for West Ham to run is by adopting the ethos of the project. Our only hope of winning a trophy is if football gets through the minefield of legal problems to switch to an American (socialist) format of salary caps and even distribution of revenue.
Why is the project not working?
There’s a real risk of relegation, why is the super wonderful project where by you spend a little net amount on transfers but have a very good team that appears to over achieve not working?
1. Our transition to the almighty project has coincided with our owner going bankrupt and us being left in limbo. In the hardest, richest league in the world you need some money to work with but we’ve had nothing at all and this is the main problem behind our current plight. If you include Hines, we started this season with three strikers, a premier league squad needs four. Franco was a free agent and Duxbury and Nani allegedly put in some of their own money to make that deal happen. Diamanti signed because Dubxbury got SBOBet to advance us sponsorship money.
We’ve also had the Sheffield United pay out and Curbishley’s compensation taking more money out of the club. Collins was sold but because of this the money won’t be reinvested in the squad. Lucas Neil was sold and not replaced. Neither Spector or Faubert had been waiting in the wings to take over, neither are technically good enough players for our starting 11. We were ready to sell Faubert which Duxbury openly stated in the summer but with no money for a replacement we had to get him fit and hope he could the job.
Supporters are against Gold and Sullivan taking over on the basis that they don’t have enough money but it would be an improvement on what we have and allow us to kick start the project. Billionaires won’t want to take us over because football clubs waste money and don’t turn big profits especially compared to the industries they’re used to working in. We need to be more realistic.
2. Gianfranco Zola. As a novice manager he was ready to embrace the idea behind the project and relinquish control of transfers which a more experienced manager wouldn’t be prepared to do. In many ways he seemed like a good choice because he would have respect of the players because he was a great player himself, wanted to play passing attacking football and was ok working within a team.
He has made mistakes though. Team formation, playing players out of position, being too cautious. He does appear to be learning and correcting these mistakes but there’s no doubt it’s contributed to us losing points at the start of the season. That’s the price you pay hiring an inexperienced manager, managers with UEFA pro license perform better than those without. Managers who have experience perform better than rookies. The best managers in the game are not ex players. When asked why this was Jose Mourinho said “More time to study”.
It’s Zola’s responsibility (and Steve Clarke) to get the team playing football in the style we’re aiming for, which Lyon and Arsenal play. You can only conclude they’re not doing a good enough job at that at the moment. I’ve seen players like Noble dwindle on the ball when we’re trying to pass quickly. When Zola first came in Green was made to roll or throw the ball out whenever he could. Against Tottenham he was booting it up the field when we have no obvious ball winner. Franco is good in the air for his size but we shouldn’t be resorting to that. The loss of Carlton Cole to injury and nobody to step into his role because we have no money has hit us hard.
Zola is also Italian, Italian football is what he knows best. For the crowd sourcing approach to transfers to work effectively we’d be better of having a manager who wasn’t Italian as that’s the market that our technical director Nani really knows. The players we get linked to are nearly always either Italian or playing in the Italian league. We need more scouts and a better worldwide network. If we had a Dutch manager we’d have knowledge of a different league.
At the moment Nani appears to be mostly handling the transfers on his own. He’s had some hits and misses like most managers would, most players coming from one league and that’s what we’re trying to move away from. We need more people with knowledge of world leagues contributing to transfer discussions.
