Southampton are Temu Man City and the only way is down now

Southampton are a football club in need of an intervention; they need to be saved from themselves.

And specifically, from Russell Martin’s increasingly deranged insistence that no alternative exists. No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Premier League Club To Have Already Racked Up Double Figures For Errors Leading To Goals.

If there’s a theme developing among the clubs currently making shows of themselves, we might tentatively put forward that it’s the infuriating, mule-headed stubborn insistence on continuing to do stupid things stupidly while simultaneously dressing that up as a noble, steadfast adherence to founding principles in troubled times.

Nothing in Our League right now sends us more Proper Football Man than watching Southampton trying to play their way out of defence despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s just not working and they simply do not possess the players to make it work.

Like Vincent Kompany and Burnley last season, they have approached the Premier League with a kind of deluded arrogance. With an apparent belief that they can just play their football their way at the higher level and it will all work out. What’s particularly baffling about that is that the evidence of the right way to do it is right there, and you don’t have to look that hard for it.

Brentford and Brighton are now firmly established Premier League clubs, and neither could be described as suffer-ball scrappers. But both were willing to earn the right to play their football, to establish themselves first and then build and build on it. They didn’t immediately turn up in the Premier League trying to be Temu Man City.

We might harshly suggest that in both cases a manager is prioritising himself over the club. On the face of it, Kompany was a disaster for Burnley last season. But he played the football big clubs want to play and is now sitting very pretty indeed thank you very much, helping Bayern Munich reclaim their Bundesliga birthright.

Martin appears to be attempting something similar, only with even less suitable players and even worse results. Maybe it will work for him as it has for Kompany, but it does appear unlikely.

What’s most damning, arguably even more so than those absurd error stats – their total of 10 is already as many as any Premier League team managed in the whole of 23/24 – is their attacking output.

It’s absolutely not working at either end of the pitch, and that’s key. The justification for playing out from the back like you’re Manchester City is that the benefits outweigh the significant baked-in risk.

Even the teams that do it well make mistakes. And when those mistakes happen, it’s likely to be costly. The most Southampton performance of the season arguably in fact came from Manchester City themselves against Tottenham.

But the argument is that when done right, playing out from the back through the opposition press allows you to create advantageous attacking situations and overloads by retaining possession and pulling opponents out of position. City more generally are the case in point here, while even Tottenham can at least point to their goal tally (if not much else) as justification.

Southampton, as well as being comfortably the team most likely to just hand you a goal on a silver platter, are also the lowest scorers in the division. And even allowing for a lack of precision in the finishing only helps so much, with xG lifting them above Everton, Ipswich and Wolves but no more.

The Premier League appears to this season to be experimenting with a wild storyline where pretty much anyone can do a nonsense on pretty much anyone at any time. The exception thus far has been at the extremes – Liverpool and Southampton. Amusing, then, that the game between the two was actually enormously on brand for 24/25 in that it was an absolute ding-dong that Southampton really didn’t deserve to lose.

But they did. They nearly always do. Because of the errors. The frequent, identical, costly and unnecessary errors.