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Post by FullerMagic on Dec 20, 2020 10:08:49 GMT
Michael O’Neill: ‘It’s not that the owners don’t want to invest – they can’t’ Michael Walker
Five days after Stoke City ended their Championship season on July 22 with a 4-1 win at Nottingham Forest, Michael O’Neill took himself off to the Lake District. It was a mini-break, but it was not a holiday.
For O’Neill had trusted assistant Andy Cousins with him and the pair had sent out invitations to recruitment people, players and agents: Come along. Stoke’s new league season would start on September 12, but its beginnings were on July 27.
“We did it because we felt we’d to try to re-structure the club,” O’Neill says, matter-of-factly. The scale of such a plan can be lost in a simple sentence.
“It was immediately after our last game of the season, at Forest (on a Wednesday night). We met on the Monday, three to four days in the Lake District. You can’t rest, start the next season and then wonder why you’re bottom again. You can’t wait. Stoke had started previous seasons poorly and we were determined we weren’t going to allow that to happen again. There was so much to get done.”
Strategic and urgent: these words apply to Stoke’s situation as they faced up to a third season in the Championship after a decade in the Premier League. They also apply to O’Neill’s character and management. He has been at the club for just over a year now, after spending eight initially tough but ultimately rewarding years as Northern Ireland’s manager.
In 2011, O’Neill took over a Northern Ireland team dropping to a FIFA ranking of 119th in the world; last November, O’Neill inherited a Stoke team bottom of the Championship with eight points from a possible 45. Even with parachute payments from their top-flight days, they were plummeting towards the third tier. O’Neill halted their fall, stabilised the team and that victory at Forest left them 15th in the final table. Stoke had bottomed out.
Today, they sit seventh and host Tottenham Hotspur in a Carabao Cup quarter-final on Wednesday. Premier League sides Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa have been beaten, away, en route to the last eight and there is a sense of upward movement.
But this reconfiguring of Stoke is a distance from complete.
When Stoke achieved safety in July and O’Neill had accomplished the first important piece of his restructuring, there was an external expectation the Midlands club would move into the transfer market and buy the financial grade of player to guarantee a promotion charge. After all, the Coates family, who own the club, are the modern equivalent of Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers.
Then in the space of 10 days in August, Stoke signed 26-year-old Morgan Fox and 33-year-old Steven Fletcher on free transfers from Sheffield Wednesday, 31-year-old James Chester on a free from Villa and 33-year-old Mikel John Obi, a free agent who had last played for Trabzonspor in Turkey. There was the subsequent £1.9 million purchase of 22-year-old Jacob Brown from Barnsley, but no one inside or outside the club was mistaking this for a spree.
Stoke fans were entitled to wonder where their club were going, although they had been given a flavour of their economic reality last January — O’Neill’s first window — when the new manager’s first purchase was midfielder Jordan Thompson from third-tier Blackpool at a cost of £300,000. The days of Stoke paying, for example, £18 million for Tottenham defender Kevin Wimmer were over.
Signed in August 2017, Wimmer is still at the club, almost three years after his last appearance for their first team. Part of a bloated squad with an enormous wage bill, the 28-year-old Austrian trains with the under-23s following season-long loans to Hannover in Germany and Belgium’s Mouscron. He is an example of the lavish spending by Stoke as they drifted towards relegation three seasons ago.
They tried, under Gary Rowett and then Nathan Jones, to spend their way back up, but the transfers did not work and financial fair play rules kicked in. In this last season of parachute payments, Stoke are inhibited economically. O’Neill cannot spend the Coates’s family wealth.
“I knew about it,” he says. “I knew the rules of financial fair play.” O’Neill also knows that, should Stoke infringe those rules, they face a possible points deduction next season if they remain in the EFL. The era of buying Wimmer, Giannelli Imbula for £21 million, Badou Ndiaye for £14 million and Saido Berahino for £13.5 million has gone. Benik Afobe, another one still on the books but on loan at Trabzonspor in Turkey, cost upwards of £12 million.
None of the above quintet has been sold on for value.
O’Neill does not have the time to start a blame game and, to an extent, he understands what has happened. As he says: “It’s not specifically someone’s fault, it’s not the players’ fault. There was a rationale behind it. You can see why Benik Afobe was bought (In January last year, as Stoke chased an instant return to the Premier League), the logic.”
But it means O’Neill has to take a different transfer path. The Lake District is full of them. “Because we had not sold assets, it was very difficult for us to spend money,” he says. “It’s not that the owners don’t want to invest in the club. They can’t.”
O’Neill arrived on a Friday last November and had to select a team for an away game at Barnsley 24 hours later. It was won to provide some breathing space, as was the next game, but he discovered quickly that this was the small picture. The bigger one was Stoke’s accumulation of players and an unproductive atmosphere at the training ground. By the end of the season, he set about addressing both issues via a series of outgoings and a few incomings. The wage bill has decreased.
“You’re signing both a person and a player,” he notes of new recruits. O’Neill goes into detail on two signings in particular — Mikel, a Premier League and European Cup winner with Chelsea, and Scotland international Fletcher.
“We have to find good players and good types and those who’ve come have all come on incentivised contracts, based on success,” he says. “In John’s case, we had him up here first of all. He came with his adviser on the train, spent three and a half hours here and there was an instant kind of rapport. He wanted to see the training ground and the stadium. He’d other options and wanted to assess our situation. He liked it.
“We could tell he wasn’t making a decision based solely on finance because he’d turned his back on a very lucrative contract in Turkey with Trabzonspor. We just got a good feel for him. You do your research through various channels and we got James Chester to speak to John Terry about him, via Villa. I spoke to Tony Pulis, who’d had him at Middlesbrough. Tony brought him back from China. We looked at him condition-wise and at his games in Turkey. When John left, Trabzonspor had a chance of winning the league, but then they fell away. The coach said it was a big blow to them. Everything came up positive.
“He had a presence about him that made us think he was going to be good for our good players to see — the likes of Joe Allen. Presence is difficult to measure, of course. But you get a good feel about certain people and John had an enthusiasm I liked. Your concern is always about the appetite of a player but John shows his every day in training, how he is around the place. He’s quiet, but he’s a leader in how he goes about his business. Other players see this is a Champions League winner. John can help us get the best out of our good players. He’s been terrific.”
Mikel played 90 minutes in 13 Championship games before an injury away to Sheffield Wednesday at the end of last month he is yet to return from. He has been one of O’Neill’s “good types”.
Fletcher has been the same, scoring four goals.
“Steven’s maybe a more outgoing personality,” O’Neill says. “I didn’t think we’d get him. His stats are good, he’d scored 13 goals in a truncated season last season. I’d watched him as a young player at Hibs. We did our research, got good feedback on what type of lad he is. He came and sat with us in the Lake District for three hours, drove down from Scotland. I came away thinking, ‘I’d like to sign him’. When you sit with someone for that length of time, and where they are at that stage of their career, you know if they’re bullshitting or not. He made a commitment, moved his family back south from Glasgow — he thought his next step would be there. It made me think he’s hungry for it. It’s what you need.
“Him and John have been exactly what we asked. They have not told us something and done something different. You’re conscious of age, but then every signing is a risk and there might also be benefits to age. Fletcher’s been a terrific influence around the dressing room, positive, in great condition. In the gym, he’s the leader, other players going with him.”
The reason O’Neill, 51, invested managerial stock in two 33-year-olds was in those last five words: “other players going with him”.
When the Irishman arrived at Stoke he found a fragmented dressing room, with disaffected individuals and little unified purpose. He needed training-ground leadership.
“Quite quickly, it became clear to me that there were a lot of disgruntled players,” O’Neill explains. “It became evident there were a lot of players who had not had a good experience at the club. They had been signed for good money, were on good contracts, but I looked at results going back to the last year in the Premier League and the first year in the Championship: what we inherited was a dressing room that had won about 20-22 per cent of their games.
“So we had a team that hadn’t won a lot, we had a dressing room that hadn’t won a lot. For some players, that was over two and a half years. What you have is a dressing room turning up on a Monday morning that hasn’t won very often. The dressing room was fractured when we came in and if a football club is not a happy place to work, it has no chance of being successful.”
So when O’Neill was plotting summer recruitment, his choices were conditioned by two very different factors: hard financial restrictions and something as intangible as “culture”.
“It’s a fancy word for standards, really,” is O’Neill’s definition of culture, in footballing terms. “It’s essential, but it’s a very difficult thing to define. It’s not something on the wall — we don’t have any quotes up. It’s the feel about the club; standards, camaraderie, a dressing room that’s good to walk into. The ones who challenge it are the players who are unhappy because they aren’t in the team. And every week you’ve more players who aren’t in the team than are in. That is the challenge, that’s why it’s so challenging.”
Sometimes only changing personnel will change a culture and although O’Neill has been limited in player recruitment, he has overseen an outflow of players — over 20 either loan or permanent transfers or, in the case of Imbula, a contract termination. It was around the same time Thompson arrived from Blackpool. Here was old Stoke and new Stoke.
In the Lake District, O’Neill also interviewed and brought in a new head of recruitment (Alex Aldridge from Millwall), a new doctor (David White from the Irish FA) and a new sports scientist (Paul Walsh from Sunderland).
O’Neill can feel the benefit of these changes but he knows this is a process. It took him time with Northern Ireland to alter mindsets and routines — and eventually results — and he learned that it cannot be achieved solely top-down. The culture, he says, “can’t always come from the staff”.
He continues: “The players have to drive it. The manager initiates it and pushes it, but the players must drive it. Otherwise, it’s just the manager talking and it’s tiresome.
“I said openly to the players when I came in that they were underachieving as a group. The club was in the position it was in and they were responsible. I didn’t hide away from it. I said, ‘As a group, we have to make it better, there’s no one else who can do that. It’s not as if I can sign 20 new players. For some reason, I’m your fourth manager in two years’. I think you have to be honest. You can’t sugar-coat it.
“Our training is markedly different this season, because we’ve got better players, better types. The players drive that. We had to play the hand we’d been dealt. At the start, there were levels of performance we’d have to tolerate, we didn’t like them necessarily. But those are the players you have, you can’t destroy them. You’re at the bottom of the league.
“We are still a long way from where we’d like it to be, but it’s a long way from where it was. Things said by Ryan Shawcross and Joe Allen, I take those things as a benchmark. Joe says the difference between now and then is night and day — remember, we’ve not had Joe since March (because of the Wales stalwart’s achilles injury). But it’s not enough just to have one or two like Joe or Shawcross. They need help. Chester helps. He’s a diamond of a lad.”
There is, of course, another form of recruitment for a new manager: from within. There are always players who have been injured, overlooked or ostracised and when O’Neill arrived, Tyrese Campbell was one of these. The talented son of former Arsenal and Everton striker Kevin, Campbell was just 19 but on his way out of the club.
A problem for O’Neill was that the sheer number of players at Stoke made individual assessment difficult. Plus, in the Championship, there was always another match for he and assistant Billy McKinlay to prepare for.
“We had assets under our nose, but we couldn’t see some of them because we’d so many,” O’Neill says. “Tyrese was going out of the club when I came. He’d checked out; six months to go, could sign a pre-contract, go cross-border. There was interest in him from both Celtic and Rangers. We were looking at compensation of £400,000. I had him in, spoke to him, but I didn’t have the time to invest time in Tyrese. I was busy trying to assess the other 28 players we had.
“In the first few weeks, he was not involved that much. Then we brought him in to training and one day they did some finishing work. I said to Billy, ‘What was that like?’ He said, ‘Tyrese is the best finisher at the club’. I said, ‘Right. OK’.
“We did another finishing drill on Christmas Eve and I put Ty in the squad for Boxing Day. He came on against Sheffield Wednesday and scored the equaliser, then we won the game. He then played against Huddersfield on New Year’s Day and scored twice. He was a different boy. Two weeks later he signed a new contract, and he’s not looked back. He was a perfect example of a player who’d fallen through the cracks a bit because of the volume of players.
“It was like signing a really good young player. I was at Hearts vs Rangers after that. I was in the boardroom and (Rangers director) John Greig came over to me and said, ‘You kept your striker, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘Aye’. He was laughing. Rangers had high hopes. It would have been easy for Tyrese to leave.”
Campbell had scored six goals in his previous 11 games when he was badly injured against Cardiff City at the start of the month. The damage to his knee means he will miss the rest of this season. He joins a long list of injured Stoke players.
Campbell’s injury was a serious blow to a developing team. Stoke had won four in six, were three points off the top of the Championship and were leading Cardiff 1-0 when he went off just before the hour. They lost that game 2-1 and followed it with goalless draws at Derby County and Queens Park Rangers. Yesterday they won 1-0 at home to Blackburn.
Regardless, O’Neill’s mantra is “constant improvement everywhere” and he accepts this also applies to himself. “I didn’t have a network of agents,” he says when it came to club recruitment, “I probably have to adapt as a manager.” He could not buy players when he was working in international football, of course; he improved the Northern Ireland team through coaching and commitment.
When O’Neill is persuaded to review Stoke’s buying and selling overall, a man who worked briefly for Ernst & Young when his playing days finished says: “Our business has not been that scientific, in that we haven’t spent loads of money. We’ve done all the due diligence but we haven’t cast the net wide. We don’t have that luxury. But that’s why we’ve put in a new recruitment department. If there’s a period of stability at the club, then…
“A lot of Stoke’s success was based on good British players, then they bought different types of players from different markets. It becomes riskier. You can’t spend £20 million on a player who doesn’t touch your squad. We’ve improved it with cheap transfers and free agents, spent about £2 million. We now have assets in the team.”
Campbell, when fit, is now seen as a £15 million player. Another alteration in Stoke’s profile is that seven of the 15 who appeared at QPR on Tuesday are aged 22 or under.
Undoubtedly, there has been progress over the past year. After proving himself in international management, O’Neill is working in a different sphere of the profession. It has reinforced his appreciation of colleagues like Jose Mourinho, whom he meets in Wednesday’s cup tie.
“Listen, he’s an amazing manager,” O’Neill says. “You cannot be where he’s been and not have an amazing skill set.
“The hardest part to improve is the bit at the top. That’s where he’s at his best. The real skill I think the top managers have is that they get the top players to conform and play in a structure. That’s what Pep Guardiola does, Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp. Mourinho’s done that everywhere.
“When you bring in five players who have been the focal point at their five previous clubs and they aren’t any more, but they are prepared to be part of a structure, that’s a top manager at work. I think they do it with their personality, their charisma, their methods on the training pitch.
“I’ve never had the chance to spend time with these managers and see it in great detail, but I think they’re all extremely intelligent. As a manager, you constantly make decisions — constantly. When you’re doing that and getting it right, there has to be a degree of intelligence. I think those people would be successful in any other industry.”
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