Quote (WNxIrvine @ 18 Sep 2015 14:43)
Or, they will all pump more money into them to get them back to being the better teams? :wacko:
The problem is english clubs spend the money on overrated mediocrity, or just big names and statistics rather than on what the team needs. More money won't change that. You need to change the way the clubs are structured and their policies.
A few days ago Monchi (Sevilla's director of football, and widely considered as the best in Spain) gave a very long interview where he talked about a lot of interesting stuff (I'd post a link but it's in spanish).
One of the things he talked about was about english clubs. He spent a year in England learning the language, but he also took the time to learn about how english clubs were organized and how they worked in terms of scouting, making transfers, etc.
He said that english clubs had the best scouting system, with lots of money invested in the best technology to provide scouts with every single statistic possible. The problem is, according to him, that the reports scouts make are completely ignored by the people who make decisions in the club. They just make their report and send them to their boss, who then filters the reports and sends a couple of them to the group of people who decide on transfers. Then those people normally ignore the reports because it comes down to "should we sign this random latvian playing in switzerland that our scouts recommend, or this french guy that plays in Ligue 1 whos agent says is available... well Ligue 1 is better the swiss league, the french are better than the latvians, and that I talk to the french player's agent all the time so I know I can trust him".
There is no proper communication between scouts and the people who make decisions. People that run english clubs often barely know their scouts personally. In Sevilla the director of football constantly has meetings with the club's scouts; he travels to where they are and many spends hours watching the players that have received positive reports. The scouts even attend the meeting where the club's board decides on transfers, so they have a say when the decisions are made, and they also know what other scouts are after so they can even look for players that synergize with potential transfer targets.
He says that in 15 years as director of football, he has only signed one player he didn't know anything about (Dragutinovic, because they needed a replacement for Ramos in deadline day, and Madrid's director of football recommended the player during the Ramos deal talks). Meanwhile in England, this happens all the time. People that make decisions sign players they know nothing about and don't know if they are going to adapt to the manager/system/team/club/country.
You end up having a team full of flashy players, but they get destroyed by the weaker-yet-much-more-efficiently-built squads you find in other leagues.
English clubs don't need to spend more, but rather to change the way they are structured in order to improve communication and synergy between scouts and between scouts and the people who decide on transfers.