Russell Martin is not going to change. It’s probably best to get that out of the way early on.
Southampton’s manager has gained a justified reputation as the most tactically dogmatic boss in the Premier League, his tunnel-visioned adherence to a possession-based style of play being something he has stuck with since the beginning of his coaching career.
It was an approach that worked last season, gaining promotion by beating Leeds United in the Championship play-off final.
Southampton had looked set for automatic promotion, going on a mid-season unbeaten run of 22 league games from September to February, but an alarming drop-off in the last few weeks allowed Ipswich Town to overhaul them for a top-two finish. But still, the goal was achieved, and from that perspective, Martin’s position that if it worked then, there’s no point in changing it now, is understandable.
But inevitably, much of the debate around Southampton has centred around whether they should change now they are back in the Premier League. Surely this style, in particular their white-knuckle insistence on playing out from the back, would have to be modified? Is it really going to work with only slightly better players against much better opposition?
Those questions are essentially pointless. It’s not going to happen. It would be like asking a koala to lay off the eucalyptus. This is how Southampton will play under Martin.
So the question then becomes: why? Why is he such a fundamentalist? And more pertinently for Southampton fans, can it work?
Or as he put it in a press conference before Saturday’s home game against Leicester City: “I’m proud of the journey we’re on, but nobody cares about that if you don’t win.”
Here are a few statistics from fbref.com to illustrate how extreme Southampton are.
They have attempted the fourth-most passes in the Premier League this season, with 4,110: only Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are ahead of them. They have attempted the fewest long passes (defined as those that cover 30 yards), with only 342. Their pass completion rate is 86.3 per cent: only City’s is higher.
On their way to promotion in May, they had the majority of possession in 44 of their 46 regular-season games. They had 80 per cent of the ball in three of those matches, which you don’t need to be a tactical boffin to know is absurd. The other team might as well not be on the pitch.
That has continued this season. They have had the majority of the ball in five of their seven league games, the other two being against Arsenal and Manchester United. To illustrate how unusual that is for a promoted side, Leicester have only had above 50 per cent in two of their seven, and Ipswich not at all. Last season, Luton Town and Sheffield United had more of the ball in only 14 matches combined.
The chart above further illustrates where Southampton sit in terms of how they move the ball up the field. As you can see, they are slower, and pass the ball more, than every team other than City.
So, why does Martin insist they play like this?
The 38-year-old is perhaps slightly misunderstood, in as much he doesn’t have his team play this way only because he thinks it looks good, or to attract attention and praise, or that he feels it is somehow a morally superior style of the game. He plays this way mostly because he believes it is the best way to control matches and, by extension, get results.
In an interview with the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper last season, Martin said: “In my view, it is in order to get yourself to the opposition’s final third with position, structure and control, and to enable yourself to stay there as long as possible. So it’s not random.”
There are other elements at play, too. He has spoken about the way it makes both him and his players feel when it all comes off, and he has also essentially admitted it’s a good career move for a young English coach to have an ‘identity’. “I feel like, as a young British coach, to give yourself a chance to work and stay at the top level you need to have a way,” Martin also told the Telegraph.
He got the Southampton job after finishing 13th in League One in his only full season with MK Dons, then 15th and 10th with Swansea City in the Championship: you don’t keep getting bigger gigs with purely those results. Martin is managing for himself, as well as for Southampton.
But their results last season suggested he was right. There were a few outliers, but as a rule, the lower possession percentage they had, the more likely they were to lose games. Which backs up Martin’s faith in the process. But the problem comes in assuming it will work at a higher level. “The way we play,” he said in a press conference this week, “the longer the game goes, the odds tilt in our favour a little bit is my experience over five years; if we’re able to dominate the ball and do what we want to do.”
The problem is that when his commitment to playing out from the back doesn’t work, it can look ludicrous, football as suicide — again, something that will happen more and more against better opposition.
To illustrate the point, according to statistics from Fbref.com, Southampton made 15 errors that led to shots by their opponents in the 46 regular-season games in 2023-24. This season, in seven games, they’ve already made 10. That’s not because they have worse players now, or that they’re not necessarily doing things as Martin wants, it’s because they’re more likely to be forced into those errors by better opposition.
Those isolated mistakes, according to Martin at least, have been the problem. “It’s moments that have cost us,” he said this week. “That’s the most frustrating thing. I’ve been really unhappy with half an hour against Bournemouth, and maybe 15 minutes against Manchester United, but other than that, it’s just been about moments.”
There have been more of those ‘moments’ than they can sustain though.
Some more statistics: Southampton have lost the ball in their defensive third 55 times — the most in the Premier League. Of those 55, 17 have led to an opposition shot, again the most in the division. Four of those have led to a goal, which… well, you get the picture.
But again, there is a theory behind it; Southampton using the ball close to their goal means they at least have it in their possession, whereas ceding it to the opposition for large chunks of the game is seen as a greater problem by Martin.
They look bad defensively in highlights packages, and given that only last-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers have conceded more goals than them and their expected-goals-against number is fourth-worst in the Premier League, nobody is going to argue Southampton are actively good at the back. But the idea is they defend by keeping the ball.
There is a bit of nuance to how they play the ball out of the back. From dead balls, it’s almost always a short pass. Only Tottenham have played fewer passes over 40 yards from goal kicks. But from open play, they do tend to mix things up a little: goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale plays those long passes 34.1 per cent of the time, and his ability to do that is a big reason why they signed him from Arsenal this summer. The theory is probably to bait the opposition press, then go over it.
While the defensive issues are easy to spot, you could construct a decent argument that Southampton’s problem isn’t in defence but in attack.
Nobody in the division has fewer than their four goals. Which is partly because they simply aren’t creating many good chances. Only eight per cent of their shots have been deemed “clear” chances (defined as no defenders between the ball and the goalkeeper), and the chances they are making, they aren’t taking. They are second only to Manchester United in terms of underperformance on expected goals.
There are a few possible explanations for this.
The simplest is that their strikers just aren’t good enough: Cameron Archer scored four times in 29 top-flight appearances for a struggling Sheffield United last season; Adam Armstrong has four in his two previous full Premier League seasons; Tyler Dibling has been their key creative spark but primarily plays either as a No 10 or right winger; Ben Brereton Diaz is regarded as more of a wide forward.
Another is more structural.
Their love of possession means Southampton are always having to try to carve a defence apart, so even when they do create good-quality chances, there are defenders in the way. Their relative slowness in building attacks naturally means their opponents have more time to organise their defence and, unlike City, they don’t have good enough players to pick through that.
There are other mitigating factors for their poor start.
Martin was not helped by their summer transfer business. There were several targets they didn’t land, including Matt O’Riley (who signed for Brighton & Hove Albion from Celtic), Liam Delap and Jack Clarke (who both went to Ipswich), who could have helped significantly.
Beginning the season without a top-class goalkeeper was an error. Ramsdale’s signing wasn’t completed until August 30, and while they only had to play two league games with Alex McCarthy in goal and ultimately getting the England international in was a significant coup, it felt like they were underprepared.
They also didn’t move as many players out as they could have done. Kamaldeen Sulemana and Paul Onuachu are two who look unlikely to receive much game time and could/should have been sold, but they are still on the books and the squad looks bloated, with 32 senior players. Armel Bella-Kotchap, whose decline has been acute since making Germany’s 2022 World Cup squad, had a proposed move to Hoffenheim collapse in the summer and remains out of favour.
There has been a lot of turnover in the team: 26 players have made league appearances over the seven games and Martin has made 15 changes to his starting XIs (joint most in the Premier League, with Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola), with an unchanged team only named once. You can read that one of two ways: either he is chopping and changing too much, or this is inevitable after a summer of such flux and he is essentially trying to make sense of a giant ball of tangled wool.
The question is whether he will be given enough time to untangle it — and if he’s going about that task in the right way.
From Martin, the message is very much: trust the process.
When asked by The Athletic which performance this season was the closest to how he wants Southampton to look, he said: “Newcastle, 11 vs 11 in the first half hour, we played brilliantly. Arsenal for the 20 minutes after half-time. (Manchester) United, for the first half hour we were incredible. If you can go to these places and do it in those moments, you should be able to do it anywhere. In all of those games, we’ve been on top but the only one we scored first in was Arsenal, and then we conceded inside three or four minutes.
“It’s why I can feel positive and excited about things: there have been real moments where the guys have not only shown they can compete, but they can be the team we want to be, which is to be as dominant as possible with the ball, and to be aggressive without it. We just have to keep banging the same drum and make sure we turn it into results.
“My job here is the same as it is as a parent. It’s to try and make sure my kids are always themselves, and the same with the players and the staff. Whatever happens externally, you can look at yourself and be happy with that, and know that you’ve given everything.”
Turning the process into points is crucial, not just for the obvious reason, but it will also help convince the players Martin’s methods are worth following, particularly those who arrived in the summer.
“We’ve had this chat,” Martin said. “The guys that were here last year, they know that if you stick with it, through the tough moments, the reward is really big. When you get through those moments, it’s the best feeling. The guys who are new haven’t had that yet, they haven’t had that evidence and that feeling of winning when the moments have been tough. The sooner they can have that, the better for everyone.
“I feel they know why we’re doing what we’re doing, so we have to continue on that journey and hope that the team grows enough to win enough games of football.”
This weekend’s game at home to Leicester could be viewed as a ‘must-win’, but it’s probably the next five fixtures that are crucial: Saturday’s match is followed by the free hit/write-off of champions City away, then it’s Everton at home and Wolves away, with a Carabao Cup game against Stoke City of the Championship tucked in there too. If they are still winless after those five, both Southampton and Martin will be in trouble. But if they pick up a few points, things will start to look rosier.
Martin is popular among the Southampton squad and staff, but while the board have supported him this far — and would like to give him and his team as much time as possible to adapt to the Premier League — there will be increasing concern the longer they go without a victory. While the season is only seven games old, if the teams above them create a gap to the three in the drop zone, there will be a risk of a second Premier League relegation under the ownership of Sport Republic, which took control of the club in 2022. There was a sense that Sport Republic chairman Dragan Solak was ‘burning cash’ in that previous campaign in the top flight and he doesn’t want to make the same mistake again.
As Martin pointed out, there have been moments of encouragement in most of their games. “We’re in a good place after Arsenal (their final match before this international break) in terms of performance, and feeling, and spirit,” Martin said this week. “The team is growing, and I’m enjoying watching them grow.
“We have to make sure we keep doing the right things and focusing on the right things, trust in the work and trust each other and trust that it will come. It always has been the case and it always has come, like last season. I’ve got no doubt that, at some point, it will.”
In some ways, it would be a good thing for the Premier League if this all started to work and Southampton started winning games. For the neutrals at least, a team doing something so different to everyone else and staying up would simply be more interesting than a ‘normal’ side.
Will it work? Maybe. The early signs aren’t great, but sometimes all it takes for things to flip is one result.
What we can be more certain of is this: Russell Martin is not going to change.
(Top photo: Dan Istitene/Getty Images)
