The Transition; what now?

With Parish's comments about winding our style dial back to being more solid again, I immediately thought back to an article I read on the Beeb earlier in the year. It was an interview with Les Reed regarding the Southampton model, and one of the key quotes for me was around their succession planning and how they identify managerial and player targets in line with unique KPIs and performance metrics that Reed and his team set. In effect they know what they are looking for regardless of who the manager might be, they don't buy in to specific situations but rather base all of their decisions on a core set of club values, and use all of their metrics to assess how individuals fit with those values.

Reed's view was that clubs can be too influenced by managerial crises and lurch from one playing style to the next without ever building a club identity and a balanced squad, and as such somebody to oversee the footballing side of the club (Director of Football if you like) is actually a fundamental part of building long term, continued success.

We have heard from the board that they were up for the transition to a more possession based brand of football...do we think that's truly out of the window now? And going forwards, do people think a DoF would be a good fit for us (disregarding Ian Moody for the time-being) to build long term success as a Premier League club?