. In recent years such a label has been attached to Brentford and Brighton. Before that Southampton’s managerial recruitment and scouting network was feasted on, Mauricio Pochettino moving on to manage Tottenham before Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mané and Adam Lallana also left to join Liverpool and became Champions League and Premier League winners there.
This year’s model? Undoubtedly Bournemouth, Liverpool’s seventh-placed opponents on Saturday, replete with candidates for Anfield’s next rebuild. Virgil van Dijk and Andy Robertson phased out for Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez? Simple, ideal solutions – the young Spaniard and Hungarian have been outstanding this season – but in this era of tightened profit and sustainability, perhaps beyond the realms of financial feasibility. The £65m Tottenham were asked to pay for Dominic Solanke last summer is an indicator of how hard a bargain a club owned by Texan billionaire Bill Foley are likely to drive.
Foley and his Cannae Holdings company, whose minor investors including the Wire and Creed actor Michael B Jordan, have far deeper ambitions than to become a feeder club for football’s elite. Foley, a former attorney, wants a “shared scouting network and playing style” to make Bournemouth a “fixture in the top half of the Premier League” and regular qualifiers for European competition. Such a drive meant the bookended sackings of Scott Parker after a promotion campaign and then Gary O’Neil after he had kept Bournemouth up during the 2022-23 season. Turning to Andoni Iraola, and sticking with the Basque last season when his team began stickily, was a giant step in the modernising process.
Bournemouth are not new to the Premier League but the Eddie Howe years, under the ownership of businessman Maxim Demin, were often times of struggle and …
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