Forget Leicester City, Southampton and Everton are a better bet for future Premier League success according to new management index
Newly-crowned champions Leicester City are more likely to mimic Chelsea's collapse than retain the title next season, according to a new report on the management quality at Premier League clubs.
Claudio Ranieri's side may have redefined what was previously thought possible, but similar-sized clubs hoping for long-term success should instead look to Southampton and Everton, according to a report published today from Organizational Maturity Services LLP (OMS).
In a ranking of how well Premier League clubs are run, OMS LLP place Leicester in the bottom half of the table, below Southampton, Arsenal and Tottenham but above last season's champions Chelsea.
The rankings are based on a clubs' organisational maturity; their ability to build long-term, sustainable success and how well they get their human capital – from star players to supporters – working to the same goal.
"The one thing we look for in an organisation is coherence in terms of what their purpose is and what their strategy is," explains OMS LLP managing partner Stuart Woollard.
"Leicester haven't got that at this point time, there's no evidence of a coherency through the systems which knit together to ultimately put a team out on the pitch.
"If they were to lose Mahrez and Vardy, what would that do to their team? It's similar to Liverpool two years ago when they should have won the league but didn’t. In the time since they’ve struggled, they did not have the management systems in place to ensure that success was sustainable and they fell away.
OMS LLP argue Manchester United's demise is a result of poor organisational structure and misguided priorities (Source: Getty)
"If you look at Chelsea, they’ve had an absolute disaster of a season after winning the league. They're a very good example of a highly immature organisation where there’s a serious failure to understand that human capital matters to success. There’s no coherency around their strategy, there’s dysfunctionality across the organisation, particularly when Mourinho was in charge. And consequently things have gone very wrong very quickly."
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In contrast, Southampton demonstrated the underlying strength of their organisation after losing a host of first team players and manager Mauricio Pochettino in 2014 by finishing a position higher and picking up four more points with new boss Ronald Koeman the following season.
Woollard describes the Saints as understanding "the link between all the human capital which connects their organisation."
He adds: "It's not just the workforce, the players, the scouts, the academy. It's the suppliers, their sponsors, it's their fans. It's everybody connected to the organisation. They're all a source of value."
Similarly, Southampton and Everton are singled out in their chasing of long-term football excellence whereas teams such as Arsenal or Manchester United are more geared towards the bottom line.
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"Arsenal are actually run very, very well in conventional City-type terms," says Woolard. "All the structures, all the systems are very conventional in terms of how they’re managing the organisation to create financial value.
"But Arsene Wenger has embedded so much of himself into the way Arsenal play on the field, all the structures that have been put in place…if he leaves the club, there’s a real risk of losing that continuity.
"Manchester United did not put the systems in place to ensure that risk was minimised in the case of Sir Alex Ferguson's departure. Now they’re looking for an individual to come and rescue them and put them back to where they were."