The Art of Squad Building

By Progression1878

Football’s hardest puzzle isn’t finding good players. It’s building the right team.

Transfers should solve problems; there is also a case that they can create them.

Supporters often look at squad building in very simple terms.

Need a right-back? Buy one! Need a striker? Go get one!

If only football recruitment was this easy.

Building a modern squad is an art of spinning plates. There are budgets, wages, playing styles, squad roles, age profiles, contracts, academy pathways, resale values, personalities, game-time management, all to consider. So, a fair lot of challenges to review when signing players, right?

The challenge becomes even harder when the list of problems is long, finding one high-level player within your budget is difficult enough. Finding four, five or six in the same window, all solving different problems, while ensuring they actually fit together?

That’s where squad building becomes complicated.

My belief is that you don’t necessarily need the absolute best 11 to be competitive; it 100% helps, of course, but building a team that complements each other with balance is key.

Every club wants competition for places. Ideally, you want two players capable of playing every position, pushing each other and keeping standards high, or Manchester City, Real Madrid or PSG, that is much easier to achieve.

They play an enormous number of competitive games, they have the financial power to carry expensive squad players, and they can offer trophies, Champions League football and enormous wages.

A player might accept being second choice at Manchester City because “second choice” can still mean 30 appearances. Lesser sides are not in the same scenario; they have to have give/take. Good players rarely sign for clubs outside the above unless guaranteed games.

They are constantly having to adapt.

Balance is one of those words used constantly in football without anyone really explaining what it means. Of course, there has to be quality across the pitch, but balance goes much further than that. It’s not just having say two right wingers and two left wingers.

For example, You might have a winger who wants to knock the ball past his full-back and attack space. Do you have somebody else who can slow the game down and create?

You might have a brilliant No.10, but do you have a midfielder capable of protecting him?

You might have a dominant centre-back. Do you have the pace alongside him to defend a high line?

This is each side of a coin in squad building. Collecting talented players is, of course, part of the remit/aims, but you want to collect players that complement each other to have the best chance of being an effective team.

This is where recruitment strategy becomes even more important: Club strategy.

The best-run clubs have a clear idea of what they want to be before they decide who they want to sign. The three B’s in the Premier League are often lauded for their recruitment.

Brighton.

Brentford.

Bournemouth.

They aren’t identical clubs, BUT one thing they have in common? Their recruitment principles survive managerial changes.

A manager is arguably the most disposable senior position in a football club. Managers leave/get sacked often — just take a look at the current ‘longest-serving managers’ list in the Premier League.

If you recruit entire squads to suit one manager, then the next manager is completely different and the squad needs overhauling? Suddenly you’re back at square one.

The best-run clubs avoid that. They establish their strategy first, then find coaches and players that fit their aims.

The manager should influence the squad, he should have a say in transfers — after all, it’s the manager having to use the players and get results. However, he shouldn’t completely define it.

There are often taglines in squad building, you want your assets, players in their prime, experience, prospects/projects, and leaders.

Finding that balance across a squad & dressing room is the challenge.

Stating the obvious, you don’t want a team full of inexperience at the highest level, just like you don’t want a squad full of older heads that offer you no cushion in sell-on value.

It’s not all down to age, as players develop at different rates, but it’s maybe grouping them as how you see them as year by year. Your squad should be constantly evolving! Your prospects should be moving into, say ‘pre-peak’ talents, your ‘pre-peak’ talents slowly moving into peak/established. Maybe the peak players you have on your books and don’t sell, move up to become more experienced pros to help the bands below.

FOOTBALLERS ARE INVESTMENTS

This is perhaps one of the most boring topics of modern football — clubs outside the financial elite can’t simply buy their way out of problems.

They have to trade their way forward, that means signing players who can improve the team today, whilst offering financial gain in the future, alongside hopefully progressing each other on the pitch.

If the signing is a success, the player helps himself by helping your club.

For example, Morgan Rogers, signed by Aston Villa for a fee below £15m in January 2024. He has grown as a player, and Aston Villa reaped the rewards by playing a crucial role in his development by offering him regular Premier League minutes. Rogers helped himself by helping Villa, with standout performances leading them to the Champions League, while they have now booked a profit of nearly £100million.

Villa have also increasingly shown that selling doesn’t automatically mean standing still, or falling into the abyss.

You want to keep your players, especially the very good ones, but part of squad building is spinning plates. Unless you are a humongous club, you are basically a selling club when the time is right. I’ve said recently: Well-run recruitment set-ups don’t fear selling players, they anticipate it.

The ideal scenario is that the replacement is already inside your squad, or the recruitment department already knows exactly where it is coming from.

That is sustainable squad building.

This is the cold truth, they don’t. Not recruitment department gets every decision right, even the so called ‘best’ ones and it can be for a number of reasons

• Quality

• Injuries

• Fit

• Some just don’t follow the patch you expected

The objective isn’t perfection; it’s making sure the mistakes aren’t ones that hurt you long term.

If you sign a 21-year-old for £15m and he doesn’t quite work out, there may still be a market for him, you might lose money, you might still make profit, but there is at least an exit.

Compare that with signing an ageing player for a huge fee and enormous wages, if it doesn’t work, the club can be trapped & stuck with this player. You see many big signings on big wages leave clubs on loan these days, this is because they don’t want to give up their existing contract.

This isn’t an argument that signing an experienced player is automatically bad business, it can happen at younger ages too (see Jadon Sancho at Manchester United). It is an argument that the club needs to understand what happens if the deal doesn’t work.

Every transfer carries risk, the smartest recruitment departments cover every base of the potential outcomes on these deals.

Then there is the part that supporters often overlook, you don’t build a squad simply by signing players It’s the obvious first step, but you have to develop the players too.

This is particularly important with prospects and players approaching their peak.

For young players, the following should be taken into consideration.

• They need meaningful minutes

• They need competition

• They need experienced players around them

• They need to know what their role is

• They need to have patience and be treated patiently

• They need to be able to make mistakes and learn from them

• They need a pathway

The same applies to players in that awkward middle ground, the 22-to-25-year-old who isn’t quite a finished product but can’t spend another two years sitting on the bench. This is where squad balance becomes developmental balance.

Experienced players should still carry responsibility, but they can’t play every minute forever. At some point, somebody else has to step up.

The best squads are constantly moving players through those stages.

Prospect — squad player — starter — experienced pro.

The never-ending cycle of squad building.

The Premier League is at it’s peak, every club has financial power. Every club every window is intent on improving, so if you stand still you will more than likely be moved past.

A club shouldn’t wait until its starting striker is 31 before thinking about his replacement, nor should they wait for their 25-year-old superstar to be sold before thinking “how do we replace him” – while these may not be the initial “look how much they’ve improved”, they can be a point of improving your foundations.

Succession planning should be a constant; the ideal scenario is that parts of the squad are already in-house.

As one player reaches his peak, another is approaching it. As one player leaves, another is ready to take his place.

That is how clubs avoid constant rebuilds.

And perhaps this is why squad building is so difficult, as there is no perfect solution. It is mostly just trying to do the best with what you have, budget-wise and talent-wise.

There are many questions that go into recruitment & it’s processing

• A new signing might improve your starting XI but block an academy player

• A young player might have enormous resale value but leave you short on experience

• An experienced player might improve you immediately but have little future value

Do you take the short-term boost in the arm, signing a 31-year-old left-back who is at his peak, even if it blocks/hurts your long-term plan of getting a 21-year-old left-back meaningful minutes to progress?

Just a small example of the questions asked in these deals, and that’s before even taking into account the sheer silliness of prices these days.