‘A pre-season can either make or break you.‘ – Arnold Bruggink, former player.
Every new football season is exciting and full of expectations. Ahead of the upcoming season every team is out to improve their squad. To improve your squad, is not just a task of signing new players, but mostly by bringing them all together and forming a collective. A pre-season is the perfect instrument to do so. However, not all pre-seasons are as successful as others.
What influences the success of a pre-season? In this article we’ll take a look on the critical success factors and see how West Ham are influencing those.
Critical success factors
– Time of signing new players
The closer the transfer deadline day gets, the longer the time to settle in will take. For example: Mario Balotelli signed for Liverpool on 21th of august, 10 days before the window closed.
You have to imagine that signing for a new club is stressful for a player. The first few weeks they live in a hotel, they don’t know anyone (there are exceptions of course), all of your family is back home and there are a lot of other things that needs to be done.
Imagine Mario: He left Milan to live in a different country (again), had to settle in at his new club, make new friends and at the same time he was expected to offer the same amount of goals as Suarez did. All in 10 days.
– Culture
The difference in culture has a huge impact as well. Ángel Di María, who grew up with the typical south European culture had to adapt in a short period of time to the English way of life.
In Spain, you eat late with family preferably outside, whereas in England you dine at 5 o’clock before shutting the curtains as the rain starts pouring down. The huge cultural differences do influence the performance of players.
Where the differences between the English- and Spanish culture are huge, the cultural differences between England and Germany or The Netherlands, are minor. Such players need less time to adapt.
– Injuries
As a newcomer (or in the case of The Hammers: under a new manager) you’ll want to prove yourself. The result of this is a good thing: hard work.
However, there can be too much of a good thing. If a player gets injured, that can influence him for the rest of the season. After his recovery he will try to regain his spot in the first team, which is extremely difficult, as most of the regular starting XI has already been formed.
– The training camp
If the daily routine of the camp consists only of training, eating and sleeping, it is only a matter of time before people will get annoyed and frustrations will rise. Especially if the training camp is held intern (Meaning, at Chadwell Heath, when the players all sleep in the same building).
How does West Ham influence these critical success factors?
– Time of signing new players
The board is doing an excellent job of signing players early in the season. Before the market officially opened they already signed two great players (Randolph and Obiang) with three other great signings close (One was Payet, the other two are Song and Jenkinson).
Appointing Slaven Bilic two weeks after the departure of Allardyce was a nerve-wrecking period, since signing players without having a manager is practically impossible. However, the board took their time to make the right decision by appointing a manager with an interesting footballing philosophy and that knows the history and culture of the club.
Perhaps is a signing player early on the most influential factor of all, and for which the board definitely deserves all credit.
– Culture
Seeing Adrian tweeting a picture of him and Obiang brightened my heart. Having someone in the squad to communicate with in your native language helps for new player to settle in. This also shows that either Adrian or Obiang made an effort to befriend his new teammate.
Not to even mention the small gesture Diafra Sakho made to the academy players on Twitter:
The first hashtag gave me goose bumps. It felt like Diafra was making an effort to get every fan behind the team, and at the same time to unite the squad to form a collective.
Hopefully he will do to this as well with new high rated signing Dimitri Payet, as both he, Cheikhou Kouyate, Amalfitano and perhaps Doneil Henry all speak French. The sooner he’ll fit in, the better he will play.
– The training camp
From the pictures I’ve seen, there is enough time an space for some leisure. The players are working hard, but aren’t being ‘drilled’ in the negative sense of the word. Some of them even watched the game against FC Lusitans together in Cork.
In conclusion
In my opinion I think the board is doing a great job on signing players early, so they have enough time to settle before the season starts. The squad is culturally diverse enough for everyone to pair up and settle more quickly and comfortably.
Overall I think the pre-season is going smoothly and well structured. It is placing a nice foundation for a, hopefully, successful season.
