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At any time in the Premier League, there is a model club to follow. 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 swimming against the tide. Howe’s time at the club ended following relegation in 2020. The plan is to follow the lead of Matthew Benham at Brentford and Tony Bloom at Brighton in establishing a Premier League force while not necessarily assuming their paradigm wholesale. Foley also operates a multi-club model with shares in Lorient, Auckland FC and Hibernian. Neither has there been a “year zero” break with the past. While Howe became a historic figure in the club’s story like Ted MacDougall or Harry Redknapp, many of those he worked alongside linger. Simon Francis, Howe’s captain, is technical director. Adam Smith and Lewis Cook, current club captain and vice-captain and former Howe lieutenants, remain key individuals.
Where Bournemouth cut deepest on the idea of well-run, exemplar club is in playing the football the elite aspires to, and have been on the thick end of. Manchester City’s slide began when Iraola’s high-pressing machine exposed the ageing legs now carrying the serial champions in a 2-1 win in November. Arsenal fell victims, too, and last week Nottingham Forest’s previously dominant defence was bamboozled. Iraola had just 12 senior players to call upon as an unbeaten run of 11 matches was extended with a 5-0 win.
“We couldn’t match up to the intensity,” said Pep Guardiola at the Vitality Stadium. “Today, the modern football is the way that Bournemouth play,” he added last month. “You have to rise to the rhythm.” Iraola’s team, when flowing, hit a tempo their opponents cannot live with.
Dango Ouattara, a makeshift centre-forward, scored three second-half goals against Forest to follow Justin Kluivert doing the same against at Newcastle. Bournemouth’s movement and counter-pressing cut through both teams. It can be bewildering to watch, an approach of such modernity that when Guardiola puffs out his cheeks in admiration there is no hint of patronisation. Aside perhaps from a trip to City in late February, Bournemouth looks probably the most difficult away fixture on Arne Slot’s remaining list of Premier League assignments.
Is this the sweet spot? The high point? Is such progress sustainable? A brain drain of sorts has begun already. Richard Hughes, the adviser behind the appointments of Iraola and Slot, joined Liverpool, with Francis stepping into his technical director role. Yet Hughes, an Italian speaker and previously a Serie A expert TV summariser, was beaten to signing Huijsen from Juventus, whose capture is described by one industry source as a “masterstroke”. President of football operations Tiago Pinto, who arrived last May, knew the teenage defender from working with him at Roma. Within football, Bournemouth’s recruitment team is respected and incoming talent is offered a Premier League chance on decent wages.
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If a new stadium has been mooted since Howe was leading the club up the divisions, any development on the spacious Kings Park that surrounds the Vitality Stadium will take time to move forward, despite Foley’s stated ambitions to go from 12,000 to 18,500 with a significant uplift in the percentage of hospitality – 6% to 17%. The aim is to service – at a premium – an affluent part of the country. Meanwhile, a new state-of-the-art training ground will open in the coming days, where Jay Mellette, the club’s performance director and once a key figure behind the scenes at Cirque du Soleil, will oversee affairs.
The next step in maintaining the status of a paradigm club is succession-planning for managers and talent, a discipline in which Brighton particularly have proven successful. Iraola is bound to be a man in demand across Europe, perhaps even when Guardiola takes his eventual leave of City.
The feeling is Iraola, with an unassuming persona and espousal of the collective spirit he learned as a player at Athletic Bilbao, will stay loyal to a contract extension signed until 2026. When Leeds came calling for him in February 2023 he stuck to his prior agreement with Rayo Vallecano, before heading to Bournemouth. There he has helped the club to become the talk of football, admired as a model to follow, a team to admire and opposition Liverpool should face with no little trepidation.
