Tonda Eckert has Southampton charging up the Championship table, so much so that an FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal is far from their priority for the rest of the season.
Last summer was an opportunity for a fresh start.
Southampton had narrowly avoided becoming the worst team in Premier League history and, after a season of winning just twice in 38 games on the way to relegation, the club needed a clean break from what had come before.
Will Still was the face of that restart, the highly rated then-32-year-old coach joining as soon as the 2024-25 campaign ended for his first foray into English football.
It was exciting. A club who needed to enjoy winning matches again had been bold in its appointment. Still had done so well in France that it was only a matter of time before an English club took a risk on him. Southampton were brave enough to be that club.
But it turned out he would last only 13 matches. Still was sacked in November with Southampton 21st in the table, their lowest position in the Football League at the end of any day since their promotion from League One way back in 2011.
The club could not risk another relegation to the third tier, and the atmosphere, which was turning increasingly negative at his final game, a 2-0 home defeat to Preston, made clear a change of some sort was needed.
While the fans called for that change to be to “sack the board”, Still was the obvious and easy target for those in charge.
It made some sense at the time. It felt like the writing was on the wall for him. But the numbers suggest things weren’t as bad as they appeared from the Championship table. Southampton were just outside the relegation zone, but in the expected points table, they were up in fifth. They were the league’s biggest underachievers when comparing actual points with xPts.
xPts isn’t an exact science, but by using expected goals data, it helps to give an understanding of which teams deserved to win matches based on the quality of chances at both ends of the pitch. And the underlying numbers suggested Southampton were far better than their league position showed.
At that point in the season, Southampton had scored just 13 goals from 23.0 xG, the worst underperformance in front of goal of any team in the Championship by a long way. They scored just eight of their 29 big chances in this period, and there were a few particularly glaring misses that stood out. They were creating more than enough to score far more goals and earn far more points than their players were actually managing. Luck was against them.
The board could have been patient, trusted in the numbers and ridden it out, but they decided a head had to roll. And the switch they made has proved to be the turning point in Southampton’s season.
Changing manager may have been the catalyst itself, or Still may have built the foundations for someone else to succeed, but whatever the reason, the improvement under Tonda Eckert has been astounding.
Five months on, Southampton are sixth in the table, occupying the final play-off position and dreaming of a return to the top flight at the first time of asking, a scenario that was unthinkable when the German took over. And on Saturday night, they face an FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal.
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1 hour ago Jonathan BurnettThere are plenty of similarities between Still and Eckert. They are both young managers with analysis backgrounds who gave up on the idea of becoming a player at an early age to focus on coaching.
Eckert, 33, is currently the second-youngest manager in the top four tiers of English football, after Fabian Hürzeler, and the sixth-youngest to take charge of a game in any of those leagues in the last five seasons, aged 32 years and 278 days on the date of his first game as Southampton boss.
Promoting him from the role he took as Southampton Under-21s head coach last summer was a risk. Still had come in with no managerial experience in English football, but Eckert was given the job despite having no managerial experience whatsoever.
But the move has paid off handsomely. Over the 26-game period for which Eckert has been in charge, only runaway leaders Coventry have picked up more points (52) or won more games (16) in the Championship than Southampton (51 points; 15 wins). They are the league’s top scorers in that time, too, with 50 goals.
Part – but not all – of the reason for that is a huge upturn in their fortunes (or the luck they’ve made for themselves) when it comes to finishing off chances. Their half-century of goals have come from 41.9 xG, an overperformance of 8.1, which is among the best in the Championship in that time.
Eckert deserves credit for his part in that improvement because a significant aspect of his task was to give his players more confidence and provide them with the tools to make the most of what they were creating. At first, this meant more and quicker transitions. Under Sill, they ranked 10th for direct attacks, with 1.4 per game. In a run of six wins from Eckert’s first seven games, they ranked third for direct attacks, with 2.1 per game – a 50% increase.
But there haven’t been profound changes. He has retained the possession-based approach that came before him with Still, and before Still with Russell Martin, but the German isn’t quite as dogmatically committed to playing that way, which was ultimately Martin’s downfall.
The rise under Eckert has coincided with many of their best players hitting form. It’s impossible to say whether that is pure coincidence and Eckert has got lucky where Still didn’t, but a likelier explanation is that Eckert has created an environment for the best players to flourish.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing, though. After a positive start, Southampton went seven league games without a win through December and January, and it looked very much as though the problems under Still remained.
Then, Eckert made the decision to move away from playing three at the back and his side haven’t looked back since. Starting with a 1-0 win over Sheffield United on 21 January, Southampton have gone 14 games unbeaten in all competitions, winning 11 to fly up the table and progress to the last eight of the FA Cup.
In that run, Eckert has shown an ability to adapt for different opponents, which the club have not always been able to say about their recent managers. Impressive wins last month over Fulham, Coventry and Norwich all came with distinct tactical approaches.
One consistent theme, however, has been his efforts to get the most of the best players in the squad. That means keeping the ball on the floor and playing out through Taylor Harwood-Bellis, who leads the Championship for touches (2,419) and successful passes (1,627) since Eckert came in. Over the whole season, he is top for involvements in open-play sequences of 10+ passes ending in a goal (14).
The midfield has been based around Flynn Downes, who has shown his best form since Southampton’s last promotion season, and getting the ball to Finn Azaz in the number 10 position. He has been a sensation this season, ranking second in the Championship for expected assists in open play (7.1 xA) and third for chances created in open play (48).
He and fan favourite Léo Scienza have been a big part of the reason that selling top scorer Adam Armstrong in January has not hurt the team. Scienza ranks second to Hayden Hackney for open-play shot-ending sequence involvements per 90. Azaz is sixth.
There have been issues, and one that stands out is how vulnerable they have been at set-pieces. Of all teams in the Championship this season, Southampton have conceded the highest proportion of their shots from set-pieces (37.0%) and the highest proportion of xG (34.4%). The return from a loan spell at Charlton of James Bree has helped with that by bringing some added physicality to the defensive line, but it has not solved the problem.
This will understandably be an area that set-piece kings Arsenal will look to exploit in Saturday night’s FA Cup quarter-final. Southampton will have to be at their very best to make anything of the tie, but if they can reproduce the quality of some of their recent displays, they just about stand a chance.
However, while they will of course give it their best shot, the truth is that as fun as an FA Cup semi-final would be, they could probably do without the distraction.
Their focus for the rest of the season will be on continuing their remarkable rise and maintaining their form to hold on to a play-off spot. If they are going to make a trip to Wembley this season, it would surely be better for their long-term future for that to be in the play-off final.
Nothing will be taken for granted in the final seven games of the regular season, though. Southampton have had to be near faultless in the last two months to sneak into the top six, and they won’t want to let up at all. Their underlying data finally reflects their actual position in the table, as the above xPts table for the full season shows, and they will want to keep up the momentum of their impressive results into the run-in.
Eckert is doing a fantastic job, but his work is far from finished.
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