Craven Cottage Newsround

One of the big issues facing Fulham this year is the steady stream of opposing shots that keep flying into our net. It makes points hard to come by, and means that we’ve been overly reliant on kitchen-sink attacks in the last few minutes of matches.  That we’ve been quite good at these isn’t something to be too pleased with: it’s great for morale and exciting for supporters, but like Britney’s current ability to make sensible judgements, you wouldn’t want to rely on it.   

But finding defenders is not easy.  Even if you’re special:

Boulahrouz £7m
A Cole £15m
Del Horno £8m
Carvalho £19.85m
Johnson £6m
Bridge £7m
Ferreira £13.2m

That’s a lot of money (somewhere north of £75 million), and a lot of players to go through before you decide that Geremi’s your right back after all.   If one of the world’s most renowned coaches needs to fritter away tens of millions of Russian money to get a halfway acceptable defence (and without the free gift of John Terry who’s to say he’d have got it right now?), what chance do we have with a budget that would be exciting if it was a tenth of that amount?  It makes things harder, that’s for sure.  But equally, players are out there to be found.  You could make a pretty commanding team based on players who didn’t cost much money, our own Phillippe Christanval being the proof of that pudding. 

This is the great unknowable of football, as presumably Fulham spend a lot of time identifying and chasing these players.  You can’t win them all, but I wonder if everyone’s as diligent as they could be?   There’s a saying in America (I think) that the wisdom of a group of informed and interested people is usually better/more reliable than that of one ‘expert’.  As an example, consider Luis Boa Morte:  Alan Curbishley or whoever made the call, decided he was worth £5 million.  Several thousand Fulham fans could’ve told him otherwise.  That’s not me being smart from the comfort of my armchair, it’s fairly close to fact.  

What if every club’s fans were to rate all their players?  There would be disagreements of course, but over the course of several hundred evaluations you’d get a fair assessment of who’s good and who isn’t.  It would be a lot easier for managers to find players because they’d already have a fair idea of where to look.   And it wouldn’t cost much.   I’m in the market research industry, and I think such a project could be undertaken for somewhere between £50-75k, which is about three weeks wages for a top player and the sort of cash you spend on a half-prospect. 

Clubs would say ‘no need! we have scouts for this!’ but how many times can a scout watch teams?   Suppose Fulham send a scout to a game a week all season, and have 20 scouts doing this.  This doesn’t give you the coverage you want, and certainly not the same coverage that a few hundred season-ticket holders would come up with.

Hmmmm.  There might be an idea in there somewhere.