Can overachieving minnows change Premier League culture?

The Premier League is experiencing a season like no other, as scouting moves to the fore and helps the underdogs to thrive.

The era of Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern royalty in the English Premier League is over. The likes of Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich and Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour will remain key figures in the league’s future, but utilizing their riches in the transfer market alone will no longer be enough to pave a path to success.

Soccer, more than any other sport on the planet, is driven by the most insatiable of capitalist principles, and the Premier League has long been one of the game’s greatest poster children. Think of the Premier League as New York’s Times Square, or London’s Piccadilly Circus: an endless wall of flashing advertising boards and commercialization.

As time has gone on, the spotlight has continued to shine brighter on the league, and money has rolled in via record-breaking broadcast contracts. When the League’s latest UK television deal was announced as amounting to over £5.1 billion ($7.5 billion), concerns emerged that this would lead to the rich getting richer, and a greater divide between the top five teams and the rest. Refreshingly, the early returns appear to be resulting in a gradual easing of the stranglehold of England’s marquee clubs.

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Having passed the official halfway point of the season, teams who would generally be termed as minnows are thriving, and could potentially be set to initiate the greatest shift the landscape of English football has seen for many years.

Money continues to play a role, but it’s those who outwardly appear to be the most diligent, creative and smartest of the EPL’s 20 teams that are reaping the rewards at present.

Defying all odds, Leicester City find themselves in the heat of battle at the top of the table, in only their second season since their promotion from The Championship, England’s second-tier division. Only one year on from being bottom of the league on Christmas Day, they spent the 2015 holidays at the Premier League’s summit.

Then there’s Watford. The Hornets are spending their first season back in the Premier League after an eight year absence, and look capable of cementing their place in the top 10, behind a unique approach to team-building and youth development.

That’s not to forget the great play of Crystal Palace, or the success of Southampton last season either, or West Ham’s re-emergence, or Bournemouth’s over-performing. The fact that the list is so long proves the point.

The common theme is scouting, and an edge when it comes to picking up undiscovered talent. For those who used to worry about the top teams holding all the resources and grabbing all of the emerging talent around Europe, if there’s one way in which the increased TV money may have helped traditionally less successful teams to catch up, it was in building up the strength of their recruitment networks.

For as much as has been talked about Jamie Vardy’s phenomenal season, and ascent from non-league semi-professional football over the course of a few years, his success may not even be the best example of this shift in thinking in progress.

Vardy’s teammate Riyad Mahrez has scored 13 goals this season (fourth in league) and added seven assists (3rd in league) for good measure. Mahrez is arguably the league’s current standout in the Player of the Year race, yet only two seasons ago he was playing for Le Havre in France’s second division.

Mahrez was not on the radar of England’s greatest clubs, in fact he wasn’t even on the radar of Leicester City when they found him. The man hailed as Leicester City’s scouting genius, head of recruitment, Steve Walsh was digging a little deeper around Europe when he first spotted the Algerian.

As he told the Leicester Mercury, as soon as he saw him, it wasn’t difficult to realize Mahrez’s talent:

"When I first saw Riyad I had gone to watch a guy called Ryan Mendes, who is now at Nottingham Forest. He didn’t really tick as many boxes as I would have liked to have ticked on that given day. He is not a poor player, just at that moment in time he didn’t fit what we needed.But I kept my eye on Mahrez and alerted people to the fact that I would like to go and watch Le Havre again. I watched him another two times after that and on the second occasion I met the boy afterwards and bonded with him. I think then he decided he would like to come to Leicester City even though I don’t think he had a clue who Leicester City were."

In Walsh’s job, it’s not necessarily spotting the talent that’s the hard part, it’s casting the net wide enough to find diamonds in the rough before they rise to stardom and command exorbitant transfer fees.

Capturing Mahrez for £400,000 represents a home run for Walsh.

"I am pleased we got him because he has been absolutely fantastic. That gives job satisfaction because everyone wants to do a job they feel is worthwhile and are good at. You realise now that he is actually worth a lot more than we paid for him."

Leicester have gained the freedom to be active and aggressive in pursuit of talent via the wealth that the Premier League affords, and they’re making the system work for them. With a mixture of bargain signings who flew under everybody else’s radar, and significant trust in young players emerging from their own academy, the Foxes ascent is so by-the-book idyllic that it resembles a fairy tale.

Theirs isn’t the only method either, as proven by Watford. The Hornets are a unique proposition as they are one of three clubs shared by the same ownership. The Pozzo family own teams in what are traditionally European football’s three biggest leagues, and that gives them a unique approach to team building.

Between Watford in the Premier League, Udinese in Italy’s Serie A, and Granada in Spain’s Liga BBVA, the group have created their own development network.

Watford were promoted off the back of many of Udinese and Granada’s youth players thriving on loan spells with the London club. It was a controversial strategy, but it was evidence of how the process of talent acquisition has changed in the global game.

The man responsible for finding many of the players who now grace Vicarage Road is Udinese’s Andrea Carnevale, a man noted for searching across the four corners of the globe to find the best talent available to him.

Carnevale’s challenge is much the same as the one that faces Leicester City, as was explained in his own words in the Watford Observer:

"Our secret on the international transfer market is simple – or at least it sounds it when you say it: we have to get there before everyone else, or certainly before teams with more money and prestige."

Gian Luca Nani, Watford’s technical director explained this approach to team building, and it’s clear how it gives a team who were once destined to only occasionally rear their head at English football’s top table, a chance at sustainable success.

"Watford is an independent club but we’d be foolish not to use the know-how of the Udinese scouting network. Thanks to that collaboration, we can build something big here."

Carnevale elaborated on that further:

"People said all we were doing was putting all Udinese’s rejects on a plane and taking them to London. But we don’t leave things to chance. We chose the ones who, in our opinion, were best suited to English football."

The prime example of such a player is Watford’s star striker, Odion Ighalo. The 26-year-old Nigerian joined Udinese way back in 2008. He had a loan spell with Granada (among others) that was moderately successful, before finding his stride with Watford.

Ighalo has scored 14 league goals so far this season, placing him just behind Vardy and Romelu Lukaku at the top of the Premier League’s goalscoring charts. It’s a remarkable rise for a striker who has only seven international appearances on his resumé up until this point, yet it’s evidence of what looking to be pro-active as opposed to reactive in the transfer market can achieve.

If Carnevale is to be believed, there’s no reason to believe why this can’t only be the beginning for Watford either. He told The Guardian:

"We run an operation on a global scale, a well-oiled, highly professional team, using many former players. We cover every significant competition around the world – regional championships at every level from under-17 to under-21, domestic leagues in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and also across Europe: Belgium, Sweden, Serbia, Croatia. In all there are perhaps 25 or 30 of us. We’re constantly looking for players. Our ambitions have no limit."

If money still speaks, owners are investing their own wealth, and utilizing the riches which come from their place in England’s most watched sports league in a smarter way than we have seen in times past.

The thinking is moving away from drawing up long shopping lists of players based on the money in the bank, and it’s shifting to getting ahead of the game and discovering talent. It’s how the game used to be, yet now it happens on a larger scale.

That’s not to say it’ll remain easy for clubs like Leicester and Watford to stay ahead of others in this department, as Leicester’s Walsh admits.

"It is getting more difficult. But part of that is taking the chance and using your gut instinct, if you watch that player and really believe in that player."

What’s important is that they’ve got a headstart, and that can go a long way towards levelling the playing field for when the league’s traditional giants catch up.

What Mahrez and Ighalo have achieved with smaller clubs sets a precedent that could cast away much of what has been conventional wisdom in the Premier League since it’s inception over two decades ago.

If you need further proof of that, look no further than 16th placed Bournemouth. The Cherries added highly rated young Argentinian winger Juan Iturbe on loan from Roma when the transfer window opened on New Year’s Day, and now they’re chasing Italian superstar in the making Stephan El Sharaawy.

To recap that’s a 22-year-old once dubbed “the new Lionel Messi,” and a 23-year-old former Serie A Young Footballer of the Year who has already represented the Italian national team 17 times, potentially gracing the 11,000 capacity Vitality Stadium.

The game has changed, and it’s exciting.