Well, that went quickly. With the Premier League season 11 matches old and parked within the natural hiatus of a two-game international break, it is just about possible – with all due caveats and boilerplate bandwagon-avoidance clauses – to pick out some of the dominant rhythms so far.  It is of course an indication of the feudal nature of English football’s top tier that the presence of Southampton, West Ham, Swansea City and Stoke City in the top nine of the Premier League should be noteworthy. Just as there is no reason why the success of the alternative big four should have any real connection to the relative stodginess of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United – while not forgetting, of course, Manchester City’s fretful title defence, or the familiar enigmatic (ie bafflingly hopeless) attempts to build a functioning Tottenham Hotspur team who do not almost immediately fall to pieces.  And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion something can be learned from the success of a clutch of well-managed teams, at least in part as a chastening counterpoint to the struggles of the better-resourced and the more obviously flaky.  Southampton are the star turn with eight victories from their first 11 matches, having lost a manager and half a team in the close season. Whatever happens from here it is a brilliantly unruffled piece of emergency piloting from Ronald Koeman, who has righted his ailing passenger jet, reset the navigation computer and extinguished a fire in the wing without drawing breath. Credit above all should go to the existing structures – fine scouting system, excellent academy, patient fans – within the club.  Two places below Southampton, West Ham are in fourth having spent no more than £16m net in the summer. Swansea are fifth having spent even less. While Stoke are ninth, just above Everton, Liverpool and Tottenham.  There is an obvious temptation to see this early season success as a kind of rebuke to those Premier League clubs where the art of team-building appears to have disappeared, replaced instead by the tendency to hurl a group of expensively-sourced players at a wall and hope some of them stick. By way of example, and Liverpool are by no means alone – of 13 outfield players used in Liverpool’s defeat by Chelsea at Anfield, six had less than 12 first-team starts. There is simply too much flux, too many new dawns, a big money brittleness that undoubtedly speaks to the failure of English clubs to compete as they might against the best in Europe over the last few seasons.  And yet this does not explain the relative success of the mid-range four. Southampton have nine new players this season, as do West Ham, while Stoke and Swansea feature new faces. There are some differences though. For a start all four have relatively settled, relatively well-stocked defences. As Gary Neville has pointed out it was once self-evident teams should be built from the back but this is clearly less the case at more high-profile clubs where there is pressure to make star signings and play with a certain brand-building style. This may simply be coincidence but United, Arsenal and Liverpool all have porous, poorly resourced backlines propping up a gaudily-assembled frontline.  Beyond the virtues of basic team building, there is perhaps also the question of pressure. At times it feels as though these is a kind of shared neuroses running through some of the more ambitious teams. The expectation of success is simply too broad: Tottenham, Liverpool, United, City and Arsenal are all, to varying degrees, suffering from a sense of falling short, of trapped ambition. All four of the season’s overachievers are in the bottom 10 when it comes to average home attendances, clubs for whom staying in the division is success, anything more a bonus. There will always be flux, but how much easier for new players to settle at a club where expectations are dampened, attention less forensically intense.  Beyond this all four of the Premier League’s semi-famous four have at least one quality each that fans of the division’s fretful big-spenders may envy. Swansea are well run and sustainably owned. Southampton have the best youth system in the top tier. Stoke have had two managers in eight years. Meanwhile West Ham – forget the haters, Big Sam – have a manager who knows how to organise a defence and has a knack of buying well in attack.  This is in itself another point of strength. Beyond the financially incontinent it is still necessary to be creative: to scout and buy well, to source potential as much as existing star wattage. Southampton, Stoke and West Ham all have their own nominees for the signing of the season, while Manchester City, United, Liverpool and Tottenham all look to have spent if not poorly then with a giddy, scattergun intent.  Little wonder, perhaps, Chelsea find themselves talked up after 11 games as champions-elect simply by being functional, balanced and strong: or rather not dysfunctional, not unbalanced and not weak – the most obviously not un-good of the Premier League’s heavy hitters – while the story of the season so far lies elsewhere, in the success of the Premier League’s buoyant mid-rankers. Southampton, West Ham and Swansea will not all be in the top five at the season’s end but their success so far presents an example of how, even among the hot-housed inanities of the Premier League, a little good housekeeping can still go a long way.
Barney Ronay: Teams like Southampton, Stoke, Swansea and West Ham have highlighted the value of building teams over signing stars