Saint no sunshine when they’re gone
KRUEGER VOWS: WE USED TO BE SELLING CLUB.. BUT NOT ANY MORE
THE list of big names Southampton have been forced to sell in the last 11 years would make a pretty impressive outfield team, with a few handy subs too.
And all those departures have brought in almost £220million. But their days as a selling club are over.
That was the firm message from chairman Ralph Krueger, who says this is now a new era at Southampton and insisted: “We are not playing games here.”
Krueger’s defiance will be music to the ears of Saints supporters grown tired of their best players, from Theo Walcott to Jose Fonte, being lured away from St Mary’s.
It is bad news, though, for defender Virgil van Dijk, who has handed in a transfer request as he seeks to leave the club. Krueger (below) said: “This summer we needed to consolidate. We needed to stop the perception out there that, ‘OK, I want a player from Southampton... and boom!’.
“We needed to get control of that to stay competitive in the Premier League. We are not playing games here. This is just who we are now, and a different era is beginning from what we needed to do business-wise and player-wise, to get the numbers right.
“We had 13 league players in the first summer I was here – 2013/14. We moved to 16, to 18, to 21, and now we have 25. It is time to consolidate.”
The “partnership” with the Chinese Gao family, who bought 80 per cent of the club for £210m last week, has helped strengthen Saints’ position. And Krueger insisted it is the stance they have taken all summer, not just with Van Dijk, which has shown they mean business. He added: “Everybody is personalising it on one player (Van Dijk) but there are others who could have had the same strategy or attitude, and they are not. “We had summers where there were multiple situations like this. But the philosophy we put out in May, we put it out for a reason. It was also in the knowledge of this partnership potentially evolving that we had the courage to make a stand and say, ‘This is time for Southampton to evolve.’ “In sport, the best clubs usually have a certain continuity in them. The ones that win championships have a continuity in their core and it was time for us to do that. We believe the fruits of that labour will end up in results.” Saints have made a £15.4m bid for Lazio’s 23-year-old Dutch defender Wesley Hoedt.