Rules designed to ensure that the big clubs continue to monopolise top spots are the reason why so many Saints have gone marching out, writes Dave Kidd
We all feel like Southampton fans these days. Any of us who chose to follow a football club from outside of England’s top six or seven, will be feeling their pain. Even Portsmouth supporters will be empathising. Laughing, but still empathising. Many of us have experienced something similar, the rest all realise that the only ‘dream’ their club can now pursue is that of finishing eighth in the Premier League and then seeing their best players leave. As Dejan Lovren and Calum Chambers follow Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Rickie Lambert and manager Maurico Pochettino out of the St Mary’s exit door, with Morgan Schneiderlin and Jay Rodriguez likely to follow, there has been much anger aimed at owner Katharina Liebherr and chairman Ralph Krueger. And like most Premier League directors, they’re not exactly big on communicating with those they expect to buy their season tickets and replica kits.
Liebherr is an accidental owner, who inherited the Saints when her billionaire father Markus died, and Krueger used to be an ice hockey coach, so they were probably not best qualified to police the shark-infested Solent, once Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham and especially Liverpool started scenting blood. The new manager Ronald Koeman insists, ‘We’re not a selling club’ because it’s mandatory for everybody in football to say that. Nobody has ever said, ‘Yep, we’re a selling club’ – even when they’re selling all of their best players. But Southampton certainly haven’t staged a fire sale. They were not actively seeking to off-load players. Chambers' departure to Arsenal brings their summer earnings to a staggering £92million, much of which will be reinvested. But Koeman must conjure a miracle if the Saints are to match last season’s eighth-place, 56-point finish.
Yet despite their naivety, what were Liebherr and Krueger actually supposed to do? Even if former chairman Nicola Cortese had stayed? Even if they possessed the ambition to have a tilt at the top four? The days of one-club loyalists like Matt Le Tissier are long gone.
To have stood any chance of keeping Shaw, Lallana, Lovren and Chambers, they would have had to offer six-figure weekly wages to each, as well spending vast sums on new recruits to prove their ‘ambition’. And even then the lure of instant Champions League football elsewhere would still probably be too much. Who can honestly blame individual players? It’s difficult to take Jose Mourinho seriously when he brings up UEFA’s Financial Fair Play – given how much Chelsea spent during his first Stamford Bridge reign. But when he says that shelling out £27m for Shaw and paying him more than £5m a year in wages would have ‘killed’ Chelsea in terms of FFP, he is not entirely wrong. If Southampton had started bandying around huge transfer fees and contracts to Shaw & co and then qualified for Europe, they would have faced punitive UEFA sanctions. FFP is designed to keep the elite in place and the likes of Southampton out.
Even though the Saints are a well-supported club who boast a model academy which produced the world’s most expensive player in Gareth Bale, they are not welcome. The Champions League was formed because UEFA feared a breakaway European Super League, and FFP was designed to make damned sure the door is double-locked to any potential new Roman Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour. The rest of us are supposed to be scared of a European Super League too. Even though it is the obvious endgame, whether a decade or two down the line.
Yet why should we be fearful?
If Liverpool, the Manchester clubs, Chelsea and Arsenal all disappeared into some wondrous Gazprom-sponsored world, they’d still pick off promising players from the likes of Southampton, but at least the remaining English football league would be competitive again.
Southampton could dream of being champions of England and so could Fulham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Blackburn, Charlton and Birmingham, who have all reached the rarefied heights of the Premier League’s top 10 in recent years only to fall foul of gravity.
As the Sky Sports adverts start roaring to herald another new season for the richest League on Earth, and everyone pretends to ignore England’s embarrassing World Cup campaign like some fart in an elevator, we’re all expected to be full of excited anticipation.
Yet not at Southampton. And not at many clubs either.
