Saints have now confirmed that Grazing Pelle has left the club and we at the Ugly Inside would like to pay tribute to his time at the club.
It is fair to say that Graziano Pelle had a tough start to his career at Southampton Football Club, there were those who found it hard to accept that he had replaced club legend Rickie Lambert and that meant that a section of the crowd got on his back from literally 15 minutes into his first home game and some of them never got off it.
But the Italian showed that he had the quality needed to play in the Premier League and in his two seasons he not only led the scoring charts, but created chances for others.
All in all he started 60 Premier League games for Saints plus another 8 as substitute and scored 23 goals, a record of a goal in just less than every 3 games and that is a very good strike rate for any Premier League player.
He can leave Saints knowing that he has done a great job for the club in his two seasons and that he has shown the doubters that they were too quick to jump on his back.
Sadly though all good things must come to an end and the trick in football is to sell on a player at just the right moment for the best money before he starts to lose his form due to age.
In this respect Pelle is following the same path as Rickie Lambert, when SRL left he was at the peak of his form, but the reality was that age was against him and he didn't have the pace for the Premier League as has been shown by his two years since leaving St Mary's.
Now that process is being repeated for Pelle who leaves the club just one day short of two years since his arrival and only four days shy of his 31st birthday.
Saints bought him for £8 million from Feyenoord and are now selling him for a fee believed to be around £13 million to Chinese club Shandong Luneng.
This is a lot more than Saints could normally have hoped to have achieved in the sale of a player of this age, indeed Ronald Koeman was eager to take the Italian to Everton, but found himself unable to justify a fee of that size for a 31 year old, nor afford to match the £125k a week wages.
Some Saints fans will whinge about another player sale, but the reality is this is the modern day Premier League, you have to keep evolving and you have to keep buying at the right price and also selling at the right time, this does not make us a selling club, but a progressive one that is not caught resting on its laurels, the Premier League is full of teams every year that have allowed their side to grow old without improvement and suddenly find that members of it have gone past their sell by date so to speak.
So good luck to Graziano Pelle, he has not only been good business for Saints, but he has been a good player, the fact that he has only been here two seasons means that he cannot be classed as a club legend, but he has done more in those two seasons for the club than many have done in a far longer period.