It's been revealed that Saints will not be wearing Adidas next season after the club got shirty with their kit manufacturers back in December of last year.
A club statement said:
"Following months of discussions at the end of last year, the decision was made at the start of December 2013 that the Club would terminate its contract with its Official Technical Supplier, adidas.
"In February and March of this year, the Club worked hard to repair the relationship with adidas but, despite these healthy discussions, it has become clear that, due to the short lead times involved, adidas were unable to produce a Southampton kit in time for next season.
"As a result of this the Club has had to find an alternative solution, and we will be unveiling exciting news regarding our 2014/15 kit within the next couple of months."
Rumours of unrest appeared within weeks of the season starting and the rumour mill was saying that Nicola Cortese felt that Adidas had over charged the club after he had spotted an identical plain shirt to Saints but without the badges etc on sale for around £10.
If this was true the irony was that Saints had priced their version of the shirt at £49.99 whereas for instance Bristol City with an almost identical design were pricing it to their fans at £39.99, whilst most of the other Premier League clubs in Adidas charged £44.99.
But the shirt design was not popular with the majority of supporters for a number of reasons, mainly that it was an off the peg design which was being sported by any number of other clubs in a different colour, for instance Fulham's home kit matched our away kit in reverse.
A further irony was that the sides in Adidas kits in stripes actually looked the least off the peg, Sunderland, Stoke and Hull for instance whereas those with plain shirts all seemed to have the identical designs to others for both home and away kits.
Another rumour doing the rounds was that the Saints werent happy with the training kit, again being identical to everyone else.
But the truth is that whoever was doing the negotiating would have been aware of all this and knowing our ex Chairman's penchant for always making the final decision, surely he knew what he was getting into.
As stated the fall out came in December and that clearly when Cortese left the new board tried to rescue the relationship with Adidas, the problem being that the timescale was now too tight for Adidas to be able to deliver the goods.
Now Saints will have to look for another supplier, given that Adidas cornered the market last year in the Premier and beyond, there should be a lot of suppliers who will not have the amount of orders that Adidas will have to deal with so will be able to offer Saints what they need.
Umbro have been mentioned and certainly they were a good supplier to Saints in the past, not pushing for payment from outstanding orders as we headed to administration and producing kit at short notice when we came out.
Their ultimate reward was to see Saints go to Adidas, on the face of it a good move given the usual standard of their kit, what is clear though is that Adidas were so popular that they had too many teams for not enough designs, our plain kit did not make us stand out from the rest and ultimately we did not negotiate with them a good deal.
Rumour is also that Adidas will return for 2015/16 and that next years will be a temporary sojourn with another manufacturer, that will cost us money as supporters are more likely to buy a shirt if it is a name brand and from that viewpoint we will lose out.