Saints FA Cup hopes may have gone West on Sunday, but the team are heading East on a summer tour of China.
Saints are reportably heading to the homeland of new majority shareholder Gao Jisheng according to information revealed at the Soccerex Convention in China.
Provisional plans are in place will see Saints taking on a Chinese Super League team and a German Bundesliga side as part of their pre season preparations in July
Gao’s company, Lander Sports, is looking to build up to ten soccer academies across China, using the expertise at Saints to assist. All of this is part of a strategy to raise the profile of the club in China, and in turn aid Lander’s businesses.
This perhaps gives an indication of why Gao was keen to buy Saints and perhaps gives Saints fans hope that if he is to prosper with these academies in China then he will need Saints to prosper in England.
The Daily Echo have reported on the story and question whether the plans may alter should Saints be relegated, but they are of the opinion that they will not especially given that Gao and his company Lander Sports have been ramping up their PR campaign in China in regards to their ownership and plans for Saints.
Saints fans on social media have questioned Gao's motives in investing in the club, some have suggested that he is here merely to asset strip and take out as much money as he can, that theory was diluted back in January when £20 million was spent on Guido Carrillo, that suggested that if Gao was trying to asset strip then he hasn't quite grasped the concept by giving money to the club for transfers.
It would be naive though to think that he is in it purely for sporting reasons, he is of course a businessman, he has not come to lose money, but then again neither had Markus Liebherr, his plan was always for the club to be self supporting.
These latest plans suggest that Gao although in it for profit, is looking to make that profit from interests not only in China but by using Saints as part of those plans.
There are no guarantees here, but at least this morning we have some sort of idea where Gao's intentions seem to lie, prior to this everything seemed to be pure speculation, those who claimed that Gao was here purely to asset strip had no concrete evidence of that at all and the lack of news from China fuelled that.
This is still a long way from Gao making a definitive statement about his plans for the club, but it does suggest that with things going on in the background, he is not really in a position to say too much before he has those plans in place.