Financial Figures Reveal That Saints Are A Trading Club Not A Selling Club ! Friday, 17th Mar 2017 09:16 The recent figures that Saints revealed earlier this week suddenly gave some Saints fans a different perception of just what the club is doing. Life is usually about perception, in all of our ordinary daily lives we rarely actually know the actual facts, but we perceive what we think to be the truth often based on little more than heresay. That is the case for many when they judge Southampton Football Club, they see nothing other than the players who go out of the club, they see that Manchester United are not selling players in those numbers and they immediately perceive that Saints are a selling club and United are not. But that does not take into account the different situations of the two clubs, United are in a totally different universe financially, one that for all fine talk of reaching for the sky etc that probably only a handful of clubs could ever hope to match, you cannot just build a big stadium and suddenly become a big club. To give a small indication of what we are trying to breach, United received £57 million for their shirt sponsorship deal this season, Saints got £7.5 million from Virgin Media, that is not a bad deal, it is the 7th best in the Premier League, but it is still around £50 million short of what United raked in just on this one area of income and that doesn't include the revenue from sales of the said shirt where United sell more shirts at Disneyworld in Florida than Saints do in total, is this telling you something ? it should be. In simple terms every summer United receive a cheque from Chevrolet and can afford to buy two Morgan Schneiderlin's without blinking. So Saints cannot take on United or Arsenal, or City or Chelsea or Liverpool or Spurs on a level playing field, they cannot take them on in terms of revenue generated either through the gate or from commercial deals, so they have to take them on it the ways that they can. When Markus Liebherr took over the club in 2009 he had a blueprint for it, that blueprint was to make the club self sustaining and successful using a strategy that involved the academy and buying and selling players, the book Soccerball itself based on the American book Moneyball, about the way that Oakland Raiders took on the big boys in baseball using strategy not big bucks. That blueprint went slightly astray when Markus died and it left Nicola Cortese able to treat the club as his own fiefdom and make big claims without the money or even foundations to back them up, a certain section of the fanbase lapped that up, probably the same one now that claims Katharina Liebherr is asset stripping. Four years ago Katharina had to wrest control back from Cortese with spending out of control and little in terms of commercial income coming in. It would have been easier for her to wash her hands of it and sell it to the highest bidder, but she saw it as a legacy of her Father and although in the long term she may still sell, she does want it to be a lasting testimony to Markus and continue to thrive rather than he family name become something that Saints fans spit on the ground for the way she dumped us. But we are back to the original blueprint now and although that does involve some investment in the club in order to be able to go forward with certain plans ie the training ground and it is well documented that Katharina has wiped off loan etc, it does not involve her putting in big bucks to buy players. Therefore it is always going to be about bringing forward youth and trading players, buying them at low prices and selling high and continuing to repeat that process. Of course there will always be times when it does not work, but if those times are far less than our success's then we will continue to prosper. The problem is that over the last few years we have done it too well, we keep signing players who we develop and who the big clubs want, we are victims of our own success. That leads fans to scream we are a selling club, but does that phrase mean that we are failing, Manchester United are not a selling club yet by their standards they have failed badly over the last four years, who got the best out of the Schneiderlin and Shaw deals ? Saints or United ! Back in the 1990's we were not a selling club, we had the same squad season on season and in the main finished in the same way, dicing with relegation but ultimately scraping out till 2005 when we tried to be a buying club and it went spectacularly wrong. I would say that Saints are a trading club, we have to take the Moneyball and Soccerball principles and work them to our advantage and there is no reason why this should not continue. Ask yourself, over the last four years would you rather have just kept Yoshida and seen him play week in week out or would you rather have had a year of Lovren, a year of Alderweireld and two years of Virgil Van Dijk, this is an example of how Saints work as a trading club, buy Lovren for £8.5 million, sell him for £20 million plus a year later, get Alderweireld on loan and then use the £20 million to sign Pelle, Mane & Clasie. Good business ? I would say so. In those four years we have had no bids for Yoshida we have not sold him, we would not have been a selling club, yet is there anyone who would claim that we would have been stronger than the aforementioned little run of trading starting with Lovren. But it is far more reaching than that. Yes at times we have been caught short, the departure of Jose Fonte saw the last of the Cortese era players gone, that deal showed why sometimes you have to be a selling club, sometimes a player can cause you a lot of problems if you refuse to sell him. But with Fonte's departure it now means that all of our players have come in under the present board, they have bought in to what we are trying to achieve whereas back in the summer of 2014 the squad then had been there under our former Chairman's promise's of success, although they used that as an excuse to leave when the real reason was money. Players who stayed like Clyne and Wanyama ran their contracts down so they got to the final year and we had no choice but to sell or see them go for nothing a year later. Now though it is different, the squad know what the club is trying to achieve, they are all signed to long term deals and they know how the club operates, that means that e are now more in control of who goes and when. Than means we are now truly a trading club rather than a selling one, we have to sell, it is part of the process and the only way we can sustain top ten finishes and shots at the top six and cup finals, we have to bridge that financial gulf between us and the likes of United etc and this is the only way we can do it. That being said we have a far better chance of succeeding with this strategy in the long term than we do if we hang on to players till the last year of their contract and then have to sell them cheaply, we barely made a profit on Wanyama for instance. Trading is good it is our way forward and if you look back it has been the Southampton way since Ted Bates took over as manager over 60 years ago, it was smaller stakes back then, but in essence what we are doing now is no different from what Ted and his successor Lawrie McMenemy did, it s just on a far larger scale. So now we sit in the top ten of the Premier League, if we end up in this place come the end of the season then this will be the first time that we have managed four consecutive top ten fixtures in our history. We have reached a major cup final for only the second time in 38 years and indeed only the sixth time in our entire history. Add both those things up and it makes this just about the most successful four year timespan in our history, we must be dong something right ! So it is back to that word perception, we used to be perceived as perenial relegation strugglers, then as fallen giants, now we are perceived as a selling club, but we are also perceived as a top ten club and one with a blueprint and strategy that literally every club outside of the big six is now trying to emulate. What it needs now is our supporters to wake up to that fact, buy into what we are trying to achieve and start to perceive ourselves as a trading club, if we do that then the perception will change across the land, but how can we expect others to believe it if a large proportion of our support doesn't itself. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, we have dines well this past four years, now we have to be proud of what we have done, not keep going into meltdown ! Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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