The media are reporting that Saints have made the decision to let Jose Fonte go in January, given that they have no quality replacement already at St Mary's it suggests that we have his replacement in our sights.
The situation with Jose Fonte is a strange one, a year ago he had just signed a new deal with the club to take him past his 34th birthday and age when few players can continue to perform to their previous standards week in week out.
Back then Fonte was very happy with the deal and in interviews always spoke glowingly about how proud he was to Captain Saints and what he hoped the club could achieve.
So what has changed ?
In simple terms one thing, he changed his agent to fellow Portugese agent Jorge Mendes and that along with going from being very much a bit part player in the Portugal squad to suddenly being in their European Championship winning team meant that he has seemingly started to think that the grass could be greener elsewhere.
Certainly wiser football brains are puzzled whyhe should be linked with Manchester United on a footballing point of view, but when you consider that Mendes is a close friend of current Old Trafford boss Jose Mourinho you can suddenly put two and two together and come to the conclusion that if Fonte was to go to Old Trafford then it might be fatal for his football career, but very good for the bank balances of both him and Mendes and the super agent would be very grateful to Mourinho for making this happen.
Certainly few other clubs are interested, Everton supposedly made an offer in the summer and the Mendes/Fonte camp seem eager to blacken Les Reed in this respect by putting it about in the press that Reed did not inform Fonte of the Everton offer.
This is hogwash, this is 2016 deals are done with agents before clubs make offers, Les Reed would know more than anyone that if Everton make an offer for Fonte, Jorge Mendes would have been well aware of it, indeed would have spoken to Everton himself as the Toffees would have been making sure that the player would be open to such a deal before making their move.
That being the case why would Reed keep secret something that he knows Fonte already knows and to be blunt probably knew before Reed himself.
But these are all tactics aimed at unsettling clubs and creating situations for players to move, indeed perhaps Fonte himself does not want to move, but agents make money by players and Managers moving on and as we found in the Ronald Koeman saga, the agent was the driving force in forcing it to a point where there was too much money on offer to turn down.
So now we have the press telling us that Saints are prepared to let Fonte go, bear in mind this is the same press that have been telling s for weeks that Sam McQueen is off to Liverpool with the player signing a long term deal yesterday, something he would not do if he was off in January.
From a Saints perspective they are probably far more inclined to let Fonte go than they would have been four months ago, they know the player is not getting any younger, he is at an age where his form will start to slowly decline, perhaps not noticeably just yet, but he will start to lose a yard or two in pace and that causes other areas to decline.
Knowing how Saints operate they will already be looking at replacements and now they feel less loyalty to Fonte than they have done, last season he was a loyal servant to the club and I think from that point of view Saints were not happy with pushing him out, now they see him as just another player being led astray with a troublesome agent.
In fairness to Fonte he continues to be a model professional on the pitch and you cannot completely blame him for wanting to cash in on the twilight of his career, like the Koeman case it is merely a situation where every man has his price, Fonte was happy with his new contract a year ago because no one was willing to pay him that elsewhere, that has changed.
So I think in January Saints now see it as good business to get the £5 million being reported as on the table and will accept it as long as they can land the target they have in mind.
There will be some Saints fans who again will accuse us of being a selling club etc etc, but this in fact proves the opposite, it shows that we operate to a structure, it is about moving players on for the right time at the right price.
Three years ago we had a team that got us to 8th place in the League, if the team had stayed intact it would have struggled to get much higher the following season because there would have been little money for new signings.
Our squad would not have had the depth that it has now having benefited from not only
reinvestment of income received but the development of youth.
We have progressed forward in these three years "Because" of our structure and not "In Spite Of It"
There are those who say that we can't keep selling players and stay in the top ten, I would say we most definitely can as long as the so called big six are happy to pay us over the top for players and prefer to pay big money for established players rather than look for the gems like Van Dijk, Bertrand, Romeu etc etc, all players who have been overlooked and indeed sold by so called big clubs.
I hope Jose Fonte stays, after all he could get another medal and enjoy more success at St Mary's, but if he goes then I have every confidence that we will continue to improve the team and indeed the squad.