Hard to believe but it has been a year since Nicola Cortese left Southampton Football Club and a lot has happened since.
With all that has happened in the last since, itis hard to believe that it has been a year since Nicola Cortese left Southampton Football Club, back then many supporters believed that the club would go into meltdown and that our days as a Premier League club were numbered, they thought that the entire success of Saints depended on one man and that one man was Nicola Cortese.
But with the benefit of hindsight we can ask the question "Did Saints succeed because of Cortese or in spite of him ?"
As Saints marched up from League One to the Premier League some lost sight of what the job of CEO/Chairman entailed at a football club, in very basic terms the job of a CEO is to appoint those who know how to run a football club both from the playing side and at a commercial lever and then to see that they all do their job.
That being the case the glory is for those that win football matches and so it should be.
But carefully planted stories in the press had gave the illusion that success was only down to one man and that Cortese was an expert in every field be it sports nutrition, tactics, player aquisition and running a business.
Of course Cortese did many thinks well, but for every think he did well there seemed to be half a dozen things he did not so well and some of them, like scrapping payment plans for season tickets or introducing a car parking ticket system that could not hope to recoup the outlay seemed to be done just to spite the fans, he was almost certainly a man who held Saints supporters in utter contempt rather than considered them the lifeblood of the business.
When he took over in the day to day running of the club in November 2009, contary to popular belief up till then his role should not have been as hands on as he was making it, meaning his relationship with the original Chief Operating Officer was unworkable, the alarm bells started to ring although not many were listening, back then, someone in a senior position in the club told me that Cortese would take the club forward, but because of his single mindness and insistence at controlling everything it would take twice as long as it should do as mistakes would be made along the way and that it would be a stormy ride.
That now looks a very accurate bit of forecasting.
Football fans in the main are only concerned with results, if the team is doing well then they think the club as a whole is well run, Katharina Liebherr certainly didn't feel that way and was asking questions that allegedly our ex CEO did not want to answer.
Perhaps one of those questions was about income versus expenditure, it cannot be denied that promotion to the Premier League brought in riches but from a commercial point of view our income was just about the lowest in the Premier, we were the only club failing to sell out corporate hospitality for instance and as any marketing manager will tell you corporate hospitality is what brings in the revenue, Katharina would almost certainly have wanted to know why out revenue was literally half of the team above us in the ranking.
But it wasnt just income, the club was spending money without seemingly any concern where it was coming from, the training ground was not only running two years behind schedule but had more than doubled from the original budget.
On the playing side perhaps 4 signings rang the alarm bells and hindsight now tells us they should have done, Gaston Ramirez, Mayuka, Vegard Forren & Osvaldo cost the club somewhere in the region of £35 million, add wages, signing on fees, annual bonus's, national insurance & pension contributions and you can more than double that over the term of the contracts. Add the training ground excess and the total for this would approach £100 million
OK we got some back from the sale of Forren but that was a drop in the ocean, even now we are probably spending over £100,000 a week just on paying wages to Gaston Ramirez and Osvaldo to be out on loan, even after the contribution from their current temporary clubs, that is one expensive mistake
It is easy to see why Katharina Liebherr might have thought that here was a guy who just content to spend my money with no consequence or accountabiliy of his actions .
A year on and we can see why from a corporate governance level things had to change, back then we had one man who refused to be accountable to anyone despite the fact that he was an empoyee not the owner, now we have a proper structure in place.
S a year on the club has not floundered on all levels it is flourishing, supporters will only see the on field results, but behind the scenes things have changed drastically, those running the club now see that the supporters are the key to success, they provide income for the club, yes perhaps its a drop in the ocean compared to the Premier league cash, but the fact is without its supporters the club is nothing, a year ago we paid £20 to watch Burnley in the FA Cup and 15,000 turned up, this year prices were halved and the crowd doubled, the revenue was the same but the feelgood factor is here this year it wasn't last.
Building a football club is like building a house, you have to have the foundations in place, those foundations are the supporters and commerical revenue, build that and the rest builds itself.
In every way the club is now stronger than before and although it will take time, under the current leadership both on and off the field it will get stronger every year.
It could have an should have happened under Cortese, but under him it was always a short term view, Mauricio Pochettino initially looked a forward thinking tactically aware manager, yet we now know he was far from the case, his experience was in avoiding relegation and he could never get that mindset out of his system, he was scared of getting relegated and therefore did not want cup runs to get in the way, he would state that the Europa League would be the worst thing for the club, but better to play in it and use it as a reserve run out than not at all, Ronald Koeman has shown us what a progressive manager with a hunger for success can do.
Now with a years hindsight we can see that the club was being held back, ironically Cortese the man who had said that football managers were just departmental heads and would discard staff because he thought they had reached the height of their powers, now seems to have reached the height of his and found himself just another departmental head where it was time to go.
Some supporters loved to sing his name, other fans sneered at us for that, this was something that happened nowhere else it was crass and worrying, but now it is rarely mentioned and never with any warmth, he was not one of us and never wanted to be, to him Southampton Football Club was just a vehicle for Nicola Cortese.
So in hindsight Saints are all the better for his departure and yes we do have things to thank him for, but we could never move forward to our potential till he went, this time last year he was holding the club back not moving it forward.
Of course this season may not end in success for Saints on the field, but if it doesnt we now know we have the foundations in place to keep competing and as we did in the 70's and 80's be a club that can challenge for honours.