There is always a price for success and that price for a club like Saints is that your best players will be coveted by the so called big clubs.
Ronald Koeman has spoken of the fact that Saints supporters should enjoy Sadio Mane at the moment whilst he is still at the club, now some would say that is a bit of a negative attitude, but they are probably the same people who believe that when a player kisses the badge, then he truly loves the club and never wants to leave.
Sadly that is not the case today and a player staying with a club for any more than 3-4 years these days is a rarity, long gone are the days when a player will reach that magical 10 year mark and get a testimonial.
A couple of decades ago things were different and clubs could hold players to contracts and even when that contract ended a club was still under no obligation to sell. The Bosman ruling in the 1990's changed all that and now the only players who stay at a club for over 5 years are usually squad players rather than the first team regulars.
The price of doing well as a football club is it usually means that you have better players in the squad than those below you, one of the reasons that those players are better is that they have that something extra, its more than just talent or fitness, its that something that drives them on, or to give it another term "ambition"
Ambition is what turns an average player into a good one and a good player into a very good one, we all have ambition, it is just that its in context and the context that a Premier League player will have his ambition is to play for the highest club possible and to get paid the most money possible doing so.
This is nothing new, read about football in the 1890's and the mercenary's back then.
So when you have a great player at your club the upside is your performances as a team improve as his as an individual do, the downside is that bigger clubs want him and as an ambitious player he will want to go to those clubs as they will offer him a greater chance of success and more money.
This sadly is a fact of life, on the continent they have accepted this as being unavoidable, take two clubs Feyenoord & Liverpool, in the summer of 2014 when our trio went to Liverpool they were denounced as traitors, at the same time as Ronald Koeman went bck to Feyenoord to try and sign their best players the Dutch teams supporters didn't burn effigy's of Koeman and Pelle they wished them well and made Saints their second team.
Supporters in England are slower to grasp this but managers like Ronald Koeman certainly have, they know how things work and the key for Saints in the near future at least will be having a system in place where the conveyor belt never stops turning and it is factored in to lose a player or two at the end of each season.
Of course we do not want a repeat of the summer of 2014, but that was a freak turn of events, we were not prepared for the fact that suddenly players who no one had made a bid for before like Adam Lallana were suddenly hot property, we do not want that to happen again, but we can handle a couple per summer if we get it right.
It won't be great but if we have the strategy in place then selling a player for big money will only strengthen a squad over the years, compare our squad now with the one two years ago, now we have a squad packed with Internationals and talent, we have over 20 players capable of playing to the first team Premier League standard before we get into the promising youngster section, two years ago we barely had 14.
So when Ronald Koeman says
"Ok, maybe one day we will lose Mane but then we have to be prepared.
"You know in our situation that kind of players if they play like today there will come a lot of interest in the end of the season, but now we enjoy watching Mane in our team.”
That is not the manager being pessimistic that was him being realistic, but he also knows that if we are prepared then it will not be too much of a problem.
Those who say look at the team we could have had if we kept all our players are being a little naive, fooball in 2015 is a lot different than in 2010, 2005 and certainly those pre Bosman days, you can count the number of clubs who can hang on to a player when a bigger club comes courting on one hand, in England there are perhaps none, even Manchester United have been unable to hang on to big stars when Real Madrid have knocked on their door.
So enjoy Sadio Mane when you can, but look forward to the future, because when he goes there will be someone as good to replace him.
This is the Southampton way, it is the way that Ted Bates built this club in the 1950's to the 1970's, it was the way we survived in the top flight for so long, but now we will not use this system to survive, we will use it to improve and prosper.