The one thing that has been the biggest factor in the success of Southampton Football Club in the past seven years has been that we have always looked forward and not dwelled on what might have been, but that seems not to be the case now !

Reading social media since the transfer closed, you would think that Saints are a club perennially fighting relegation and that we had a squad that ranked 20th in the Premier League.

All because some people did not like the fact that we showed a profit in the transfer window, rather than spending every penny we had in signing players, indeed any players as long as we spent it seemed.

Ove the past few years Southampton FC has been considered a progressive club, one that always marches forward and always looks to the future always believing it is about what we do next that matters, not what we have just done.

Those that run the club be they the Liebherr's, those charged with the day to day running of the club or the coaching staff and players have not always got it right, but they have always learn't from mistakes and marched on.

Now though it seems some of our supporters cannot do that, I just hope that Katharina Liebherr does not read much of the Saints related social media, if she does then she will probably be thinking right now that Southampton supporters are a pretty ungrateful bunch.

What Katharina Liebherr has done for this club over the 2 1/2 years or so since she was forced to wrest back control from Nicola Cortese is nothing short of a miracle and those achievements should mean that she and her team should be given the uniquivocal backing of the supporters.

She has the right to ask Saints supporters to trust her, they perhaps won't agree with some things and she will get things wrong, but what we have achieved in such a short period of time means the supporters should trust her.

So Katharina Liebherr deserves credit for what she has done and does not deserve some of the accusations thrown at her about pocketing the transfer profits, supporters should consider the fact that even if she did do that, then it would only be a fraction of what she and her family have invested in this club and if she left tomorrow it would be in a far far better state than it has ever been in it's entire history.

But too many are spitting feathers because we have shown a profit in the transfer window, they are incensed that we did not spend every penny whether we needed to or not.

Of course we could have spent more, I myself am amazed we did not bring in a central defender, but I am not claiming the downfall of the whole club on the back of it.

Likewise the appointment of Claude Puel, already people are on his back, they make no account for the fact that he has taken over in a close season that was badly disrupted by a very late European Championship schedule, they make no account for the fact that he has made no worse a start than any of his predecessors in the past two decades, a sizeable minority of our supporters have already decided he is clueless.

Perhaps he might turn out to be so, but if we applied the same criteria to everyone of his predecessors since Markus saved the club in 2009, then none of them would have survived past their first three games and therefore the club would not have kept moving forward.

Running a football club is not just about spending every penny you have in the transfer market, it is about having a strategy both on and off the field, both short and long term and it is about keeping faith with that strategy even at moments when things are not going well.

If football was just about throwing money about in the transfer window then we would not have finished above Liverpool last season.

The problem in the transfer market is we are not playing on a level playing field, a big example of this is the difference between what Saints earn for just their shirt sponsorship deal and Manchester United's income from that source.

Saints deal with Virgin is the 7th largest in the Premier League in monetary terms, but it is still £70 million less than United's, in transfer money terms they can afford to buy three Morgan Schneiderlin's each summer and if they fail discard them and buy another three the following year.

That is what we are up against and that is before their other commercial income kicks in which again dwarfs us, this is pretty much the case for the five other clubs who make up the big six and why we cannot hold players when they come a calling, we can delay it as we did with both Schneiderlin and Wanyama, but ultimately they are being offered wages far in excess of what we can and that is what will count.

The point here is that to even pay our players anywhere near these levels we cannot do that on commercial income alone, we have to generate other money's in and unfortunately the easy way of doing that is in the transfer market and the excess from this summers ins & outs will have gone towards the wage increases needed to sign our current squad to long term contracts.

Some reading this say this lacks ambition, that we are only signing players on to these long term deals to keep their transfer values high, the answer to that is yes and rightly so, we cannot compete on the same levels as the big six, so we have to do it on our terms.

That means continually moving forward, that means that yes player or two will leave in transfer windows, but it also means that we can still compete, our strategy is better than literally everyone else's in the Premier League, definitely the clubs below us who rely on blowing the transfer budget every summer just to tread water.

So those Saints supporters who are not happy with the way the club is at the moment need to realise that sometimes we have to take what looks at the time like a step back, that at some stage we are going to not be able to better our league position each and every year as we have done for the last 7 seasons.

But that doesn't mean that it is doom and gloom, we are still one of the most envied clubs in the Premier League for our strategy, we are still moving forward and making the club stronger off the pitch each and every year.

So what is needed now is unity, we need to learn from history that managers take time to impose themselves at St Mary's, supporters can make or break a club's season, if Sants fans get behind Claude Puel and his team then we can have a great year, but if they get on his back then it could drag the club down.

Personally I want to see Claude Puel succeed as that means success for Saints, sadly there are more than a few out there who have got it wrong two seasons running that they would prefer to be proved right this year rather than see Saints move forward.

Photo: Action Images

TeamCortese added 23:17 - Sep 6 Let see how we perform in the next 10 games. If it's negative, then Liebherr out. If it's not I'll eat my words and celebrate in Saint's success.
0

Southampton Polls