As a statement of intent, Southampton’s £12.5m purchase of one of world football’s most exciting midfielders will take some beating. The versatile and energetic attributes of Victor Wanyama have attracted the attention of some of England’s biggest clubs, but it is the Saints who have staked a hefty sum on the Kenyan fulfilling his undoubted potential.
The summer transfer window has had a staccato opening. Of the major players, only Manchester City have got to work quickly, bringing in the dynamic Brazilian enforcer, Fernandinho, and Spanish winger Jesus Navas.
Jose Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas have made their own initial forays into the market, although it would be a safe prediction to venture that both Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur are yet to indulge in their major business.
Arsenal’s avowed grand investment plans are still to materialise, and Evertonians will inform you that David Moyes will not be rushed into making any hasty acquisitions.
The cagey approach of those five clubs, who will surely fill the Premier League’s top-quarter positions once again, has left the next aspirational group to be chief players in any trading to date.
West Ham United parted with £15m to turn Andy Carroll’s stay at Upton Park into a permanent arrangement. Roberto Martinez has been positive, sprinting from the blocks to ensure his augmenting of the stellar but undersized squad waiting for him at Everton.
In South Wales, an uneasy truce appears to be prevailing between Swansea City’s manager Michael Laudrup and his chairman, Huw Jenkins. The return of cordial relations between the Swans’ most influential protagonists has culminated in a club record £12m being spent on the Ivorian serial goal-scorer, Wilfried Bony.
Regardless of some cute recruitment, and Laudrup’s proven eye for a player, there remains a sense of unease at the Liberty Stadium. It will require a lengthy period of calm to convince an anxious support that the renewed playing foundations being constructed at their club are built on rock rather than sand.
As the last campaign was drawing to a close, the same impression of instability was emanating from St. Mary’s. The club’s capricious Executive Chairman, Nicola Cortese, was considering his future on the South Coast – a situation which prompted the Argentine manager, Mauricio Pochettino, to declare that if Cortese were to depart he would follow suit.
After four months in charge, the suspicion was growing that the man controversially brought in to replace the popular Nigel Adkins would be merely the latest in a string of transient occupants of the Saints’ dugout.
When Chris Nicholl was removed from his post in May 1991, Southampton had employed three men in their top job across the preceding 36 years.
Pochettino is the 17th permanent appointment during the ensuing 22 years. The former Argentina international defender wasted no time imprinting a favoured ferociously high-tempo, high-pressing, and adventurous style on his new team.
If it had transpired, in the immediate wake of his January instalment, that ‘Pochettino’ was to be the latest name placed tangentially on the Saints’ manager’s office, the wearied fan-base would simply have shrugged their shoulders and studied the list of possible names to fill the role of next condemned man.
By May, the eventual decision of Cortese to remain in situ was most welcome for the consequent continued presence of the Argentine boss.
Just three days into the 41 year-old’s reign, there was a marked change to the Saints’ footballing approach for a home match against Everton – a goalless draw which, in truth, should have yielded more.
To an outsider Pochettino would have been considered consigned to start life at St. Mary’s on the back foot, such was the understandable outcry regarding the incredibly harsh sacking of Nigel Adkins. The now Reading boss, by virtue of leading Saints to successive promotions, restored the pride to a club which after becoming an accepted top-flight fixture had, during the course of five miserable years from 2004, suffered an ignominious slide into League One amidst a whirr of fiscal strife.
From day one however, the strident Argentine has been positive in every (translated) public utterance, and backed his words with deed – both in the manner of his side’s play, and in his premier recruitment policy.
This is a very different Southampton to the outfit which spent a large part of the 1990’s staving off relegation, inspired by the wonderful individuality of Matthew Le Tissier, and playing at their charming and atmospheric old home at The Dell.
Shortly after commencing their first term back at the top last August, the £12m capture of the scintillating Uruguayan attacker Gaston Ramirez served notice that this was a club no longer content to exist with survival as its primary aim.