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Quinn: Saints Way to be admired
- Updated: September 19, 2016
Work took me to White Hart Lane yesterday, but waiting for the game to begin I was keeping an eye on what was going on down on the south coast where Southampton were playing Swansea.
Southampton ended a good week with their first win of the Premier League season after two away losses and two home draws. On Thursday night they had picked up their first win of the season when they started their Europa League campaign.
Back to business as usual.
I smiled to myself and settled down to watch Tottenham, a highly ambitious club who have done very well so far out of buying players (and poaching backroom staff) from Southampton. For clubs around the top end of the table, Southampton has become a very good place to shop.
Last year I got to know the former Southampton chairman Nicola Cortese a little bit. It was an acquaintance I wished I had made long ago before I got involved in the business side of the house at Sunderland.
Whereas I was surprised to find that I fell in love with Sunderland at the end of a long career, it was almost more surprising that Cortese, an Italian guy working as a banker in Switzerland, should have fallen in love with Southampton FC.
Cortese was running the sports business practice for Banque Heritage in Geneva when he was asked to conduct the purchase of Southampton on behalf of Markus Liebherr, a German-born businessman based in Switzerland.
Looking in from the outside you might have thought that the best advise Cortese could have given his client was to keep his money. Southampton were in administration, in League One and would be starting the season with a 10-point deduction.
Cortese concluded the deal expertly and was asked to take over as chief executive of the club. For some reason he said “yes” and what followed was one of the great success stories of modern English football. He and Liebherr developed something called the ‘Southampton Way’, which sounded like a slick slogan at the time, but which has become the blueprint for a lot of clubs who don’t have billionaire sugar daddies.
Success in the modern game gets measured in different ways. If any Southampton fans are distressed that the club hasn’t won the Premier League or the Champions League by now, they should try to remember how happy they were to win the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy in the spring of 2010. How happy they were just to still have a club to follow.
I think they will be content enough with their lot though. Southampton fans know that the tag of being a ‘selling club’ has lost its sting largely due to their own club’s belief in its own system and ethos.
[Morgan] Schneiderlin, [Dejan] Lovren, [Luke] Shaw, [Victor] Wanyama, [Adam] Lallana, [Sadio] Mane, [Nathaniel] Clyne, [Graziano] Pelle, [Calum] Chambers and others have moved on in the last couple of seasons following a path well worn by players like Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott and Alex …
