Rumours of new owners at any football club make for interesting reading, and Southampton may soon have new chiefs at St Mary’s.

Indeed, recent reports state that the Saints’ majority owner Gao Jisheng wants to sell his 80 per cent share of the club for £250m, but we can’t help but feel that he’s making a huge mistake here.

The mathematicians out there will have figured out that a £250m valuation of an 80% stake means that he values the whole club at £312.5m, but a look at their assets and potential future income shows that it’s worth so much more than that.

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For a start, next season's squad is valued by Transfermarkt at £243.27m, and that’s a conservative estimation as the website often undervalue players, for example, Virgil van Dijk was valued at just £45m by the site when he was sold to Liverpool for £75m.

For the sake of argument let’s take their current word for it, and go with the claim that the Saints’ squad is worth just over £243m, even though it’s plausibly worth more than that.

Then we have the stadium, St Mary’s is a relatively new ground, opening in 2001, and it apparently cost just under £32m to build, which in today’s money when you account for inflation is around £53m.

Of course, that is just the construction value and the actual value of the ground may be somewhat higher than that when you consider the potential worth of selling the naming rights and hosting other special events such as concerts.

The training ground is another important aspect of any football club, and the south coast club have a state of the art facility that cost them £40m a couple of years ago.

That’s a running total of £336.27m, and that’s just in sellable assets before we account for the earning potential of the business.

Being a Premier League football team is worth a lot of money these days with clubs receiving at least £96m for finishing bottom of the league, and that’s without considering sponsorship money, ticket sales and other sources of income.

The Saints’ most recent financial accounts show a pre-tax profit of over £35m in that particular financial year, meaning that the club are in a very healthy position.

So, a business with sellable assets worth a bare minimum of £336.27m that made £35m in their most recent declared financial results is being valued at £312.5m, and you can buy 80% of it for just £250m.

Of course, that’s a ridiculous amount of money for most people, but for the millionaires and billionaires who are considering buying a football club it’s something of a bargain.

Gao needs to think very carefully before selling his share of the club for the amount being reported, as he should be holding out for more than that.

In other news, this man has proven how important he is to the Saints.