Welcome to Football FanCast’s brand new page dedicated to all things Southampton transfer rumours! We aim to give you your daily scoop of everything you need to know about the Saints as well as keep you both entertained and informed every step of the way.
From juicy transfer news and the latest gossip to come off the mill and all the way to intriguing and out of the box opinion pieces, in-depth analysis of your team and the players, Football FanCast’s Southampton portal will cover it all and then some! Make sure you stick around because the fun is just about to begin!
When it comes to Southampton’s transfer records, it’s more about the sales they’ve made over the years than it is about their purchases. The most expensive player ever to become one of the Saints is still Jannik Vestergaard, whose £22.5m transfer from Borussia Monchengladbach in 2018/19 tops the charts at the club.
The second name in line is now an extremely popular one – Sadio Mane signed for the Saints from RB Salzburg back in 2014/15 for a reported fee of £20.7m but as we now know, he would end up going to Liverpool for £37m, making Southampton some profit along the way as well.
But of course, the biggest and most lucrative sale was that of Virgil van Dijk, whose £76.1m swap shattered some records at the time and is still the Saints’ biggest ever business they’ve done. And the fact that Van Dijk went to Anfield of all places is hardly a surprise either as Southampton are quite famous for supplying the Reds with top talent.
Players such as Nathaniel Clyne, Dejan Lovren and Adam Lallana were also former Saints who ended up packing their bags for Merseyside.
Taking into account all of their incomings and outgoings, it doesn’t surprise that most of their most famous transfers have indeed been exits from the club. The likes of Van Dijk and Mane are, of course, the prime examples, and players that ended up reaching world-class status at Liverpool as well as making Southampton serious profit.
Vestergaard’s transfer was big purely due to the price tag that broke the club record but we have to mention both Van Dijk and Mane once again because their arrivals at the club from Celtic and Salzburg respectively truly did have an enormous impact on the club as a whole, despite them leaving the Saints not too long after their arrival.
Of course, if we go further back in their history, we can find players like Peter Shilton, Alan Ball, Rickie Lambers and then even Ron Davies and Ivan Golac, with both of their transfers being quite special. The former player broke their transfer record back in the day with his £55,000 price tag while the latter was one of Southampton’s first-ever foreign imports at the club, moving to England from Yugoslavia in 1978.