IMAGINE you’re a banker.

Not pleasant, I know, but bear with me.

You’ve ruined the global economy through your greed and incompetence and now you need to recoup some of the trillions you’ve lost.

As you pour over your ailing lending book, deciding where you can winkle back the odd million or so, your eye alights on the overdraft of Southampton Football Club.

It’s had its financial ups and downs, but after some fierce cost-cutting has got itself back within its £5m limit and is gearing up for a proper scrap in the Championship.

It is the heartbeat of a city already down on its knees because of the mess you’ve created.

Would it seem right to you, then, that this is the place to start clawing back money? An amount of money so small compared to the countless billions squandered on toxic debt as to be a dwarf flea on the backside of an entire herd of elephants.

Barclays did.

After allowing the club’s overdraft to balloon out of control to £6.3m in the boom time by dishing out cash like sweets when money was cheap and it was all on the never-never; as the financial pigeons came home to roost, Saints were ripe for plucking.

Controversial chairman Rupert Lowe accused Barclays of “behaving like salesmen” in allowing the club’s debts to run so out of control. But that soon changed after the global financial collapse.

When the finances had been wrestled back within the £5m limit, it was then that Barclays made its move.

Bosses were summoned to Canary Wharf and told to slash the overdraft by another £1m, down to £4m.

It would prove a cut too far for Saints.

Lowe and co had already managed to slash losses despite income shrinking dramatically and were working towards a stable financial footing. But even their famously parsimonious approach couldn’t keep within these new financial handcuffs. In the end they were over the limit by a little more than £100,000.

A staggeringly small sum to a bank, which not so long ago paid just one staff member £22m.

The hard-headed among you may be thinking, “it’s just business, the bank is just doing what banks do”.

And on one level I couldn’t argue with you.

But Saints is not “just another business”.

It’s at the centre of Southampton’s community, a source of fierce local pride, albeit in happier times.

It’s a driver for business and puts the city on the map, on the news and in the public eye.

For the sake of an infinitesimally small drop of cash compared to the ocean of debt assembled by Barclays and its Calamity-Jane cohorts, they have grievously wounded this city.