SOUTHAMPTON Football Club has lost half of its value in the past nine months.

Nearly £900,000 of the overall £8m loss came yesterday as investors took fright at Saints' grim situation after the heavy weekend defeat by arch rivals Portsmouth.

The 4-1 Fratton Park loss made the club relegation favourites. Saints sit squarely on the bottom of the Premiership table with share prices at their lowest point for more than two years.

Since July 2004, Saints have had three managers, while financial bosses have watched the club's value fall from a high of £16.5m to today's £8.07m.

Saints director Andrew Cowen said the share price slump was typical of "volatile" stocks such as football clubs and did not suggest investors were panicking.

Shares in Saints' parent company Southampton Leisure Holdings were trading at 30.5p on Friday before the crunch game. When trading started again on Monday morning, the financial impact of on the pitch failure was quickly felt.

Shortly after 8am, when markets opened, Saints stock fell swiftly to 29p and then further, coming to rest on 27p by 11am, where it remained - a fall of 11.5 per cent. It is a far cry since the pre-season high, when, in July last year, club shares were changing hands at around 56p each.

The steep drop is bad news for Mr Cowen and chairman Rupert Lowe, who both went on a share buying spree when the price was around 50p. Both are now sitting on substantial paper losses.

Mr Cowen said: "I bought some shares at 50p back in the summer. That is not now looking like one's financial salvation with them at 27p today. In my case I am a director and I am looking at this as a long term investment."

Mr Cowen, who earned £301,000 last year for his role as an SLH director, said: "We are down 3.5p and a £900,000 loss isn't very far off the mark, but what is more important is that of the 27 million shares in circulation only 27,000 were traded. What that says to me is that this is not a panic. This is the market makers marking down shares quite aggressively. It is understandable considering they saw the poor performance, which doesn't help our battle against relegation.

"On paper the club is worth half as much as it was but that is because the value of the club has been artificially depressed."

Asked if Saints now represented a good investment, he said: "On the back of our heaviest ever defeat by our local rivals, with three games to go to the end of the season, well it's not for widows and orphans, is it?

"If we stay up we are a cheap Premiership club and if we go down we are an expensive Coca-Cola Championship club."