Southampton FC owners Sport Republic on Premier League relegation

Lead investor and chairman Dragan Solak, CEO Rasmus Ankersen and club chairman Henrik Kraft have got a new office overlooking the main training pitch at Staplewood.

The inquest into exactly how their stark increase in investment into the club was eventually not even close to staving off the failure is long underway.

With significant changes at the board level, the club’s top brass are barely recognisable from 18 months ago – CEO Martin Semmens is among those who have left.

In a rare interview, Solak – who admitted he knows the least about football of the trio – pointed to the club's neglected past to help explain the outcome. 

Speaking to the Daily Echo, he said: “I think everything that happened this year was coming in the last five years.

"The club didn’t have proper investment for five years and they were doing what they had to do to survive and stay in the Premier League. They did a great job doing that.

"But every survival leaves scars that are seen or unseen on the tissue. We hoped with increased investment we would be able to move the club towards where we wanted it to be.

“Unfortunately, it is shown you cannot buy success just as you cannot buy love! We spent a lot of money and acquired some wonderful talents but unfortunately produced this very disappointing season for all of us.”

Kraft, added: “Of course, we didn’t want to get relegated. But it is an opportunity now to reset and get everything aligned with our own vision, for us to get closer involved.

“We will come back stronger because we will have had an opportunity to make a lot of changes, if things are going okay you don’t always make the hard decisions but now we have to – so hopefully that leaves us stronger.”

Dragan Solak and Martin Semmens

When Sport Republic first acquired Saints in January 2022, Kraft told supporters they would be “active and engaged owners” but “would not start any revolutions”, having been attracted to a well-run club in the first place.

Now, the board is composed of Kraft, Solak, Ankersen, new independent director Andy Young, the outgoing Toby Steele and Katharina Liebherr’s appointment – Rolf Bogli.

Kraft says there have been varying reasons for staff departing, such as opportunity elsewhere, but accepts most departures have been in line with Sport Republic’s vision.

Kraft explains: “In the first six months, we were very much aligned with that statement but I think everyone knows last season finished very, very badly.

“It has been an attempted evolution. I’m not sure I’d go as far as calling it a revolution now but we have had to make more changes than we initially anticipated.”

Dragan Solak, Henrik Kraft and Rasmus Ankersen (Image: Stuart Martin)

Asked how much responsibility Sport Republic accepts for the club’s relegation, Ankersen said: “When you are the owner, you need to take full responsibility no matter what.

“We have to look at what happened and make sure we get things right for next season.

"Now that Henrik and myself are moving closer to the action, we’ll pick the team we want to run the club day-to-day to make sure we do everything to make this a success.”

Sport Republic bosses are already set to appoint a third permanent first-team manager during their tenure after Ruben Selles departed having overseen the final 14 games.

Nathan Jones was picked to succeed long-term custodian Ralph Hasenhuttl in November, but lasted just eight Premier League matches, losing seven before he was sacked.

Nathan Jones

Many supporters feel the appointment of the two bosses has been a big reason why the club has finally succumbed after 11 years in the top flight.

Ankersen said: “There’s always a risk. When you recruit a manager it is not like recruiting a player in a set transfer window and often you’re not playing games.

“You almost always recruit a manager under time pressure, either because someone headhunts your manager or when you need to let go of yours because you need to find someone who can do a better job.

“The narrative about a manager is always a simple one but there are multiple things that have caused the fact we’ve been relegated, not just one factor. There was a logical rationale to the appointments at the time but they didn’t work out.”

Solak then launched an interesting and eye-opening defence of Jones, who had helped guide Luton Town from League Two to the Championship playoffs before Rob Edwards completed the job with their Premier League promotion this month.

Solak said: “It was easier for me because I was not involved with all the football talks, but I was involved in the choice of manager – so I take my part of the blame.

“We already had Ralph, a very experienced, high-level, proven Premier League manager, and then he started failing. I think Ralph is an extremely smart and honest person but you could see some kind of energy was not getting out of him.

“We wanted a change and we didn’t think that another long-serving manager of the Premier League was a change. What I saw in Nathan was pure energy that we needed, aggression and a guy that would make pitbulls out of our players.

“He proved he could do this in Luton but he could not turn our squad that way, maybe it was the players he just didn’t get across and his system didn’t work. He was inexperienced as a manager in the Premier League, and maybe the pressure is at a different level and can break many people who are not used to that.

“If I could not do it, I would – I would be the happiest guy if Nathan would be the hero of Luton Town, got his promotion to the Premiership and became a Premier League manager by promotion.

“Having to sit at home and watch the team he practically created get promotion to the Premier League, it’s unbelievable. You can make a very emotional movie out of that.

"I feel very sorry in part for not enhancing his career, he is a good guy and an honest guy but perhaps wasn’t the right fit.”

Despite sitting bottom, there was still over a third of the season left when Selles was appointed following an initial interim victory over Chelsea.

A deal for former Leeds United manager Jesse Marsch to become the new Saints boss was nearly 100 per cent done before it had fallen through days prior. 

“At that time, we were not in a great position obviously and within the club, there was a feeling it was important to go back to something familiar,” Ankersen said.

“Southampton, over the last few years, has been recognised as having a very well-defined style of play and that has brought the maximum out of the players.

"That started slipping last season and it started to look like a team without an identity. Nathan came in to try and fix some of the more immediate issues we had.

"Aggression, and we had been very poor on set plays. Nathan had a great record at Luton on that, and being a team that was on the front foot and being aggressive without the ball.”

Ankersen continued: “When that didn’t have an impact, the feeling was it was important to go back to something most of the players were familiar with, the 4-2-2-2 system.

“When you are under pressure you tend to go back to default setting and we felt like we should support that, there was a feeling of going back to something familiar in the building. That didn’t work.”

Another factor in relegation has been mentality, leadership and experience on the pitch. 13 of the club-record 25 league defeats came by just one goal.

Despite regular results against top-half clubs – the side’s last four points came in draws versus Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United – they could not get over the line in relegation six-pointers.

The likes of Fraser Forster, Jack Stephens, Nathan Redmond, Jan Bednarek (before returning from Aston Villa) and vice-captain Oriol Romeu all left in the summer.

The club captain, James Ward-Prowse, and Theo Walcott have aired their regret over some characters the dressing room lost amid struggles to harness the focus of the young group.

However, Ankersen insists: “Whenever you lose, the explanation or reason that tends to come out is that you lack leaders or experience. 

"If you go to Leeds and Leicester now they may say the same thing. In the summer, there was fatigue within the team in relationships between some of the senior players and management.

"We – together with the management team – had to make some decisions on what direction we wanted to go.

“The conclusion was that Ralph had done a great job and deserved now to be backed with increased investment, that also meant we needed a refreshment of the squad to turn the curve upwards again.”

He added: “That meant some of the more experienced players, who were not playing at the end of the season, and big characters can be good when they play but bad when they are not.

“But we recognise that we probably didn’t get the squad balance quite right, whether that means we should have added more experienced players it’s hard to tell.

“The squad balance and the identity of the team we didn’t quite get right and there is an element of balancing experience and youth that could probably have been better.”