I WAS speaking to a pal of mine this week who is a Liverpool fanatic.

Naturally, given the current news cycle, our conversation naturally switched to Jordan Henderson.

As I mentioned in my column last week, the Liverpool captain is to join his former teammate Steven Gerrard at Saudi Arabian side Al-Ettifaq – a deal which has now been completed.

At first, my friend couldn’t understand why any player would want to leave the best club in the world in order to join a Saudi team.

But when he read about the sums of money being offered to players in order to make the witch, he quickly realised that it wasn’t something a 33 year old player, who is nearing the end of his contract, could turn down.

Since then, we have also seen that French star Kylian Mbappe has also been offered more than £700 million a year to join Al Hilal on a one-year contract – a figure I never imagined we would see in football.

But back to Henderson, I can also see why Liverpool are willing to allow their skipper to leave.

A £12 million fee could help them complete works on their stadium, Anfield, or could go towards signing their next star midfielder.

Liverpool have apparently expressed their interest in signing Romeo Lavia from Saints, but are yet to strike a deal.

I can quite understand Southampton standing firm on their valuation of the Belgian midfielder.

They quite probably don’t want to lose him as a player, but the player and his agent may be looking to join Liverpool.

We have to remember that his year we are not in the Premier League, which is where every player wants to play.

Supporters may not be happy to see one of their favourite players head out of the exit door, but what I would say is that if they were in young Lavia’s situation, they would most probably wish to be back in the Premiership.

So, if Lavia goes, every player still at Saints will have to work twice as hard to ensure that the whole team is back in the Premier League.

Whilst the club will certainly not want to lose him – none more so than the manager and his fellow players – it’s understandable that the directors will be saying to sell him now if the value is there, rather than wait until next season when Manchester City could active his buy-back clause.

Hopefully, a star player leaving for a huge figure should be the catalyst to see more new faces, that Russell Martin wants to add to his squad, signed at St Mary’s.

When you are talking about the money involved in football, I think it’s only right to point out that most of the top clubs are getting involved in their local charities.

There was a good example of that this week.

James Beattie has been linked with helping out the Saints Foundation – which has been running for many years now and raises money in different ways, which is then distributed around the Hampshire area, to help problems which couldn’t be solved otherwise.

I have to admit that when the foundation started, I never thought that one of our top players was going to skydive out of a plane.

Whilst I have been happy to get involved with various fundraising activities over the years, I have to say don’t take me with you James, but I wish you good luck.

I think I would only ever have jumped out of a plane had we been relegated and was pushed by various rightfully unhappy supporters.

I must also admit that I got a good laugh from watching the video Saints shared to announce the fundraiser.

We saw James portraying James Bond in a tongue-in-cheek way as he ‘landed’ at St Mary’s as 009 instead of 007.

James is asking for other supporters to take part and I seriously believe it would be fantastic to see a group of supporters around James on the day.

What he is doing is different and brave, but it’s all for a very good cause.

The foundation are asking that those wishing to take part in the 10,000ft Big Saints Skydive to raise £500 and for those ultra-daring Saints supporters to commit to raising £600 in order to take on the 15,000ft fall.

The Big Saints Skydive is taking place on Saturday, September 23 at Old Sarum Airfield near Salisbury, and you can sign up to take part now.