Southampton might have slipped into stagnation and that’s a thin tightrope to walk

Southampton had a terrible end to last season and haven’t yet significantly strengthened. Will this be another year of attrition for them?

How long does it take for consolidation to become stagnation? It’s a question that Southampton supporters may well be asking themselves ahead of the 11th consecutive Premier League campaign of their current run. It’s been five years since the Saints finished in the top half of the Premier League, but with current managerial incumbent Ralph Hasenhuttl having been in charge for three and a half of those five years with, shall we say, unpredictable results, the likelihood of this improving much next season seems fairly remote.

Since Hasenhüttl took charge of the team in December 2018, Southampton have finished in 16th, 11th, 15th and 15th place in the Premier League. But even these runs of mediocrity seldom last forever. There’s going to come a point at which things are either going to get better or worse for the club, and that carries attendant risks, because much as the benefits of things getting better should be obvious, there isn’t much room for manoeuvre, should they deteriorate further. Southampton only finished five points above the relegation places last time around, and that’s not much wiggle room should things not go to plan next season.

They have had, thus far, a relatively quiet but still peculiar summer. On the one hand, captain James Ward-Prowse has already pledged himself to the club for next season, while Kyle Walker-Peters – whose stock rose with an England debut earlier this year – remains with the club despite the revelation that a buy-back clause allows Tottenham Hotspur to sign him back for £30m.

This sent Saints Twitter into a bit of a flap but it’s not believed that there has been any interest in this from Spurs, and as the Southampton Daily Echo explained, such clauses allow selling clubs to offload their younger players at a cheaper rate than they might otherwise do. The sensible way to look upon this sort of transfer is as somewhere between a long-term loan and a normal player sale, but this contractual clause seems to be Tottenham-specific, so any interest from Manchester United or Arsenal would likely only be countenanced by Southampton were the starting bids to be considerably higher than £30m.

It is understood that similar terms have been written into the contracts of new signings Gavin Bazunu and Romeo Lavia, both of whom have transferred to Southampton from…