Not perfect but decent. Southampton brought in the same amount of players into a squad which had its heartbeat ripped out of it. Yet, despite paying a fraction of what we did, no one can dispute that their summer signings were ten times better than the ones we bought with our Bale money.
Fingers crossed that was Mitchell's doing and we can see something similar come July
How much better were they though? Southampton are dropping down towards us in the table and are likely to stay below us over time.
Initially praised, their new signings have come under critisism lately and haven't kept their initial performance up.
Most of them wouldn't get into our side, and not played like Capoue, Paulinho, Soldado etc. their heads would also drop as well as their value.
If Tadic was ours people would point out his inconsistency, while if Chadli had his season in Southampton colors we'd look at his 10 goals (twice as many as Tadic) season from midfield with envy.
Don't think any of us are dreaming of a team of Forster, Gardos and Long.
Was a good summer of signings for Southampton that has kept them high in the table, but it wouldn't have been good enough for us, it's more difficult to land the signings needed to take us into the top 4 - we're talking Modric, Berbatov level here.
Also looking at our fab 7 signed with the Bale money, I figure we'd go more or less even if we sold them off.
Capoue, Chiriches haven't dropped much in value. We take a hit on Soldado and Paulinho, but don't forget that Eriksen is likely to have increased his value by £20m. Chadli's goals probably have taken him up to a 10-12m player as well, up from the 7 we signed him for. Lamela will come good eventually.
