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A lot can happen in seven years, just ask anyone associated with Southampton Football Club.
On Thursday, the Saints head to the San Siro - a bastion of continental greatness, a stage for legends of the game - and they do so as equals. Perhaps even as favourites.
After all, Claude Puel’s team are in a rich vein of form - unbeaten in seven with six clean sheets - and bristling with confidence; the exact opposite of an Inter Milan side reeling from three straight defeats and whose fragile home record makes a mockery of their iconic black and blue stripes.
Favourites in the San Siro… seven years ago the very notion would have been openly mocked.
In October 2009, Southampton were second-bottom of English football’s third tier, battling a points deduction, breathing a sigh of relief not to be extinct after being dumped into administration with debts of more than £30million.
That this week they share a platform with Inter, who that same month were well on the way to a fifth consecutive Serie A title, is as remarkable as it is ludicrous.
Then again, seven years ago the world was a very different place.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric was confined to reality TV, Alexandra Burke was top of the UK singles chart and Brexit could have easily been confused for a prescription laxative.
And, while Inter were preparing for the Champions League visit of Dynamo Kiev, the Saints had just spent their Saturday afternoon in the blustery surroundings of Boundary Park.
Having been stabilised by German-Swiss businessman Markus Liebherr, Southampton started the 2009-10 campaign with a 10-point penalty.
It is no exaggeration to say they were days away from collapse, with significant sums owed to Aviva, whose loan had facilitated the construction of St Mary’s.
On October 3, with a 4-1 victory over Gillingham, they moved into the plus. By the time the trip to Boundary Park came around, they were off the bottom of the pile but still behind Tranmere - now of the National League - and Stockport, who currently linger on the sixth rung of English football.
Ultimately, Saints couldn’t beat their points deduction that season and finished a place off the play-offs. But the structure for success had been built.
The following year, under the tutelage of Nigel Adkins, promotion was won at a canter - as well it should given the talents of Adam Lallana, Rickie Lambert, Morgan Schneiderlin, Jose Fonte, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Kelvin Davis and Radhi Jaidi - as absurdly strong a League One squad as the division may ever have seen.
Liebherr passed away suddenly, at the age of 62, at the start of that term - with his daughter Katharina inheriting the club - but the upward trajectory continued.
Twelve months after winning promotion to the Championship, the Saints returned to the Premier League. Adkins was promptly replaced by Mauricio Pochettino the following January - a move widely derided at the time but proved by history to be thoroughly astute - and, despite his lack of English, the Argentine’s side finished a respectable 14th.
Behind the scenes a state of the art academy, overseen by former FA technical director Les Reed, became the source for a steady stream of talent.
In addition to Lallana and Oxlade-Chamberlain, Calum Chambers and Luke Shaw would go on to play prominent roles for Saints before being sold on for huge money to the Premier League’s top clubs.
In 2013-14, Southampton finished eighth. In October 2014, five years after they were scraping the barrel in League One, they briefly held second spot in the top flight.
In the San Siro, Puel will be relying on goals from a man whose own rise has been even more stratospheric than the Saints’. Seven years ago, Charlie Austin had yet to make a Football League appearance, having only just broken into the professional game with Swindon Town. His freescoring exploits in the Wessex League, with Poole Town, convinced the League One Robins to part with £50,000 for his services. After getting two minutes as a substitute in a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy game at Exeter, Austin made his league bow on October 24, 2009 at Norwich. He said of the experience: ‘I thought: Oh my god. There are 25,000 people in the ground and there are 1,000 Swindon fans singing a 20-year-old’s name that has just been working on a building site.’ The striker’s knack for finding himself in goalscoring positions quickly made him a hero at the County Ground, where he reached the play-off final in his debut season. A move to Burnley followed, where the goal rush continued, before Austin joined QPR for £4m in 2013. He swapped west London for the south coast in January, having been called up to the England squad for the first time in May 2015.
In the boardroom, a power struggle had developed between Katharina Liebherr and chairman Nicola Cortese - the trusted consigliere to the deceased former owner who had quickly endeared himself to the St Mary’s crowd.
The heiress to a £3billion fortune wanted more day-to-day involvement in the running of the club - first making her point at a meeting on the banks of Lake Worthersee in Austria in July 2014 - and she eventually won the duel six months later.
There was panic around Cortese’s departure from fans worried that the project would be derailed, but the concern was unnecessary - as that season’s finishing position proved.
Liebherr showed that every player has a price but Saints continued to reinvest their plentiful profits.
Dejan Lovren cost £8m and went for £20m; Lallana was poached from Bournemouth as a trainee and flogged for £25m, Oxlade-Chamberlain and Chambers fetched £28m from Arsenal between them, Manchester United paid £27m for Shaw and Liverpool £35m for Sadio Mane.
Such vast figures for a club whose supporters rallied around to raise £130,000 to ‘Save Our Saints’ when the abyss was growing ever darker before their eyes in 2009.
Pochettino chose to join Tottenham but Southampton picked his successor wisely. Ronald Koeman shifted the focus from home-grown talent to thoughtful purchases from abroad with similar success.
The 2014-15 season brought the club their best Premier League finish of seventh. A year later Koeman bettered it again.
Now it’s Puel’s turn. And the foundations are there for him to succeed.
Liebherr has proved her detractors wrong - the Saints owner has put £20m of loans into the club to ensure it operates to as high a level as possible - and, in March 2015, the south coast side announced profits of £33.4m. That’s £3m more than the debt which seven years ago almost wiped Southampton off the face of the earth.
And so we come to Thursday night and Inter; a tale of two clubs with vastly different fortunes.
Seven years ago, a Nerazzurri side including three World Cup winners plus Samuel Eto’o, Wesley Sneijder and prime-time Esteban Cambiasso played out an entertaining 2-2 draw with Andriy Shevchenko and Kiev.
Southampton, meanwhile, ran out in front of 5,341 in the chilly autumn air at Boundary Park. Paul Wotton played in central midfield and Paul Dickov managed the opposition.
Oldham to Milan is 1,026 miles as the crow flies. You’d need light years to describe the progress made at St Mary’s.
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