In the four years since they arriving at the club, the relationship between Sport Republic and transfer windows has been like the relationship between a elephants and laxatives. You just end up with a massive great pile of shit that takes years to clean up.

It is one of football’s great truths that you can never judge a transfer window until at least a year down the line, because some players you sign will make promising starts and then fall away, others will do the opposite and some will look good on paper and provide absolutely nothing. Sport Republic’s modus operandi is to hope that a young player will be brilliant and then be bought by one of the big clubs at a 500% markup. It happens occasionally but not often. A criticism of Sport Republic has always been that they have signed players who they hope will massively grow in value, whilst not necessarily keeping their eye on what is going to give some amount of football club a functioning team on the pitch. There was a time about a month ago when you looked at our team, and apart from the central defenders, there was barely a player over 5 foot 7. Some decent individual players but no balance for the team, especially in the Championship.

The nature of transfer windows means that summer is building for the season ahead and you have hopefully carefully planned it, and January it is inevitably for fixing the fuck ups at short notice, mixed in with doing the things that you should’ve done in the summer but didn’t manage to do. So having said it’s very difficult to judge, that’s what we’re going to try and do.

In this window, we needed a goalkeeper… desperately. If we could’ve only had one player come in, then this was the one we needed and we got in Daniel Peretz from Bayern Munich, who had not played any football for the best part of the year. There was lots of cynicism and lots of pissing and moaning and in his first game he predictably looked very rusty but there was something about him straight away. He tried to do the right things, even though it went wonky a few times. After one game he was outed as a loud voice in the dressing room, demanding the standards had to be better and with every passing game he’s got better and better. At the moment is looking like his arrival alone is going to make an absolutely huge difference.

Another new arrival is Cyle Larin, who has arrived from RCD Mallorca. On the face of it, the stats don’t look amazing but on the positive side, this is a guy with a lot to prove and a desire to get himself into Canada‘s World Cup squad for this summer. At 30 years old, he is going to be absolutely desperate to achieve that and the more motivated he is, the better it will be for us. He has of course been written off by a very large negative element of the fanbase but I feel that this has little to do with him and more to do with the fact that Sport Republic are not trusted. He needs a goal, and early.

The reason that this one grinds with so many is that the Larin deal was needed, to fix the rather large Damion Downs sized fuck up from the summer and if it was a case that it was Larin for Downs then I don’t think anyone would have been that bothered about his arrival. We would be replacing one failed player with one new one, with the outgoing player having totally failed to fix the ‘target man’ problem. The issue is that Downs has gone out on loan, Larin has come in, and we have allowed Adam Armstrong to leave, signing for Wolves for £7million, plus £2 million in ‘achievable’ add-ons – whatever that means.

For all his faults and there are a few even at Championship level, , Armstrong is a guaranteed goal scorer in the Championship, with 21 two years ago, and 11 already this season. However, bearing in mind the fact that he has a year and a half left of his contract and being 29 years old, we probably thought that 9 million was a good deal and considerably more than we’d get in the summer. It is a gamble however because you are letting someone who guarantees a few Championship goals between now and the end of the season, go and replacing him with a virtual unknown who has never played in England before. I would say though that Larin’s profile is more in keeping with what we need, being 6 foot 2 and a bit of a physical specimen. It also is likely that he is unlikely to start games straight away as it looks like we’re going down the route of playing Ross Stewart for the first 60 or 70 minutes of every game and then needing to bring someone on, and Cyle will fit that bill. The only real problem comes when Stewart inevitably breaks down and we will then have no choice.

The other striker news of course was that with Armstrong going, Cameron Archer stayed so we at least have three senior strikers plus Nick Oyekunle from the Under 21s. None of this would have been necessary of course if we hadn’t royally ballsed up the striker recruitment in the summer. Not only was Damion Downs not the physical ‘hold it up’ striker that we needed, he was also not a footballer. So, all the striker activity in January could be seen as correcting or attempting to correct the mistakes of summer. If Larin turns out to be a success then it will have been an excellent gamble by Johannes Spors. If he turns out to be another Damien Downs, which would be pretty difficult, then it’s going look like another Sport Republic Hail Mary gamble with long odds, that unsurprisingly fails.

Another fix we’ve had to do from the summer is to being James Bree back from his loan to Charlton, after signing not one, but two players to fill the right back spot. Mads Roerslev has been injured and not great when he has played and Elias Jelert has been decent when he’s played but spent about three months out injured as well.

Elsewhere, we’ve got rid of some deadwood, with several players who are never going to make a positive contribution for us, exiting the building either on loan or permanently or in some cases, both. Gavin Bazunu has a course gone on loan to Stoke and it’s really hard to see a way back for him here, given how shocking he was this season and the realisation through the early performances of Daniel Peretz, that there are many more competent goalkeepers out there.

The name Armel Bella Kotchap came up last week. I knew he was on loan at Hellas Verona for the last year of his Saints contract, but they have acted early to make the loan deal permanent and we have pocketed a fee of over £4 million for a player with questionable fitness, attitude and pretty much everything. I will not follow his career with any interest whatsoever.

Joe Aribo has also left, moving to Leicester on loan to cover the last six months of his contract. It’ll take him about half of that to get fit and that assumes that he plays every game. Personally I just think this will be a glorified preseason for Joe and he will sign for whoever in the summer. He had one terrible season with us in the Premier League, half a decent season in the Championship under Russell Martin (including the playoff semis and final) and was one of the less shit performers in a few games of the games back in the Premier League. This year, whenever he’s been involved, he has been towing a proverbial caravan, nowhere near the fitness levels required to play in the Championship. It drives me mental because he’s easily good enough to contribute. Leicester are absolutely desperate financially, so a loan suits them – well they will think so until they see the state of him. His bleep test on arrival should be interesting.

Juan Larios has seen his career go nowhere because of injuries and he has gone on loan to Real Zaragoza to link up again with the mercurial Ruben Selles. I have nothing against Juan at all and I hope his career takes off but it’s hard to imagine him ever being any great shakes in English football because of the physical stature of him. You can be slight, or you can be short, but you can’t be both.

Talking of short, the Wee Man Ryan Fraser has gone abroad to play in Australia for the last six months of his contract here. Fair play to him for arranging that and not sitting around to the end of his contract like he did at Newcastle and Bournemouth previously. The Wee Man of course played in the play-off final and had some very good moments in that season, but it was absolutely a scandalous decision to sign him permanently when we got to the Premier League, which owed more to Russell Martin being his mate than any expectation that he was actually going to contribute anything on the pitch. He started this season pretty well to be fair but then fell away to such a degree that he wasn’t even getting in the match day squads, despite being versatile enough to play about six positions on the pitch good luck to him in Australia.

The one I feel we’re going to regret a course is Ronnie Edwards who has gone to QPR but like with Armstrong, he didn’t want to be here anymore and wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t actually blame him for wanting to be here at all because he was obviously not given any encouragement by Saints and probably enjoyed his year at QPR on loan last season, more than he enjoyed any time at Southampton and with his family allegedly being QPR fans as well, it’s no surprise he wanted to leave. There is a very good chance that he turns into a very good player there and ends up playing in the Premier League if he toughens up a bit. We’ll regret this one as we’ll inevitably lose THB in the summer and then we’ll be in the lottery of recruiting again.

Anyway – Adam Armstrong.

He leaves after four and a half seasons having been signed from Blackburn for £15 million, in the summer of 2021. It was always suspected that Ralph Hasenhuttl didn’t really want him as the replacement for Danny Ings, and it quickly became apparent in that first season that Ralph was right about the player struggling at Premier League level, despite scoring on his debut at Goodison Park. The struggle continued for his first two years at the club at Premier League level. Two goals in each of his first two seasons tells you everything you need to know and one of those was in a dead rubber game after we had already been relegated. Not one single fan would have been that bothered if he’d left at that point.

It’s a good job he didn’t though because back in the Championship under Russell Martin, he came alive, starting with a goal that flicked in off his face at Sheffield Wednesday and ending with the winner in the play-off final against Leeds at Wembley, which was his 21st goal of the season and the most important goal Southampton have scored since Bobby Stokes in 1976. From a personal point of view, that goal meant that I had my best day ever as a Southampton fan with my family all around me, watching us win at Wembley. It doesn’t get any better than that, and I have to thank Adam Armstrong for that moment and that win.

I did hold out a bit of hope that back in the Premier League, with the manager that believed in him, and a new contract, that he could have a better go at it at his third attempt but it didn’t go the way anyone wanted and after a disappointing two goal first half of the season, he was loaned out back to the Championship and West Brom, whilst we completed our relegation. Nothing much happened for him at West Brom and he came back to us this season and there was a worry that he wouldn’t have significant motivation to be effective for us this season because the aim was to get promoted of course, and he must’ve known he was incredibly likely to get given another chance of the Premier League in the event of us getting promoted, having failed three times before. However, he got his head down, started the season averagely under Will Still and then exploded into life when Still was sacked, quickly establishing himself at the top of the Championship goal scorers leader board with 11 goals. The last ten games have seen him drop right off and lose confidence however. So overall…. in the Championship: 38 goals in 75 games – almost exactly 1 goal every 2 games. In the Premier League – 6 goals in 73 games, roughly 1 every 12. We are where we are though – the Championship.

One underappreciated factor which never seems to be taken into account when players leave is that they actually want to go and they don’t want to play for Southampton anymore. Holding on to a player against their will has never worked out particularly well for us in the past and all the indications are that Adam wanted to leave and have another shot of the Premier League with Wolves, even though that is likely to be a very short-lived shot at the Premier League, given that they are in danger of getting around the same number of points that we did last season on our way back to the Championship.

I expected him to leave in the summer of 2026 to be honest, and as we are chasing the holy grail (from a financial point of view) of getting back to the Premier League, it seems a bit mad to let a player go now who could well have scored even one goal, which could’ve made that dream of reality. If that costs you a couple of million quid on his transfer fee at the end of the season in the event of you not making it, then so be it. From the outside, it would seem mad to be letting him go now. Time will tell.

Armstrong is a funny player. In the Premier League, his touch and finishing was just not good enough and he didn’t have the pace or strength or movement to really test defenders. He’s a striker but not a number 9 and he’s not really a winger either, more of an inside forward. He needs to play off of a target man in a front two, but how many teams play like that these days? Whilst he is clearly is good enough for the Championship, even at that level, I have never known a striker who has such a vast difference between when he’s confident and when he is not. For six or seven games when Tonda Eckert was the interim manager, Armstrong was absolutely unbelievable, played the number 9 / false 9 role to perfection and rattled in a vast majority of this season’s goals in those games. However, there have been twenty-odd games this season where Arma was below average. That’s the trade-off you have for a goal scorer I guess.

From his point of view, he has departed in the right way, with his Instagram post containing a very classy message. I love the fact that he referred to the “the goals, the celebrations, and the misses”. Yes, he did miss some absolute sitters but I like the self deprecation and the self-awareness, which is not something you see often from modern footballers or by the AI that they get to write their goodbye messages.

I wish Adam Armstrong well for the rest of his career. He will go down in Saints history as a player who actually achieved something major for the club, with his 21 Championship goals that season, including that big one in the playoff final against Leeds at Wembley. Ironically, in his last game for Saints, from an almost identical chance to the playoff final, he should have scored another big one at Fratton Park but hit it straight at the keeper. Those two passages of play illustrate Arma when confident and when not. Regardless of form leading up to the game, he will undoubtedly score for Wolves against us next season, should that game come about.

So overall, this is a transfer window, where we’ve fixed one key issue in goal and as a bonus, reduced the wage bill, getting some of these deadwood players out of the door, and also brought about £18 – £20 million in fees in as well, which is always handy bearing in mind that we didn’t get enough players out the door in the summer and overspent…. to end up with a squad that needed fixing in January. No football fan likes to hear the terms like ‘balancing the books’ but it’s a fact of life unless you are prepared to do a Leicester or Nottingham Forest or are one of the big boys to whom the rules do not seem to apply.

On the other side of that, balancing the books is one thing but having a successful team on the pitch is another. Whether they could’ve done anything about it or not, the departure of Adam Armstrong to be replaced by a relatively unknown Canadian, is going to be one that comes back to bite Spors and Sports Republic if it doesn’t work out. If it doesn’t work out of course, then Cyle Larin will be the fall guy and Adam Armstrong will have been raised to the level of prime Brazilian Ronaldo, in the minds of those doing the criticising.

It does seem on the face of it, that a lot of what we’ve done was left behind from the summer. We needed a goalkeeper in the summer and we didn’t get one, we needed a physical striker in the summer (which was acknowledge by the board) and we didn’t get one, we needed certain players out the door in the summer and didn’t manage it. It’s impossible to get everything done in one window however.

Buckle up… and, as always, remember one of football’s great truths: we won’t know if this transfer window has been a success until further down the line.