Why Koeman’s Midas touch shines brightest

When Ronald Koeman arrived to take up his first Premier League post last summer, Southampton were the laughing stocks of English football.

Their manager had left for Spurs and five of the club’s finest playing assets had been, or were in the process of being, sold — Luke Shaw to Manchester United and Calum Chambers to Arsenal, while Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren and Rickie Lambert set up residence at Anfield.

“Will the last player out please shut the door,” neutrals like us cried jovially.

With such a depleted squad and wild rumours that Morgan Schneiderlin and Jay Rodriguez would be the next to jump ship, big money flooded in for the Saints to be relegated.

Koeman had barely finished his first training session before the odds of his team going down were slashed from 14/1 to 11/2.

Fans were outraged and experts were puzzled by the club’s lack of ambition. No one gave them a prayer of coming close to the 56-point haul that had steered them to eighth spot the season before.

There was only one direction Southampton were heading and that was down. With 14 years of football management behind him, Koeman stayed cool. Refusing to panic, he calmly went about the task of reconstructing a new-look Southampton side that would play in his own image.

What has happened since has been astonishing. From a position of catastrophically low expectations, the Saints boss has somehow delivered the club’s best-ever Premier League campaign.

With a budget four times smaller than Manchester United, his men have kept pace with all the big guns. In fact it was only since injury ended goalkeeper Fraser Forster’s season that they have lost their chance of a top-four finish.

How has Koeman done it? Importantly, the manager nailed his recruitment spectacularly well. Combining his knowledge with the club’s world-renowned scouting system, the 52-year-old cherry-picked the players he wanted in expert fashion.

To very little fanfare, Forster, Sadio Mane, Shane Long, Dusan Tadic, Graziano Pelle, Toby Aldeweireld and Ryan Bertrand all came on board just before the start of the campaign.

With the 15th-highest wage bill in the Premier League (£55.2 million or S$115 million), it was all Koeman could afford.

Yet, not one of them has flopped. They have all helped to make the Saints a better side than they were under Mauricio Pochettino.

Renowned in the Netherlands for an obsessive compulsion to succeed, the ex-Barcelona superstar also quickly instilled into the players his winning mentality.

Working tirelessly on the training ground, Koeman conducted intense but enjoyable sessions that soon turned a team of strangers into one of the most cohesive and organised units in the division.

The facts speak for themselves. Southampton have conceded only one goal from a corner all season. And no one in the Premier League has made fewer individual mistakes (five) that have led to a goal.

When they scored the game’s opening goal this season, Southampton’s record read: Won 15, drawn two, lost one, conceded eight. Koeman has taught his team how to hold what they have, magnificently.

Players he inherited have also improved. I look at Nathaniel Clyne, Jose Fonte, Victor Wanyama, Steven Davis and James Ward-Prowse — all have progressed by leaps and bounds under his tutorage.

His motivational work with Schneiderlin has been mightily impressive too. On the eve of the season, the French midfielder was so outraged that the club had not sold him that he felt he was not in the right frame of mind to play.

Yet within days and for the rest of the campaign, Schneiderlin knuckled down and played an instrumental part in their success. This is only one example of Koeman’s exemplary man-management skills.

For all of the reasons outlined in this column — and despite tailing off towards the end of the season — I have to make Koeman my Manager of the Year.

Success must be relative, and since last June, no coach has performed better. No one is laughing at Southampton now.