Southampton's surprising £183.5m most expensive all-time XI - featuring ex-Chelsea & Liverpool stars

Southampton may have spent most of their time in the top flight fighting for survival, but they’re a tough nut to crack and for a perennial relegation favourite, they’ve spent a lot of time in the Premier League – and along the way, they’ve developed a pretty interesting track record with big-money signings.

Sure, the Saints don’t splash the cash like the biggest teams do, but every new summer in the top tier has brought with it a mixed bag of new players – some of which have shone, and quite a few which have flopped badly.

Out of curiosity, then, we decided to build the most expensive starting XI of players that Southampton have ever signed in the top flight – we’ve gone for a classic 4-4-2 as the neatest fit for the Saints’ biggest buys. Let’s see what money can buy these days…

GK: Aaron Ramsdale (£25m)

£25m is the amount the Saints will pay for the England international if all of the add-ons are met and if they do go down this season then he won’t prove to be quite so expensive, but he’ll be the priciest shot-stopper in club history regardless, so he’d better be good. Early reviews have been mixed, not that most of the club’s defensive issues can be pinned on Ramsdale. We know he’s capable of being very good indeed, and he’ll have to be if Southampton are to survive this time.

LB: Ryan Bertrand (£10m)

You can’t say that Southampton didn’t get their money’s worth out of this one. Bertrand, who had won the Champions League with Chelsea but never really nailed down a first-team place, arrived in 2014 and spent seven years at St. Mary’s, making 240 appearances for the club. About as solid a signing as you can get for £10m, Bertrand retired from the professional game over the summer.

CB: Jannik Vestergaard (£18m)

The Denmark international and his fearsomely furrowed brow arrived on the south coast in 2018 and spent three years providing us with a perfect dictionary definition of the word ‘decent’. Seldom great, rarely particularly bad, probably a bit too slow to be truly effective at the highest level. In the end, he was sold for a £3m loss, making this pretty much exactly what a three-star signing looks like.

CB: Taylor Harwood-Bellis (£20m)

Brilliant on loan in their promotion campaign last season, Harwood-Bellis is young and has plenty of work to do, particularly on his positioning in open play, but has the combination of technical skill and good old-fashioned defensive grit to become a huge success. There’s a fair chance that this will look like a bargain in a few years’ time, but we’ll reserve judgement until then.

RB: Kyle Walker-Peters (£12m)

Now in his sixth year on the Solent, the twice-capped England international has become something of a stalwart and has certainly proven to be pretty good value for the outlay. Still only 27 (it only feels like he’s been around forever), he was also named in the PFA Championship Team of the Year for the 2023/24 campaign. Just a good deal all round, really.

LW: Sadio Mané (£12m)

When the Senegal legend arrived on the south coast in 2014, he was the most expensive player in Southampton history – and given how good he proved to be, it was a pretty shrewd bit of spending. The club also made more than £20m in profit from purchasing one of the best left wingers the league has seen in recent years, who also broke the record for the fastest Premier League hat-trick while wearing red and white stripes. We acknowledge that he might play up front in a real-life 4-4-2, but this feels like a fair stretch to us. It’s hardly Garth Crooks’ Team of the Week territory, is it?

CM: Mario Lemina (£15.5m)

Like Mané, Lemina became the club’s most expensive player of all time when he arrived from Juventus in 2017. Like Mané, he lasted two seasons before his departure. Unlike Mané, he left with a shrug, and we suspect most Premier League fans would have forgotten him entirely if he hadn’t wound up at Wolves a few years later via a couple of undistinguished loan moves and a decent spell in Nice. Not a bad player, by any means, just not one that has ever managed to set the world alight – or justify a record outlay.

CM: Flynn Downes (£18m)

Lemina is at least no longer the club’s most expensive central midfielder, with that honour passing to Downes after he impressed on loan from West Ham last season. Former manager Russell Martin had said that he would “cry myself to sleep” if they didn’t get the deal over the line – not that it saved Martin’s job.

RW: Dušan Tadić (£11m)

The first signing of the Ronald Koeman era, which probably isn’t the first line on his CV. Tadić proved to be a pretty good signing, scoring 21 goals in 134 games for the club over four seasons, but it was at Ajax where a more experienced version of the Serbian winger really flourished. Now in Turkey and still playing and performing at the age of 36.

CF: Kamaldeen Sulemana (£22m)

Southampton’s two most expensive signings of all time are forwards – and we can fairly say that the results of the two deals in question have been mixed. We’ll start with Sulemana, who has also played on the wings a fair bit, and who arrived from Stade Rennais for a big pile of cash, almost none of which he’s paid back as yet. Now in his third season at the club, he has managed just two goals, both of which came in the same thrilling 4-4 draw with Liverpool. Outside of that, this has not looked like a particularly smart investment. At 22 years old, he at least has time on his side.

CF: Danny Ings (£20m)

Ings only spent three seasons at St. Mary’s but is still in the team’s top five all-time Premier League goalscorers, hitting 22 in a brilliant second campaign and, in total, bagging 46 goals in exactly 100 appearances in all competitions. That’s what you want when you splash the cash on a striker. They even managed to turn a profit when they sold him on to Aston Villa for £25m in 2021 – but it’s the Saints that got his best seasons in the top flight.