SAINTS’ Europa League qualification is just reward for a truly remarkable 2014/15 season.

Yes, the club will be playing European football for only the second time in three decades next season just because Arsenal won the FA Cup.

Twelve months earlier, Saints wouldn’t have been so lucky.

Hull City, the losing FA Cup finalists in 2014, qualified for the Europa League as the Gunners had already won a Champions League plade.

It was the same way Saints qualified for the 2003/04 UEFA Cup, as FA Cup runners-up with Arsenal – again – victorious in the final and top four finishers.

Those rules were changed last summer, stripping the losing FA Cup finalists of their European honour.

Had they not been altered, Aston Villa would now be preparing for a Europa League campaign rather than Saints.

But the rules had been changed, and it’s Ronald Koeman’s men in Europe.

How sweet do those few words sound to the ears of Saints supporters?

The same Saints supporters who this time last summer were fearing for their club’s top flight future as a handful of stars were preparing their exit route.

To think Saints lost Rickie Lambert, Adam Lallana, Luke Shaw, Dejan Lovren and Calum Chambers, and STILL finished higher than they did with all five of those players is phenomenal.

Seriously, it is.

Under Koeman, Saints further scissored the gap between themselves and the top four.

In 2012/13, the club’s first season back in the top flight, they finished five points above the drop zone and 32 adrift of the top four.

In 2014/15, Mauricio Pochettino improved Saints’ league finish from 14th to 8th - but they were as many points adrift of the Champions League places, 23, as they were from third bottom Norwich.

Under Koeman, Saints finished 25 points above the relegation zone and only ten points off the Champions League.

Points wise, Saints were closer to the Holy Grail of the top four than Arsenal or Manchester United were to champions Chelsea.

It is not easy to qualify for Europe these days, not unless you are one of the ‘elite’.

Only four clubs have won the Premier League since 1995 – Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City – and those four clubs have also won 16 of the last 20 FA Cups .

The only other clubs to have won the latter competition in that time are Liverpool (twice), Portsmouth and Wigan.

During the same timeframe, the League Cup has presented some other (less glamorous) clubs with their moment in the sunshine – not least Leicester (1997,2000), Birmingham (2011) and Swansea (2013).

But all those are exceptions to the rule.

The footballing landscape has changed since Saints lifted the FA Cup 39 years ago.

Back then, they were one of two Second Division clubs to win the trophy in four seasons (Sunderland having won it in 1973).

West Ham, in 1980, were the last team from outside the top flight to lift the famous cup.

That is why we must celebrate Saints’ achievement in finishing seventh - the club’s best top flight position since they finished in the same place 25 years ago – and the European qualification it has brought them.

And how ironic it is that Lallana and Lovren moved to Anfield because they wanted to play Champions League, because they believed Liverpool could give them something Southampton Football Club could not.

Now Liverpool are preparing for exactly the same European competition as Saints are.

Delicious karma, if you’re one of the St Mary’s faithful.