Les Reed has admitted that Saints had to concede defeat in their pursuit of Toby Alderweireld after receiving the news that the centre half wanted to join Tottenham.

Saints’ executive director described himself as ‘disappointed and deflated’ that a year’s worth of work in trying to capture the on loan Belgian permanently fell at the last hurdle.

While Reed confirmed that the club will take no further action against Atletico Madrid, he insisted that Saints did everything they could to land Alderweireld, even, they beleive, outbidding Tottenham, but were ultimately turned down by the player.

It was certainly a complicated situation with clauses and buyout options, but Reed was prepared to explain.

He said: “I think what was getting out in the media was a lot of supposition about what these clauses were because between us and Atletico Madrid we tried to keep that between us.

“It’s very simple in as much as we had an option, within that option they had a buy back clause.

“They had a window of opportunity basically to send our deposit back and they would either agree to the transfer or send the deposit back and he would return to Atletico Madrid.

“If they missed their window of opportunity then the option would automatically kick in and therefore we could sign Toby.

“The argument was about they felt they did it properly and got it in on time, we felt they missed it.

“That was essentially what we were arguing about, but at the same time we had spent a lot of time, as is natural if a player is with you for a year, you are going to ascertain whether he likes it, he’s enjoying it and whether he wants to be here and so on.

“We knew that Toby was happy to be here, wanted to stay and all the indications were that he wanted to play for Southampton. Even to the point of accepting terms and conditions for his future contract.

“Again, in other countries you can actually put those contracts in place at the time of the option agreement but here you can’t so we had to wait before we could put something in writing.

“By that time lots of negotiating had gone on and we knew we had an acceptable deal on the table.

“The fact of the matter was that we wanted to land the player, we wanted the player to be here.

“The choice was do we pursue this legal argument which could tie it up for months and get FIFA involved and so on, or do we bite the bullet and go into the open market and make a bid that is acceptable to Atletico?

“That was the decision we made (to make an offer) but we always kept the without prejudice advantage that was lawyer to lawyer, but my discussions with Atletico were fairly positive, to be the point we made the bid and I was flying out on Tuesday to seal the transfer by discussing it with them.

“But I got a call on Monday night that Toby had decided that he now wanted to play for Spurs. That threw the whole thing into a pointless exercise.

“There is no case with Atletico because we could have done a transfer with them.

“We believe we bid more than Spurs. I did ask whether financially there was an issue with his contract that we needed to talk about and was assured no there wasn’t, it wasn’t salary, it wasn’t with Atletico a transfer fee, it was just that Toby felt his future lay at Tottenham Hotspur.

“Then you have to weigh up there are four Belgian players at Tottenham Hotspur, his fellow centre half for Belgium plays at Tottenham Hotspur, so there would have been a big pull that way.

“What’s deflating and disappointing for me is the amount of energy and work we put into it over a long period of time.

“I hope the fans don’t think we left it to the last minute and missed out because we put more energy into that than anything else, and were convinced by him that this was where he wanted to be.

“Everyone’s got a right to change their mind but from our point of view it happened at the door of actually completing the transfer.

“For me that was very disappointing and deflating because I put a lot of work into it, but then next day you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, look at the next target and move on, and that’s where we are at the moment.”