SAINTS’ executive director of football, Les Reed, has given a fascinating insight into the philosophy of how the club conducts its transfer business.

Reed, the man who is responsible for all of the dealings and negotiations at St Mary’s, took time out of his schedule to discuss a number of issues relating to Saints’ activity in the current window.

One matter he was asked about was how difficult it can be to handle situations where another club’s interest in one of their stars is played out largely in the public arena.

“It is very difficult, because there are certain clubs who play that game very blatantly, and it’s almost like none of us will rat each other out,” said Reed.

“My view is that there is a point where, if the effects of another club interfering with a player’s mindset really does start to do damage, then maybe somebody has to make a stand and go ‘Hey, you can’t do this’.

“I think, to a certain extent, you have to play a bit of a cat and mouse game all the way through, but, at the end of the day, it does unsettle the player and there’s a point where if it’s gone so far – as we found with one or two of our players last year – you don’t want it to unsettle the whole team.

“If one player’s unsettled, and he’s not going to be happy staying, then you’ve got a decision to make so it doesn’t affect the rest of the squad, and we have a very, very good dressing room.

“We have a very good, tight squad and that’s a big contributor to our success, and we can’t allow something to affect that, so it does make it difficult and it is tactical, but it is part and parcel of that game as you call it and you have to try and be resilient and manage it as best you can.”

Reed insists the approach of leaking information or trying to publicly unsettle players at other clubs is not one he wishes to take.

“We like to go straight to the club,” he said.

“We like to go club to club for a number of reasons.

“One of them is that we want to be open and transparent with the other club.

“I found it gets things done quicker. Sometimes all this stuff is unnecessary.

“And the other reason I prefer to go club to club is the goalposts have changed in terms of agents and representation, so you can get four different mandates laid on your desk signed by a player saying ‘I mandate this agent to get me out of the club I’m in’, and then you go down that route and the other agent says ‘No, that was me’, ‘No, that was me’, and then you end up with agents saying ‘I want a cut of that deal’, ‘I want this’, ‘I want that.’ “If you go straight to the club then you can cut all of that out, because you get a deal done with the club, then you speak to the agent and, usually by getting a deal done with the club, you can identify who the real agent is.

“But once you start getting third parties involved in trying to manipulate it and wriggle round it, it just makes the whole process very, very difficult and it can fall apart at the last minute, because you’ve actually been dealing with the wrong person.

“There are a lot of brokers out there now, who will pretend they represent a club who want to sell a player, and if you jump too quickly into that you can go down blind alleys and so on.

“And that usually – that broker, who’s actually not connected with the player – is the one that starts feeding stuff into the press and so on, in an attempt to pressurise the other club to get the deal done, and then go to them and say ‘I can get that deal done for you’.

“So that landscape’s changed in the last few years and now, with the deregulation of agents, I can see that being a major problem, because what happens now is you get phone calls from people you’ve never heard of saying ‘I’m an agent’, or they give you a business card, saying ‘What positions are you looking for?’ “And if you go ‘Oh, we need a central defender and a left-back’, they will go to a club that’s got a central defender and a left-back for sale and say ‘I represent Southampton’ and then they will pursue you for a cut of that deal if you buy that player, when it’s totally false.

“So, if you like a player, and you have to do your homework, which is what we do – we try to build our database and be in advance of it, so we know as best we can who the real agent is, certainly know who are the club contacts – if you go straight club to club, you avoid all that confusion and therefore that’s the way we prefer to operate.”

Reed is also pleased that, while this summer has been busy, it has not been as wild as last year’s was.

“I think it’s not as frantic, it’s not as turbulent, and the other side of it is, in addition to raids on our players, there were all sorts of other rumours going around about the future of the club, the ownership, Mauricio [Pochettino],” he said.

“We aren’t surrounded by all of that hysteria that we were last year.

“It’s more like a normal manic transfer window, because everyone says the same – transfer windows are so unpredictable, because one thing happens and it triggers something else.

“That’s why we think we have a good structure in place whereby we plan for all eventualities and therefore we can react quite quickly to things, or we can be quite proactive.

“We have got our ducks in a row, let’s move on and like we said last year let’s wait until we play Newcastle at the start of the season and at that point we can see if we have been successful or unsuccessful.”