SAINTS have no immediate plan to extend St Mary's - despite selling out virtually every home game in what was a record-breaking season.

There were around 22,000 season-ticket holders last season and sales are already going well for the next campaign, but chairman Rupert Lowe has said the club needs 25,000 and ideally a waiting list before the board will plan for any extension.

He explained it would cost somewhere between £15m and £17.5m to add 5,000 seats to the current 32,500 capacity and stressed that would only make financial sense when there was more certainty those seats would be regularly sold.

He said: "When we went to the stadium originally, the view was 25,000 was a more than adequate number to build.

"But, when we looked at the numbers, we opted to build a 32,500 single-tier stadium that cost us just over £1,000 a seat.

"We've been tremendously successful, have great fans and have probably outstripped the support we thought we'd get.

"That's great and thank-you to everybody but to extend the new stadium, which is designed so we can expand it at great expense, we'd probably have to spend something like £3-3,500 a seat to do it.

"To do that speculatively without the actual seats pre-sold for a period of time would be difficult to do.

"What we want to see happen is the season-ticket num-bers continue to grow and, if we get to 25,000 - which I think is the maximum we could go to without shutting out a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to come - we then need to register a waiting list of people who are happy to subscribe for a season-ticket.

"Then we would have the basis to talk to the banks and see if we can convince them to lend us the money."

Lowe accepts that any extension of the stadium would potentially be a very positive step for Saints.

"I agree it is, in an ideal world, something we should be looking to do at the appropriate time," he added.

"But we don't want to damage the club, so it has to be done in an extremely well-planned and structured way.

"The board does keep it under constant review and, as I say, if the season-ticket numbers continue to grow, it is something we will be seriously considering."

Saints' average league attendance this season was an excellent 31,716, but managing director Andrew Cowen is backing Lowe's belief that the club still needs more certainty of numbers before expanding the ground.

"There is no point in going on a recreational building trip and turning something that should be a financial asset in to a liability," he said.

"We need it to pass the financial sniff-test Rupert has outlined."