The Saints will be facing the Dutch club Vitesse in the Europa League qualification round. There will be two legs with the first taking place at St. Mary’s on July 30th. The second leg will take place a week later on August 6th in Arnhem.
Ronald Koeman said regarding this, “We play the first [leg] at home before the start of the Premier League. Normally I’d prefer to play the second leg at home, but we have to accept it.”
Vitesse was the first club Koeman managed after assisting at Barcelona and for the Netherlands National Team. Koeman led Vitesse to the UEFA Cup, now the Europa League, amassing a record of 40-23-16 from early to 2000 to late 2001. Koeman can now measure how far his managerial career has come since his early beginnings.
Southampton should be proud to be in the Europa league this coming season, but they received a bad draw. Vitesse had the highest coefficient (10.195) of any unseeded teams, while Southampton were the fourth ranked seeded team. So, theoretically Southampton drew the toughest opponent they could for the qualification round.
Koeman and his side are not intimidated though. In an interview Koeman said, “We’ll play against a good team and one that likes to play football, and we will see what happens – we are a better team than Vitesse, and we have two games to show that.”
Koeman and Les Reed have both been very confident in the squad this off-season claiming that we have the right squad and right squad numbers for the longer Europa League season ahead.
This does not mean that Vitesse are not fearful of the match up. There is a youtube video circulating the web of the Vitesse players and manager watching the draw vs. Southampton. You can try to decipher their reactions and if you know Dutch, please shoot me a translation.
Ronald Koeman Interview:
