Mauricio Pellegrino has complained that his side were priced out of deals during the January transfer window, hence why they struggled to significantly strengthen.
Southampton lost star defender Virgil van Dijk to Liverpool for £75million at the very beginning of January, yet the club only managed to bring in one addition, in Monaco’s Guido Carrillo for a record breaking £19.2million.
The South Coast club were also heavily linked with Spartak Moscow’s Quincy Promes and Tottenham’s Erik Lamela, although neither deal came to fruition.
The January window is notoriously difficult to do business in, and Pellegrino has claimed that huge deals such as Paul Pogba’s £89million switch to Manchester United in 2016 and Neymar’s massive move to PSG from Barcelona for £198million last summer has further damaged the market. He said;
I think we were prepared. The question is in our targets, we couldn’t bring our targets.
Some of them because it was too expensive for us, some of them because they (other clubs) don’t want to accept our bids.
And at the end, little by little, when you lose the target number one, you lose the target number two and the time is passing every single day it is more difficult because they (the selling club) don’t have time to replace.
The market I think in the last two years change a lot, from Pogba, from Neymar, I think the transfer fees are massive.
When you think about now the transfer fees of the players, it’s difficult to bring good players, good quality and that can play in the Premier League that’s difficult.
Southampton haven’t won in the Premier League since beating Everton 4-1 in late November, drawing seven times since then, and with the club now in the relegation zone, Pellegrino is in for a difficult final few months of the season having to stick with a largely unchanged squad.
Pellegrino, whose side face bottom club West Brom at The Hawthorns on Saturday, refused to criticise the contributions of his players and will wait until the campaign has finished to assess their overall performances. He continued;
At the end of the season will be the moment to draw a conclusion about our performance, about what every single player did in this period of time and after to analyse.
And maybe in June it will be easier. Right now it’s difficult to talk about.
