Mauricio Pochettino reckons his Saints side changed the landscape of English football. Pochettino arrived at St Mary’s in January 2013 after the club decided to part ways with Nigel Adkins, the manager who had guided them to back-to-back promotions and into the Premier League. The Argentine attracted interest from Tottenham Hotspur and left Saints at the end of the 2013/14 season. However, he guided the St Mary’s side to an eighth-place finish during that campaign which, at the time, was their highest-ever Premier League finish.
Mauricio Pochettino said: “Football in England changed with that Southampton team of 2013-14, there is no other team that had as big an impact in changing the mindset. We arrived at a club with a president like Nicola Cortese who gave us what we needed to create something unique in English football. Our ability to adapt to a completely different environment was incredible. We found a group of players who wanted to learn from the experiences we brought from Spanish football, and with the quality to play a different style of football to that which everyone in English football was used to. Young players started to appear, and people started to trust in young players, also in the English national team.”
