Southampton defender Kyle Walker-Peters is being linked with a return to his former club Tottenham Hotspur this summer, according to the latest reports.
The Saints travel to the West Midlands on Sunday afternoon to take on West Bromwich Albion at The Hawthorns in the first leg of their play-off semi-final tie. Russell Martin’s men will be hoping for a positive result to take back to the St. Mary’s Stadium with them next week.
The club’s relegation from the Premier League wasn’t overly shocking. Southampton had been losing some of their best players, including Oriol Romeu and Danny Ings, and it seemed as though Championship football had been coming for quite a while.
This season, Martin’s men picked up 87 points and were one of the second-tier’s great entertainers. However, the club were competing in one of the strongest Championship campaigns in quite a while, with the likes of Leeds United, Leicester City and Ipswich Town each accumulating 90 or more points.
Now, the Saints will partake in the lottery of the play-offs to decide whether or not the club will return to the Premier League at the first time of asking. Should they fail to win promotion in the next three matches, the club on the south coast may struggle to keep hold of some key players over the summer.
One name being linked with a move away from the club over the coming months is Walker-Peters. According to a report from talkSPORT, his old side, Tottenham Hotspur, are weighing up a bid for the fullback which would see him return to North London.
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The 27-year-old still has twelve months remaining on his current deal and boasts a market value of £17 million, meaning he will be one of the most sellable assets at Southampton should they need to trim the wage bill.
Writer’s View
Parachute payments are greatly reduced in a club’s second season following relegation from the Premier League. As a result, Southampton will need to offload some of the players, like Walker-Peters, who are on top-flight wage packages.
Martin recently admitted that the wide defender will likely leave the St. Mary’s this summer should they fail to earn promotion back to the promised land.
“I think if we get promoted it becomes a lot easier to keep him,” he said.
“If we don’t, we won’t keep hold of Kyle. There’s no point in pretending otherwise really, financially for the club and Kyle’s ambitions as well.”
Deputy Head of Writing
