With a 2-1 home defeat to Hull City having left them in 15th place in the Championship table and ten points short of a play-off place, the revival experienced by Southampton following their decision to sack Will Still and replace him with Tonda Eckert already feels like a long time ago.
The Saints have now failed to win any of their last seven league matches, a run which stretches back to December 9, although their FA Cup campaign started successfully enough, with a 3-2 win at Doncaster setting up a home tie against Leicester City in the Fourth Round of the competition.
But with the Saints’ form in the league faltering, questions are being asked of the club’s owners Sport Republic, and among those questions is what they were thinking in selling striker Dom Ballard – who’d been with the club for a decade after coming up through their youth system – to League One Leyton Orient on transfer deadline day last summer.
Southampton owners slammed over Dom Ballard departure – he should’ve been given Saints opportunity
Football League World have spoken to Saints fan pundit Martin Sanders to find out how Southampton fans are feeling about Ballard now, and there’s general confirmation that Ballard’s Orient progress has been near the top of the Saints fans agenda.
“He’s the biggest talking point amongst Saints fans after Tonda Eckert and yesterday (the loss to Hull City).
Dom Ballard, 15 goals for Leyton Orient and another hat-trick yesterday. He’s one of our own, came through our academy and was never given an opportunity at senior level.”
Martin has huge sympathy with Ballard over his treatment by the club, and knows who is to blame for this having happened.
“In pre-season, I saw him down at Eastleigh in a friendly, and he was in amongst a group of players who weren’t even in the match-day squad, and I feel really sorry for him, because he needed to be given an opportunity and we went and bought Damion Downs, which says it all, really, for recruitment under this ownership.
“They continually make terrible mistakes and terrible decisions when it comes to recruitment.”
“A lot of fans are asking whether there’s a buy-back clause, but there won’t be, will there? Our loss, Leyton Orient’s gain. He will be a great striker. Throw him in the Championship and no doubt he’ll come back and haunt us.”
Dom Ballard is reaching his potential too late for Southampton
Having first joined Southampton as an eight-year-old, the sale of Dom Ballard for an undisclosed six-figure fee to Leyton Orient at the end of the summer 2025 transfer window brought to an end a 12-year association between the player and a club that often seemed to not know quite what to do with him.
Ballard signed professional forms with the Saints at 17 in 2022, but the following three years were largely spent on loan at Reading, Blackpool and Cambridge United. In total, he made just two appearances from the bench for the Saints, both coming at the very end of the 2022-23 season, with a total of 24 minutes of game-time.
And the striker has flourished at Brisbane Road in a way in which he was never given the opportunity to at St Mary’s.
On the same day that Southampton were losing at home to Hull, Leyton Orient were beating Reading 3-1 in League One and Ballard was helping himself to a hat-trick in twenty minutes, taking his goalscoring tally for the season to 15 in the league from 20 appearances. He has been the undoubted highlight of what has been an otherwise uninspiring season for Orient, so far.
Complaints have been growing at Southampton about the owners’ running of the club for a while now. It was reported at the start of November that anti-Sport Republic songs were heard during a home match against Preston North End, and that unhappiness only seems likely to grow, should the Saints not turn their form around and get back on track.
Sport Republic bought the club in 2022, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Southampton have been in decline since then.
At the time that they completed their purchase, the Saints had an unbroken run of a decade of Premier League football behind them. But they were relegated in 2023, and even a future as a yo-yo club between the top two divisions seems beyond them now, if this season’s underachievement is anything to go by.
Dom Ballard was one of Southampton’s own, and his sale to Leyton Orient without having been able to prove himself at St Mary’s is another blot on their copybook.
His progress this season might have been difficult to predict, but Saints fans are not in a forgiving mood at the moment, considering their team’s flat-lining performances on the pitch this season, and the protests against the owners only seem likely to get angrier and louder unless their team’s performances on the pitch improve substantially. The Hull defeat indicated that there little prospect of that happening at the moment.
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