In his first interview as Southampton chairman, Krueger talks about his ice hockey career, his best-selling book and how he is going to make Mauricio Pochettino stay at the club

Ralph Krueger begins with an admission. And something approaching an apology. "This whole year was supposed to be a year off," the recently appointed Southampton chairman says. "But then I said to my wife: 'Oh, there's just this little thing with Team Canada. And now this.'"

It is Glenda that you have to feel for. "She probably hopes, especially when you get into the 50s, that we're going to slow down," Krueger adds. But this 54-year-old was never going to slow down. After 29 years of marriage, Glenda knows it and, during an afternoon in his company, it is clear that comfort zones and easy options are not a part of his make-up.

The little thing with Canada was the Sochi Winter Olympics, in which Krueger, a Winnipeg-born German national, worked as a scout for the ice hockey team. Krueger being Krueger, he scrutinised virtually everything, including the training sessions of potential opponents. "I love watching hockey games but Ralph's a freak," Ken Hitchcock, the Team Canada associate coach, said. "He watched 25 games in Sochi." Canada won gold.

Ice hockey is Krueger's first sporting passion. It was the game that took him from Canada to Germany in 1979 and a professional career in the Bundesliga. He represented Germany at international level before he moved into coaching, initially in Austria and then as the head of the Switzerland national team programme from 1997-2010, which incorporated three Olympic cycles. After that, it was back to Canada and the NHL, where he worked first as the Edmonton Oilers' assistant coach and then as the head coach during the lockout season of 2012-13.

The cross-over into Premier League football has a startling feel to it and yet, according to him, it is not even his sporting pedigree that has made it possible, although it has most surely helped. Krueger's credentials are rooted in him being the founder of a motivational speaking company; a best-selling author and, as of 2011, a core member of the World Economic Forum's council on new models of leadership. "We create platforms where we can communicate to the world leaders," he says, matter of factly.

When the Southampton owner, Katharina Liebherr, assessed the high-profile fallout from her dispute with Nicola Cortese, and the then club chairman's eventual departure from his position in mid-January, she moved to appoint Krueger. He joined after Canada had tasted Olympic glory on 23 February; indeed, he flew to England the next day.

"Truly meeting Katharina [for the first time] would not have happened until last fall, in the October, when she was running a search for a potential leader," Krueger says. "The sports marketing company in Liechtenstein that she used have known me for 20 years and they said: 'We know a guy and we don't believe he has anything after February.' Then we met and it just took off right away."

Krueger is a born talker and there is an energy and intensity to his words and character. He says that he was water-skiing at Ringwood at 6.30am – "12 degrees in the water; six in the air" – and he has passed down the sporting prowess. His daughter, Geena, finished last year in ninth place in the world slalom water-ski rankings while his son, Justin, plays ice hockey for Bern and Germany. Krueger also runs and cycles.

He has thrown himself into the challenge at Southampton, the nub of which he says is to provide "emotional leadership and creativity – creating cultures, creating mindsets". It essentially boils down to him building "a very, very strong team of people off the pitch to support and sustain Southampton for a long period of time". He says that the finessing of the senior management will not extend to the first-team manager, Mauricio Pochettino, and the players. Krueger will have no input on the technical side.

He talks repeatedly of the "commercial vacuum" that he has inherited and the potential to expand both locally and abroad but in a manner that retains and reinforces Southampton's "unique" identity, a key component of which is the reputation for promoting young English talent. He believes that there are similarities between the club and the Green Bay Packers, the NFL franchise, in that both are supporters' favourite second teams.

Krueger intends to hire a chief commercial officer while he says that "there will be a definite sports director for all of the football operations" or, as he goes on to suggest, a team that will develop around the current director, Les Reed.

Yet he accepts that commercial pushes and balanced books are never going to quicken the pulses and most fans have straightforward questions, the biggest of which concerns whether the club will be able to keep in the summer, together with the squad's star players, chiefly the captain, Adam Lallana, Luke Shaw and Morgan Schneiderlin. Jay Rodriguez would have been another potential target only for serious injury to cut him down.

Pochettino has said that he will "assess the situation at the club" at the end of the season before he decides "whether I am to stay another season" – the final one on his contract – and Tottenham Hotspur have monitored his progress since his arrival at St Mary's in January last year.

Krueger's strategy to ward off the predators is simple: continue to make Pochettino feel wanted, stimulated and central to a vibrant project, which runs from the first-team down to the under-eights. Krueger is too long in the tooth to make rash promises and he suggests that no single employee is bigger than a club which has stood since 1885. "As good as anybody is in any position in the organisation, – a player, a manager, a person in the office – we are all part of a very, very long history that is just going to go on," he says.

But Krueger is not generally a worrier and he is both pragmatic and relaxed about the summer. "The first thing I'd say about Mauricio is that he took his time at Espanyol [where he previously managed for four years], which was really important," he says. "What really great managers do is stay in one spot until they cannot evolve there any more. If you see managers go one year, one year, one year and then, suddenly, they are in a top league, they don't have the foundation, possibly, to do the job. Mauricio has very carefully planned his career.

"Right now, the only thing I can say, whether we speak about Mauricio or the players, is that what we have here is very good and we are doing everything in our power to keep this group together. We are going to create a culture that this is just an excellent organisation to be a part of at all levels. Whatever the dynamics of football or the situations that can evolve outside of Southampton do to us as we move forward, we will just keep moving forward. But there has been no talk of selling anything."

It is put to Krueger that he must believe the club is in the position to convince Pochettino to stay. "Philosophically, if you look at my leadership style and you make the statement you did, then you can draw a line under what you think is happening," he says. "We have an open culture here."

Krueger has, however, made an unwanted discovery. The cost of redeveloping the training ground has risen from £15m to £30m while the club owe £27m on outstanding transfer payments, £22m of which is due in the summer. Yet Krueger is adamant that there is a solution and it does not lie in cashing in on a saleable player, rather driving quick commercial upturns.

"We feel very comfortable that we have a plan that can deal with the situation and we are definitely not factoring in a big player sale," he says. "We're pretty sure that there are no more surprises and that being the case, we feel comfortable that we're going to be good. And that we will be able to keep this group together."

Krueger radiates conviction. It is one of his greatest qualities. But he admits that he had to work at it. "The reason I am at Southampton, primarily, is because of the leadership experience that I have but it developed out of a pure fear of how dangerous it was to become a hockey coach at the age of 31, 32," he says. "I thought: 'I don't want to be a coach that is ever afraid.'

"So one of the first things I did [in 1991] was to start a company where I went out and spoke about my experiences in sports. I did a lot of reading, whatever was happening in sports or in motivational speaking, and it inspired me to find my own path. My first official speaking gig was in 1994 and it has run parallel to my entire coaching career. I pushed myself. Even though I was full-time coaching, I was part-time studying leadership in the corporate world.

"My company, which is called Teamlife, has evolved to have very, very close links with the biggest corporations in Switzerland – Credit Suisse, UBS, Nestle. I'm still doing consultancy work with it, although I am substantially reducing my role."

Krueger wrote his book in 2001 – Teamlife: Over Setbacks to Success. He did it in German while he had help to translate it into French and, although it has never been published in English, it has proved widely popular. "It's about lifestyle habits for winners," he says. "Two-thirds of it was theory, one-third from my own experiences in sport."

Krueger has a steeliness, not to mention a handshake that leaves you counting your fingers. "Believe me, I can be ruthless for the cause," he adds. "It'll be above table, it'll be honest, it'll be in the eyes of whatever I need to be ruthless about. I have 52 stitches on my face from my sport. This dimple right here? That was from when a hockey stick went through my cheek."

And yet what leaves the impression is Krueger's empathy, particularly for the values of Liebherr, who inherited Southampton from her late father, Markus, in 2010 and is driven by the desire to honour the principles for which he stood.

"The first magnet that drew me to Southampton was speaking to Katharina and her perspective," Krueger says. "I don't want to genderise it but it was refreshing. She is in this for so many emotionally based, value-based reasons. The values at the top are strong and honest and good. In the organisations where the focus is bottom line, bottom line – well, there are a lot of compromises in how you treat people then."