Saints were in trouble for most of last season and Mark Hughes really has to improve their abysmal home form

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 12th (NB: this is not necessarily Ben Fisher’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 17th

Odds to win the league (via Oddschecker): 500-1

For Southampton, at last a summer without a saga. Not only have they not been dragged into a tug of war with any prized assets, but also for the first time in three years, June did not signify the arrival of a new manager. Surveying the scene, there is welcome calm, the bigger picture still exciting, though the fear of relegation lived with Saints right up until the final day against Pep Guardiola’s champions, when suddenly the thought of a fatal 10-goal swing in Swansea City’s favour did not seem so silly, so unfeasible.

For so long a docile Southampton side diced with death and a disastrous return to the Championship beckoned, 24 months on from a sixth-place finish. Led astray by Mauricio Pellegrino, a talented Saints squad sought comfort in Mark Hughes’s methods following his appointment in spring. Not one to pussyfoot around, he injected belief, reset mentalities and refocused on the fundamentals, upping the training intensity for starters. It did not happen overnight – Hughes lost his first three league games, the first a harrowing 3-0 defeat at West Ham – but, in the end, two wins from eight league matches were enough and they survived by three points, earning Hughes a bonus of almost £1m and a three-year deal.

The barometer for success has been slightly blurred by last season but supporters would surely be grateful for some stability. Hughes has already cleansed his squad, with both Sofiane Boufal and the £19.2m club-record signing Guido Carrillo, the Argentinian striker who only arrived in January, exiled on loan, the latter to Pellegrino’s new employer, Leganes, while the midfielder Jordy Clasie has re-joined Feyenoord.

Dusan Tadic, who relished the responsibility handed to him by Hughes, will be missed the most having departed for Ajax, but, as ever, there are a wave of new arrivals.

The winger Mohamed Elyounoussi is arguably the most exciting, the Morocco-born Norway international signing for £16m from Basel, where he impressed in the Champions League, scoring against Manchester City in March. Stalked by Saints scouts since 2012, when he was a teenager at Sarpsborg, where his manager was the former Sheffield United striker Brian Deane, Elyounoussi and Stuart Armstrong, a £7m buy from Celtic, will provide craft and should help shoulder the load on Charlie Austin to score goals.

It is credit to Austin that he has been so sorely missed throughout his two-and-a-half injury-hit seasons on the south coast but the damning reality is that in that time, he has scored 14 goals in the Premier League and started just 23 matches in the same competition. He mustered seven goals last season yet still finished as the joint top-scorer, alongside Tadic. Southampton’s interest in Danny Ings, the Winchester-born forward released by Saints as a schoolboy, makes sense as they search for a long-term striking solution.

At the back, they have signed a leader, good character and man mountain in Jannik Vestergaard, the 6ft 6in Denmark defender, from Borussia Mönchengladbach. The towering centre-back is not scared of throwing his body on the line – he blocked 39 shots in the Bundesliga last season, more than any other player in the division – though he is afraid of spiders. “I hate them,” he said. “My girlfriend’s less afraid of them than I am, and I really have to be forced to remove them from the apartment,” he said. Vestergaard will likely slot in alongside two from Wesley Hoedt, Jan Bednarek, Jack Stephens and Maya Yoshida in Hughes’s preferred three-man defence, but it remains to be seen whether it proves dynamic enough.

That 3-5-2 system definitely benefits the wing-backs Cédric Soares, the Portugal international and one of several Saints players Hughes had previously tried to sign at Stoke City, and Ryan Bertrand, the marauding left-wing-back who had also expected to be in Russia with England this summer.

In goal, the £10m arrival of Angus Gunn compliments Southampton’s wealth of goalkeeping options, while also nudging Fraser Forster further down the pecking order. No longer a problem position, Alex McCarthy – who signed a new four-year contract amid interest from Tottenham – was handed the No 1 shirt in the summer.

As for Gunn, the son of the former goalkeeper, Bryan, he was highly-rated at Manchester City and left to compete for first-team football after an impressive loan spell at Norwich City. “There’s been a lot of change and change for the right reasons,” Hughes said. “I think you have to be progressive both as a club and as a squad. A lot of hard work has gone into pushing us forward as a club, so hopefully we’ll all benefit from that progress.”

As well as sharpening up in both boxes, if Saints have any plans of moving back towards the middle of the table and beyond, then they must address their form at St Mary’s. Southampton have won a miserly 10 league matches over the past two seasons on home soil, four of which came in 2017-18, and a closer look at those games exposes just how bleak things were last season. The first was thanks to a soft stoppage-time penalty against West Ham, the second courtesy of a fine solo effort by Boufal at the end of a dire performance against West Bromwich Albion, the third a crushing 4-1 win against an abysmal Everton, in David Unsworth’s final game in temporary charge, and the last was against Bournemouth, in April. Southampton simply must put on a better show this season, starting at home to Burnley on Sunday. “Once we get to a point where everything clicks I think people will be excited by what we’re able to produce,” Hughes said over pre-season.

In the bygone eras of Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman there was an endearing fearlessness about Southampton, especially at St Mary’s. They had an air of invincibility about them, no matter who was strutting off the team bus towards the away dressing room. But a dismal 18 months and a series of bruising results later, such as home defeats to Burnley and Chelsea, the latter after imploding with 20 minutes to play, or Hughes’s then Stoke side, on the final day of 2016‑17, have sapped them of confidence. After resuscitating Saints last season, now Hughes must find a way to reinvigorate them.