SOUTHAMPTON, England — Les Reed remembers the venom. He remembers the anger and the worry and the stress. He remembers — much as he may try to forget — the cursing. Just moments after the end of Southampton F.C.'s final home match last season, Reed, the club’s executive director, sat in his seat at St. Mary’s Stadium and absorbed a steady stream of salty language from fans as they stomped up the aisles.

It was not that the Saints were bad; they had actually finished eighth in the Premier League, one of the best finishes in the team’s 129-year history. Rather, the fans were frothing because they were panicked about what was to come for this storied club from England’s South Coast. Everyone knew small-money Southampton was going to lose several of its top players during the summer. The manager and his coaches could go, too. An off-season of turmoil was all but assured and, for fans of a club that had been mired in financial crisis and, nearly as depressingly, the third division, only a few years earlier, the impending maelstrom felt an awful lot like the beginning of a slide back down the hill.

“They were yelling at me, screaming at me, ‘Les, you better fix this, you better keep this together,’ ” Reed said in an interview last week. “And I remember sitting there, just being absolutely battered, and thinking, We will.”

He had no idea quite how right he would be. Six months later, the reality here is startling: Southampton’s nightmare summer played out just as everyone imagined, with a flurry of player sales and a coaching change, yet Reed and the rest of Southampton’s executives cannot stop smiling. Somehow, Southampton is the story of the Premier League season, not just for its results so far — it sits second in the standings — but also for its methodology.