Chairman Ralph Krueger describes the changes that have taken place at Saints over the past year as like being on "a different planet" to the club he found upon his arrival.

Saints are well structured and organised away from the pitch, financially stable and secure, and no longer have to ask their billionaire owner for handouts.

On the field, they are thriving with a new manager and a team that was almost completely changed last summer.

It has been a remarkable period in the club’s history and, with Saints facing the run-in of their lives, with the tantalising prospect of Champions League football awaiting, further excitement awaits.

Krueger gave a wide ranging interview to Daily Echo reporters Adam Leitch and Gordon Simpson, the first part of which is here.

The second part will be published tomorrow, with Krueger talking all things Saints - past, present and future.

Reflecting on the season so far, so many people are delighted and you must be absolutely thrilled?

"A certain percentage of yourself, you can always stick into the emotions of the moment, but the role still has to do with what we’ve spoken about since the beginning of my time here, and that’s building a sustainable model.

"You have to take yourself out of that momentary pleasure and enjoyment of looking at where we’re at and think about how we can sustain that and grow that in the future.

"You are flipping back and forth.

"I love the matches. It’s been extremely entertaining and enjoyable to go to every single match.

"I’ve missed only a couple live, due to business commitments, but pretty much every match live and every journey has been exciting.

"No matter the final result, it’s a wonderful team to watch, it’s a great product, the entertainment has been excellent and there’s so much pleasure in why we’re doing all this, and that’s the matches.

"You can feel the pleasure around us in our spectators, in and around the town and people who watch game on the telly.

"You can feel there is so much pleasure in the product and so that makes us and the leadership and me personally very, very happy."

When you appointed Ronald could you have envisaged it would go this well, this quickly?

"If I revisit the hiring process where Les [Reed] had done his groundwork and we ended up at Heathrow with Gareth Rogers, Les and myself in a four-hour brainstorming with Ronald, from that very first brainstorming I trusted this was possible, to have an extremely honest, open kind of team environment.

"It was out instinct right at that very first meeting, which you knew led to have no more meetings.

"We were so all-in on how he fitted to what we needed that we never pursued any more interviews, and Les finished the deal pretty quickly after that.

"That has only been confirmed.

"I was really optimistic off the bat and have never been disappointed by that not being backed up.

"Everything he said seemed so real, felt so natural and you could feel Ronald has an amazing breadth as a manager.

"Because I come from that world I can understand that.

"He also understands the business side of the game. You will have managers in the league who are one-dimensional sports, sports, sports, sports.

"He’s very interested in the whole picture and how that picture looks and how we’re getting there and how we’re going there.

"He’s stuck very well in the means we have to work with here.

"Where we are today, I am never that kind of guy who is surprised. I’m not surprised where we are.

"It’s a real nice place to be, but I’m not surprised.

"We just feel we are where we deserve to be right now and that we are not lucky to be here and that this has happened for a reason.

"On many, many different levels we have lot of really good people making decisions to get us to where we are today."

You came into the club with Mauricio Pochettino here, but do you now feel the structure you have in place is something you are more comfortable with?

"I think in many ways, if you take the recent history of the club over the last five or six years, many people were in the right place at the right time to get the club where it needed to go.

"What happens is, as teams evolve in sports, it’s often healthy and necessary for changes to happen.

"You should never say whatever is there before you compare it to what you have now, because things happen for certain reasons and people are in places for certain reasons.

"All I can say is the changes that happened to the club in the summer, the club was ready for those changes to happen and they needed it to happen for the club to move forward again.

"I think that it’s certainly Ronald that was right was for us, but we were also right for Ronald. It’s a two-way fit, which has been why that managerial change at this time was really good.

"In a summer when we needed a very, very experienced manager to deal with, and him now being in his 15th year as a head coach, and two or three years as assistant before that, he was well positioned for what we needed to calmly deal with the hurricanes around us."

He is continually being linked with other clubs, which he said is inevitable given his history with Barcelona, but he seems keen at least to honour his contract as it stands. Are you confident that will happen and you won’t have another Mauricio on your hands?

"I think that I have learned really quickly. In the one-league sports world I come from that doesn’t exist, because you do not tamper.

"People just do not tamper during contracts. In football that kind tampering is tolerated, and it’s part of the business.

"I have gotten to understand that people being targeted – players, staff, coaches – that’s part of the business.

"We are not afraid of any of that tampering any more.

"We went through something in the summer that we will never experience again and it strengthens us to know the club is really strong going forward and is not dependant on any one person.

"Right now that’s a philosophical answer to a simple question.

"The simple answer is right now we are talking about what we are going to do next season.

"We are keeping the picture small and you have to just trust we are strong enough as a club to deal with any of those potential changes. We proved that in the summer."

Ronald said he is aware that one or two big players could go this summer as well, so with the resilience of the club presumably you are prepared for that?

"Les Reed was selected as the board member to direct the football in a classic general manager sense.

"The parameters and frameworks and the strategic side of the club is discussed regularly in our leadership group, but Les then connected with Ronald.

"They did an outstanding job this summer of staying within those parameters but finding solutions.

"We are very confident all of that is in place and we are such an attractive destination.

"Let’s not kid ourselves. What’s happened in the last few years is pretty much every player who comes here finds his potential and improves, so the recruiting process for a club like Southampton is that you earn the fact that more players want to come.

"This is a club people want to come to. They want to play here, we treat people right, we’ve got very good people at all different levels, we’ve got a lot of respect in the club, we’ve got growth through young players at the club.

"If you think last summer we had a lot of people who wanted to come here, then next summer we have even more.

"It’s just about making the right decisions for us then.

"This is a major destination for players in the football world."

One specific problem is Nathaniel Clyne with his contract running down. Is there anything you can say about that one?

"All the football specific discussions are in Les’s hands.

"I am supportive in the whole process, but Les Reed has control over those situations and the responsibility.

"He is conducting conversations in the best interests of the club with the representatives of players we want to keep and those are ongoing.

"We are extremely pleased to have signed Ryan Bertrand and James Ward-Prowse to long-term contacts just recently.

"It’s interesting for me that people aren’t as excited about those contracts as they should be.

"Ryan Bertrand is a new player.

"He didn’t belong to us, but we’ve purchased him, we’ve signed him and he’s committed here long-term.

"That’s a proven winner who brings an unbelievable mindset. James Ward-Prowse made that commitment.

"We are moving forward for sure.

"Nathaniel Clyne, the only thing I need to know in my position is that those conversations are going on the same line and we are dealing with them the same way, in the best interests of the club, and we stay within our parameters.

"If players understand this needs to be a win-win then I can’t think of a better place for players to play for players who are not at their potential.

"You would definitely want to stay in Southampton.

"That’s an area where I can’t get into specifics, because that’s why we’ve constructed everything as we have. It’s for Les to get into the specifics of the deal.

"I can only talk philosophically that we have made big progress in January and we are on the way. There are talks."

When we last talked about the finances of the club there was a very big transfer debt to be paid this season. Has that hindered the club at all, how close is that to being cleared and what are the implications for the future?

"If you look at the numbers, we are somewhere between three and five players deeper than we were this time last year. Three or four Premier League players.

"If you look at the shift of the sales in the summer and how many players have come in new, the net out, depending on how you want to count the loans and the buys, is somewhere between three-to-five players more.

"We are running a responsible, healthy financial programme right now here. Everything is in place.

"I’ve always told you we want to build a sustainable model. We want something long-term.

"The board made a strategy that was handed over to Les Reed and Ronald Koeman for the transfer window and we didn’t vary from that because we all of a sudden had three injuries.

"We set that strategy in December, they went into January with that strategy, we brought in [Filip] Djuricic and [Eljero] Elia and there were injuries going on all over the place and we didn’t lose that discipline.

"We are in a healthy position and the numbers of the club will be revealed in the next few weeks, but you have to remember we have invested a lot into salaries going into the future, but we feel comfortable where we are today and where the numbers are today."

There was not that degree a comfort when you came in just over a year ago?

"No. We are much more comfortable.

"We are building always three years ahead, so when people see the transfer numbers in the summer they need to know a lot of that has been re-invested in salaries and new contracts.

"We are built on a healthy financial model here and people can be comfortable in that kind of discipline here.

"It’s one thing to want to have more players and want to have this or that, but fans here should know we are trying to build a model where they are going to watch football for a long time.

"We are not a fly by night, one-off, high risk operation.

"If I look back a year ago to today, it’s a different planet. There was so much to understand and get to know.

"We have David Bence now as the CFO, Gareth Rogers from CFO into CEO.

"We have two very strong financial minds there who are religiously putting all the systems in place and not get caught up in emotions, like in January when we could have easily gone wild with something in the hope of it bringing us somewhere, but that’s not where we are."

Has the club finally got to the point where it now no longer has to go cap in hand to Katharina Liebherr and ask for money on a yearly basis?

"That is definitely correct. We are working on a model, and I said from the start we had huge potential for commercial growth, and we have systems in place and have expanded that department.

"When I walked in here at the beginning there were two apprentices more in that department and now they’re packed – there’s got to be ten in there.

"We’ve got some opportunities there.

"A lot of it in football is targeted on 2016 and so on. You are always a year ahead, but we have a lot of exciting things happening off the tail end of the exposure we are getting worldwide on our success.

"All of that is putting us in a position.

"A year ago, one of the things I said about was our potential for commercial growth and just our whole marketing concept and the way we’re branding ourselves, it’s so much more professional.

"People around the world are feeling it. People all around England are feeling it.

"How we’re doing as a football club is one thing, but also the image that we’re resonating out there is very strong and powerful, and we’re getting very good feedback.

"The question is does Katharina need to invest? The whole thing we are building up on is that’s enough from her, and this needs to be healthy, sustainable model.

"If you keep doing that all the time you just end up never winning, but once you become a business, which we are now, and have the people to run the business properly, on the financial side David and Gareth and on the business side Martin Semmens as our chief commercial officer and then Les Reed with his unbelievably vast football knowledge and experience and all the different roles he’s played in his life, it’s the right place at the right time for Les.

"We have so many people that have come into the club at the right time, from the right place, and it’s giving us a real solid foundation upon which to build a long-term success here.

"You can really feel there is a team growing up.

"When we talked a year ago I was just speculating. I was honest with you, there was no knowledge of what we really had here.

"There was certainly not a lot of structure and certainly not a lot of transparency.

"We are trying to be very transparent and have structure."

With this structure in place, and the atmosphere, do you feel Southampton is ready to be a European or even a Champions League club next season?

"One hundred per cent ready for that.

"At the end, we had to start those processes in our mind, whether they were for next year or the year after.

"We’ve always spoken since I came here, day one, was that our dream was to go into Europe.

"If you look at our interviews together, even through the tough times in the summer, at the end of last season, all those interviews – you can pull them out, look them back – boom, we talked about the vision is to go to Europe, to build the club to Europe, and that wasn’t just lip service.

"We’re expecting every single department, every single area of the club – not just the football – to be ready for the next step, and it’s not something that has to happen, but we are ready if it happens.

"There’s no question about it. We will be ready and, again, we need to stay in the small picture.

"We take it one day at a time here, through ‘til May 24th.

"The standings count one single time the whole year, and that’s on that day, but we will be ready to deal with whatever the circumstances are.

"If it’s a step into Europe, let’s go, and let’s react to it.

"But it begins with Les, of course, and the football department and Ronald to be prepared.

"But we as an organisation are already checking on what that encompasses, what it entails, what it means, and we’re ready for it."

Just how big would it be for you as a club if you qualified for the Champions League next season?

"Obviously, being the best of the rest is already a huge accomplishment.

"I think that was really the way we came into this season, was trying to defend that spot, of being the best of the rest.

"If you break into this group it would be a monstrous opportunity for us and we will deal with it if it happens.

"We’re going to let everything go naturally right to the end of the season, but, of course, that’s something that opens up opportunities that we don’t have if we don’t make it – and if we don’t make it we still want to make it.

"It’s not a timeline, and then take the steps to try and take another push at it.

"But, obviously, that would be – it would be hard to summarise that in adjectives I think.

"I don’t know exactly what the words would be, but let’s just enjoy one day at a time right now and let the guys stay in the world that they’ve been in.

"One of the great things our coaching staff’s done is keep the picture small and work day-to-day, and I think that’s the most important message right now, that we keep it that way and just keep enjoying the season."