Dragan Solak makes Spygate quip as he reveals new Southampton strategy | OneFootball

The Southampton owner opened up about their use of AI to aid in their analytics

Southampton's Championship return last season ended in disgrace, as they were thrown out of the play-off final after being found guilty of spying on Middlesbrough's training sessions ahead of their semi-final clash.

The Boro incident was the third count of spying that the Saints admitted to, after they also spied on Oxford United and Ipswich Town ahead of league fixtures under Tonda Eckert, too.

That's resulted in Southampton being docked four points to begin the upcoming term, and the higher-ups at St Mary's are hoping that will be all the punishment they'll receive, allowing the full focus to be on winning promotion the right way in 2026/27.

The Saints have been on a real rollercoaster under the guidance of Sport Republic and Dragan Solak since the Serbian bought the club in January 2022, and the hope is that another campaign filled with ups is on the horizon.

What can't be held against Solak is the investment he's put into the club over the last three-and-a-half years, both in terms of buying players and putting strategies in place to help prepare the club for games that deem spying on their opponents rather pointless.

Dragan Solak opens up on how Southampton are using AI in their analytics

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Southampton owner Dragan Solak wants to run an ambitious football club, but recognises that, even when he took over in 2022 when the Saints were an established Premier League side, they'd need to outperform their budget to compete with the very best.

Therefore, he's invested in AI strategies, which are becoming more and more common in football clubs, to help analyse data points in a few minutes, allowing the staff at Southampton to know almost everything they need to know about their rivals.

"We invested a lot of money in making an AI suite that could give our analysts an unbelievable amount of information within a few minutes. So I don't really understand why we needed to go and watch over the fence! But okay, that's something for me to figure out in the next months," Solak joked, per the Southern Daily Echo.

"In my opinion, I look at our pre-game preparations, and I'm amazed at what type of information we have and what can actually be done.

"Tonda [Eckert] is a great coach to use all of this because he is methodical and goes into every little detail. All the little things of every game. Then we have a very advanced AI within our science and medical department with over 215 million data points.

"Our AI agent sometimes needs four minutes to give us the full report on one player, as there is so much data, but this is where I want to develop our club."

The medical data seemed to work perfectly throughout last season at Southampton. Other than Mads Roerslev, who has been missing since November with an Achilles injury, Tonda Eckert had a fully fit squad for the majority of the campaign. 33 of Ross Stewart's 50 games at St Mary's over his three-year stay came last season.

Solak believes that having that AI in place can help keep Tonda Eckert's squad fit, while also providing all the insight about the opposition, which can help them battle against some clubs who have bigger budgets.

"We don't have the funds that are available to Man United," he continued. "When I look towards the big clubs in the Premier League, we have to be more agile, smarter, but we have to have the same ambition.

"We cannot live on less ambition than Manchester United. Our guys have to have this ambition to be better, in a different environment. With all due respect to all the hard-working people at this club, we are a football club. Everything has to end up in the team.

"The guys in marketing have nothing to market if you don't win games. If you are losing games, whatever we do well in IT, who is going to respect that? As long as we play good football, the rest will work."

Southampton showed their ambition in parts last season

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When you look at Southampton's run to the FA Cup semi-finals last season, in which they beat the likes of Fulham and Arsenal, and took the lead against Manchester City, it's evident that the ambition that Solak refers to was on show.

Those three sides, more specifically Arsenal and Manchester City, the Premier League's top two in 2025/26, have plenty of resources and a large playing budget, but Tonda Eckert's side were still able to match them and, in the Gunners' case, better them over 90 minutes.

Being able to maintain player fitness throughout the final few months of the campaign, too, where the FA Cup meant they were playing Saturday/Tuesday every week from the final international break to the season's end, shows that the AI model helped there, too.

The Serbian businessman may be onto something when it comes to investing in AI to help the club prepare for games, and only time will tell next season whether it was that, or by other, more illegal means, that helped Southampton go on a 19-game unbeaten run to end the league campaign.