What Adam Armstrong has said about Southampton FC situation has got many Saints fans reacting | OneFootball

Southampton striker Adam Armstrong has spoken out on the club's current dysfunction and fans have picked up on one glaring contradiction in his words.

Southampton striker Adam Armstrong has spoken out on the Saints players' attitudes this season, and fans were quick to pick him up on the contradiction in what he was saying.

Southampton fans are angry. Their team, which was only relegated from the Premier League at the end of last season, has been plummeting towards the Championship relegation places. They've only won once in the League since the opening weekend of the season. And now they're managerless, following the departure of Will Still.

This season wasn't supposed to be like this for the club. One of the small crumbs of consolation that can be taken from relegation is that at least your team should perform substantially better at a lower level the following season.

But despite the appointment of a promising young manager and quite a substantial amount of money having been spent on the team over the course of the summer, this new group of players have shown few signs of gelling.

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With over 150 appearances for the club since his 2021 transfer from Blackburn Rovers, Adam Armstrong has become a popular figure around St Mary's, but this doesn't mean that everything that he says will be popular.

And the Southampton reporter for local newspaper the Southern Daily Echo, George Rees-Julian, has now posted a comment by the striker on the social media platform X which has caused consternation among fans of the club.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted the inherent contradiction in what Armstrong said, there, and it didn't go unnoticed by Saints fans, either.

Others pointed out the irony of this coming from the team's captain, who they may have felt was responsible for some degree towards getting the players motivated in the first place.

And some even took this as an opportunity to critique Armstrong's performances in a Southampton shirt so far this season.

Southampton fans have been unhappy about more than Will Still alone this season

That Southampton fans should be unhappy at the way the team has been progressing through the 2025-26 season is understandable, because this state of affairs is nothing new to them. Their team ended last season on a feeble 12 points, ten points adrift of second-bottom Ipswich Town and a remarkable 26 points from safety.

And while no-one has an entitlement to anything in football, supporters paying hundreds of pounds a year for a season ticket who'd just seen their team lose 15 of their 19 home matches will have had an expectation that things would be better, this time around.

But there have been few signs of that, so far. Their opening weekend win against Wrexham required two very late goals to secure all three points, and since then the Saints have only won once in the League, an away win against a Sheffield United team who were very much undergoing a psychodrama of their own at the time.

Will Still has gone, now. But the issue for many Saints fans is that the problems faced by the club outstretch him by quite a distance. They've seemed to be in decline since Sport Republic took ownership of the club at the start of 2022, and there don't seem to be many signs of the gloom lifting from over the club.

And when fans are at this level of disgruntlement, even the most well-meaning of comments can be interpreted in the most negative of lights. Southampton fans were angry about more than just the head coach prior to his departure from the club. As the club step up their search for their third manager of 2025, it will be a decision that they need to get right.

Adam Armstrong may be about to find out that Saints fans are even more frustrated at Southampton's decline than even their expensively-assembled group of players at the lack of direction in the Championship from a club who used to be mainstays of the Premier League.