St Marys has never captured the public imagination in the same way Southamptons move

“I was nowhere near 100 per cent fit, but Stuart Gray came to me on the Tuesday before the game and said, ‘I guarantee you that when the final whistle goes, you will be on that pitch — you deserve to be for what you’ve done for this football club.’

“From that day onwards, all I was thinking about was scoring the last goal at The Dell. I didn’t verbalise it to anybody, but I was obsessed. I felt like it was my destiny to be the last player to score at The Dell.”

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Matthew Le Tissier, Southampton’s greatest ever player, is reflecting on that memorable match against Arsenal 20 years ago today. It marked the end of the club’s 123-year stay at The Dell, the iconic stadium nestled in the heart of the city centre.

For the 15,200 supporters in attendance, minus the Arsenal contingent, Le Tisser’s heroics at the rickety old ground will live long in the memory. And it was only fitting that the honour of scoring the ground’s last competitive goal — surprisingly, his first of the season — presented itself to the club legend.

“It was really weird because it wasn’t a particularly easy chance, but as soon as the ball left my foot, it was one of those moments where I had caught it so sweetly,” the 52-year-old recalls.

“I knew where I was, I knew what direction the ball had gone off in and I knew there was no chance the goalkeeper was going to stop it. The ball left my foot and I literally wanted to start celebrating there and then because I knew where it was going.

“The noise that hit me when the ball hit the back of the net was just incredible. It will stay with me until my dying days. It was an incredible moment.”

To mark the 20th anniversary, The Athletic has spoken to former players, a board member and a lifelong fan to tell the story of the club’s move from The Dell to St Mary’s.

Although moving was important for the club’s future, leaving a stadium as iconic as The Dell was always going to be emotional.

With new stadia being erected across England throughout the 1990s, an already dated ground had started to look even older. But it was old-school in that sense: the fans were right on top of the pitch; the changing rooms were sub-standard and away teams hated visiting it.

Supporters sensed the unease when sides such as Manchester United and Liverpool were in town, which always made for a more raucous atmosphere. If ever there was a need for a 12th man, The Dell stood tall.

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“First and foremost, the most important thing for me was that the stadium had a full crowd. It doesn’t matter how big it is, it was full, and that was a different feeling for me,” Marians Pahars tells The Athletic. “I had been playing in front of 1,000 people back home (in Latvia) and then suddenly, it’s 15,000.

“The feeling of the fans when they were a metre away from you… that was just amazing. I didn’t experience that before. For me, that was a new experience and a great feeling. People are so close to you, and you don’t want to play at an away ground like this.”

Notable Southampton victories, such as a 6-3 triumph over Manchester United and a 4-1 hammering of Liverpool, meant trips to The Dell were a source of dread for the Premier League’s big hitters — they knew they were in for a tough time whenever they arrived on the south coast.

Ben Stanfield, host of the Total Saints Podcast and lifelong Southampton supporter, was a season ticket holder at The Dell and explains to The Athletic how fans thrived on welcoming the big teams.

“As the likes of Manchester United and Arsenal developed their grounds, fans were further back from the pitch,” Stanfield says. “At The Dell, that was never the case. The dugouts were even carved into the stands, it had a proper old-school feel to it.

“Because the stands were so steep as well, particularly the Milton Road, it felt like you were sat on top of the goal. Lots of clubs came down to The Dell, and I think it had a reputation that it could be a bit of a graveyard for the big teams.

“The Premier League is a lot more cosmetic these days and you don’t necessarily feel that buzz when Liverpool come to town. You just think you are going to get rolled over. It felt like more of a level playing field in those days. It was almost like cup fever, where you thought you had a chance of turning them over because the fans were up for it.”

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While he never played at The Dell, Southampton manager Ralph Hasenhuttl has seen enough footage to know what it was all about. And the 53-year-old, speaking ahead of the 20th anniversary of the move, declared his love for old-school stadia, comparing it to a venue he used to play at in Austria.

“In my hometown in Graz, the big derby was Sturm vs Grazer AK,” he recalled. “They had an old ground called the Gruabn, and you couldn’t even hit the corner because you had to run down a hill to kick the ball. There was no space… it was unbelievable. I loved playing there.

“I must say that when I was working in Germany there was a tendency to build everything new and there were some nice grounds to go to. But they all looked very similar. When you come to England, you go in the old dressing rooms, and you think it’s not possible in the Premier League.

“But in the years I have been here (in England), I feel more and more that the traditional old grounds are very important for football. I think it is something special to have old grounds and it’s a special atmosphere.

“You can feel the tradition in every corner, and it doesn’t matter if the dressing room is a little bit small or there is no car parking. This is true football.”

One big change from The Dell to St Mary’s has been that supporters are no longer sat within touching distance of their heroes. There is now a sizable gap between the pitch and terrace, which is designed to stop players taking a tumble over the advertising hoardings.

Pahars tells The Athletic that his memories of his first home goal for the club involve almost falling into the crowd. Andrew Cowan, the club’s former managing director, speaks about the very real possibility of “Michael Owen ending up on your lap” at any given moment.

With The Dell squeezed in tightly between residential streets, innovative thinking was required to maximise the capacity. Perhaps the most unusual were the “chocolate boxes”, which were located halfway up the Milton Road Stand, the end of the old ground fans may remember for having a terrace that got shallower from one end to the other.

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“They were there in my early days,” Stanfield recalls. “I used to go with a mate and stand at the top of that stand. We used to hold on to a bar above our heads so we didn’t fall down.

“There wasn’t a lot of space between the Milton Road goal and the road itself, so they had to be creative and to add a bit of structure, that’s why they built them in.

“The Milton Road was obviously unique because it was a weird design, but it was more built for logistics rather than aesthetics.”

As often happens in football, all good things must come to an end.

Rupert Lowe, Southampton chairman from 1996 to 2006, realised the need to take the club away from The Dell and into a Premier League-standard stadium.

“The saga of Southampton moving grounds out of The Dell probably started at the genesis of the Premier League,” Cowen, Lowe’s right-hand man at the time, tells The Athletic.

While the 1990s saw a host of new stadia being built across the country, Southampton spent large parts of that decade searching for a suitable site to develop their new ground.

Supporters could only watch on as the likes of Derby County (Pride Park), Sunderland (Stadium of Light), Bolton Wanderers (Reebok Stadium) and Middlesbrough (Riverside Stadium) moved away from their old homes and settled elsewhere.

But Southampton, knowing they needed to move on from their 123-year-old ground, were involved in an administrative squabble over a site in Stoneham, Eastleigh.

“It was a very complicated site,” recalls Cowen, who was the driving force behind the club’s move. “It was owned by Hampshire County Council, half of it was in the administrative area of Eastleigh Borough Council and the other half of it was in the administrative area of Southampton City Council.

“You could probably guess what happened: nobody could agree that water is wet. Hampshire had some very, very grandiose — slightly unrealistic — views for an architectural statement. That’s all well and good, but one has to live in the real world.

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“Eastleigh didn’t want any enabling development which would impact on the Swan Centre (shopping centre) and commercial area. Southampton just wanted a football stadium for their club.”

It eventually became apparent that the Stoneham proposal wasn’t going to work, yet the desire to move on from their home for over a century remained strong. The club’s hierarchy, while realising what The Dell meant to fans, knew the 15,200-capacity ground would hold them back from a financial standpoint.

With the previous scheme leaving a sour taste in the mouth, Cowen believes the saga had become “a cause of embarrassment for the club and particularly for the council”.

Hampshire County Council had the vision of a “modest” 20,000-capacity stadium with an architecturally ambitious roof, which mirrored The Pavilion at the county’s Rose Bowl cricket ground and the Mound Stand at Lord’s.

John Arnold, then leader of Southampton City Council, instructed his team to look for a plot of land that was under their complete control, signalling the end of any administrative squabbles.

And that led them to opt for where St Mary’s sits today, a disused gas work site just a 20-minute walk from the city centre.

“If you go back to the mid-90s, building a football stadium in the middle of town was like reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards,” added Cowen. “Middlesbrough had just built The Riverside 10 miles up the arse-end of nowhere, and you saw the Stadium of Light being built outside of the city centre.”

Even though a site was found and planning permission had been granted, the hierarchy’s vision to build a new stadium fit for a Premier League side was still met by a myriad of issues, ranging from the discovery of Viking artefacts to human waste.

“There were times when it got bleak,” reflected Cowen. “The site itself had three major issues. The first issue was that it was the old town’s gas plant. As a result of that, there was an enormous pool of hydrocarbon waste under the surface. It was horrible. There was nasty, brown, sloppy stuff down there too.

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“The site had an electricity substation that controlled most of that part of Southampton. Moving that is not an easy business.

“Because the site is on the banks of the Itchen, it was also a site of archaeological importance. The archaeological bill was half a million quid. Apparently, the Vikings used to sail up the Itchen, stop short of the Centurion Bridge and saw it as a great place to park. In fairness, they found some quite interesting stuff that went up to the British Museum.”

Wessex Archaeology carried out the excavations and unearthed around 40 ancient graves, which included a haul of weapons, gold and unique jewellery, dating back to the seventh century.

It was decided that where the pitch would be built should remain untouched, leading to Roland Smith, Wessex Archaeology’s resources director, to say: “It is an intriguing thought to imagine Southampton’s Premiership footballers dancing all over this surviving Anglo-Saxon archaeology.”

Unearthing a treasure trove was the least of Cowen’s problems, though. Developing a transfer network was the issue that kept him up at night.

“It was like herding cats,” he recalls. “The biggest logistical problem of building the stadium was agreeing a transportation plan to bring 30,000 fans into the city centre. We had to look at some very innovative solutions and probably one of the largest park-and-ride programmes ever seen in this country.”

With a new stadium now finally on the way, Southampton’s time at The Dell was running out. And when their final competitive match at the iconic ground took place against Arsenal in May 2001, it was only fitting that it ended in one of Le Tissier’s greatest moments.

His 89th-minute winner sent the home supporters into a frenzy and produced a moment that those present will never forget. Only “Le God”, as Southampton fans like to call him, could produce a moment as beautiful as this…

Into the final! 🏆#SaintsFC fans, you've voted the last goal at The Dell into the #SaintsWorldCup final…

What a goal it was 😇 pic.twitter.com/ARTnX7BU9M

— Southampton FC (@SouthamptonFC) July 13, 2018

“In 35 years of going to watch Saints, if there were two minutes I could bottle and take with me and open at any point, it would be when Matt scored and ran across to the Lower West, where his son was sat, and celebrated in front of us,” reflects Stanfield. “That was the most magical moment I’ve had as a Saints fan, either at The Dell or at St Mary’s.”

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Walking away from the ground that day, Stanfield admitted the realisation he wouldn’t return had not yet sunk in. No more would he walk past the club store on the corner of the stadium as he had done every other weekend as a child, dreaming about owning the latest kit.

No more would supporters be able to protest outside the boardroom, which is exactly what they did during Ian Branfoot’s time in charge.

No more, as Stanfield says, would they have to “literally piss into a gutter” when they visited the toilet. And it wasn’t just the fans who would benefit from better facilities. “I wouldn’t say they were the best possible toilets in football,” says Pahars. “We were moving from a two-star hotel to a five-star hotel.”

The future looked bright. St Mary’s could accommodate more than double the fans The Dell could, which would see the club start to claw back the money spent on building it.

“From memory, the cost was a tad over £30 million,” says Cowen. “It looks like good business now, and a football stadium is something that has to be built down to a price.”

But were supporters on board with it?

“I don’t think there was unease,” the club’s former managing director says. “There was certainly uncertainty. But I think everybody associated with the club, whether that was the city council, the board, the fans and the staff, all recognised that it had to have a new home.

“It’s like if you grew up in a small house and your parents didn’t take advantage of birth control measures: you outgrow the place. Premier League football had outgrown The Dell.”

Yet, more than doubling the capacity alone wouldn’t guarantee the extra tickets would be sold. Asked if the club were concerned about being able to sell out St Mary’s, Cowan responded: “Publicly, yes. Privately, no. You can do various desktop exercises and look at the demographics of what you believe to be your catchment.

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“The reason that there are a lot of stadiums not dissimilar to St Mary’s is that if you put all the material and relevant construction costs into a computer, you come out with four single-tier stands with the corners filled in and a hospitality box bolted on the front.

“That’s what you’ve got at Southampton. The view was that if that was the Ford Mondeo of stadiums, the best of economic value and capacity, can you fill it? The answer was that we thought we could, and we have been proven right.”

Since returning to the Premier League in 2012, Southampton’s average home attendance topped 30,000 every season up to the pandemic.

While supporters have consistently turned up to St Mary’s in their tens of thousands – when allowed – it was only a few weeks after it opened for the 2001-02 season that questions were asked whether the move had all been worth it.

Southampton struggled for form and failed to win any of their opening five league games at the ground.

Speculation grew about Portsmouth shirts being buried underneath the centre circle and witch doctors were supposedly hired to lift a curse that had been placed on the stadium.

And for Pahars, getting used to St Mary’s took longer than he expected.

“From the football side, I knew it would take time to adapt because I knew everything about The Dell’s pitch: where the holes were, the best places to beat defenders and stuff like this. That didn’t bother me too much, but it was affecting me a little bit,” he told The Athletic. “My first impression was that this was something that wasn’t ours…it wasn’t mine. It was similar to other new stadiums, so, OK, from the beginning it felt wrong.”

Despite the slow start to life at their new home, Pahars started to find his feet and wrote his name into the history books after scoring Southampton’s first competitive goal at the ground.

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It came during a 3-1 defeat by Aston Villa, and resulted in the Latvian icon being awarded a keepsake.

“The grandson of the guy (Watty Keay) who scored the first goal at The Dell presented the medal to me,” continued Pahars. “When I talk about it now and I have that medal in my collection, it’s something I am very proud of. It is a big honour for me to have that, and I will be in the history of Southampton Football Club forever.

“Maybe one day when Southampton build a new stadium after 200 years, maybe my great, great, great, great, great-grandson will present another medal!”

Even though 20 years have passed since the club have moved on from The Dell, the love supporters have for their old stomping ground has only grown.

St Mary’s has been home to some memorable moments in its own right: seeing off Portsmouth in style in 2003, promotion back to the Premier League in 2012, beating Inter Milan in 2016 and hitting eight past Sunderland. But for Le Tissier, it doesn’t match up to The Dell.

“I think it was the quirkiness of it,” he reflects. “It was the fact it was kind of all over the shop, there was no symmetry to it. It was all wonky. There was a pillar in the changing room, so when the manager was giving his team talk whoever sat in the corner had to peer around the pillar. It was just little things like that. It was a strange old stadium.”

To the generation of Southampton fans that were lucky enough to frequent The Dell, you sense it will always hold a place in their heart. But as is always the case in football, money talks.

You could argue that when the club were on the brink of going out of business, having St Mary’s as an asset was the equivalent of being on a life support machine.

Despite Southampton flirting with relegation in recent seasons, St Mary’s has continued to host big crowds for league games. The financial impact of playing behind closed doors throughout the coronavirus pandemic has led to the club losing up to £5 million per month.

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Asked whether he thinks building the ground has saved the football club in the long run, Cowen sits on the fence.

“That is an enormously difficult question to answer,” he said. “I think that, despite what happened in 2005, relegation might have happened sooner rather than later had we stayed at The Dell.

“Part of the reason for moving to a larger stadium was to increase the SFC family. If grandpa had a season ticket and he died, you didn’t tell the club. You put grandpa in the freezer and carried on going yourself. Season tickets at The Dell were like hen’s teeth.”

Twenty years on, though, perhaps Le Tissier sums it up the best: “I know financially, the club had to move to St Mary’s. We all understand that. But I don’t think, although there have been some memorable games and atmospheres at St Mary’s, that it has ever captured the public imagination in the same way as The Dell.”

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