Katharina Liebherr officially leaves role as Southampton Director
By Chris Hughes
Southampton’s board has officially undertaken a serious change, with their Director Katharina Liebherr resigning from her role.
As reported in the Daily Echo, Southampton’s Swiss owner has left her position with immediate effect ahead of next season, instead leaving the running of the club to Ralph Kreuger, Les Reed and Vice Chairman of Business Martin Semmens.
Although not directly linked to Southampton’s potential takeover, the news comes as part of a big reshuffle within the hierarchy of the club, in order to match the club’s ambitions of reaching the summit of the English football within the next decade.
It’s believed that the Premier League approved Lander Sports’ potential £200 million bid for an eighty-percent stake in the club, with would allow for substantial investment without seeing Liebherr lose all control of the Saints.
Katharina had overseen the day-to-day running of the club since her late father’s passing in 2010, with Markus having rescued the club from near liquidation whilst still in League One.
Despite leaving her role with the official football club, Liebherr will still remain as director for Saints’ parent company, which includes the Saints Foundation among other off-the-pitch ventures.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Echo a couple of months back, Krueger explained the situation fully:
"“In the re-organisation we will not have a CEO anymore and we are not looking to hire anybody. We have an extremely strong, young, dynamic, very intelligent, well-educated group of operational managers. We will have an interim managing director in Toby Steele, who will retain his CFO role.“At the strategic board level we now have a three person strategic board. That is myself as chairman, Les Reed will be elevated to vice-chairman of football, and Martin Semmens, who has been key in forming our strategy, in particular with commercial and the way our brand is developing, will take the vice-chairmanship of business.”"