Well, that is one way to win a standoff without saying a word. Benfica have agreed terms worth around €20m with Parma for the Australian defender Alessandro Circati. The reading out of Lisbon, carried by Football League World at lunchtime, is that Marco Silva has got the centre-half he came shopping for.
Look at that fee again.
It sits almost exactly where Benfica's offer for Taylor Harwood-Bellis sat at the weekend, and almost exactly where Southampton hurled it back at them. So the Portuguese champions were never lying about the size of their budget. They were fibbing about which defender they wanted to spend it on.
What Southampton were holding out for
Saints want €35m. Call it £30m, and they have not shifted off that figure once, in public or behind closed doors.
Benfica came in at €20m, or roughly £17m. David Ornstein and Ben Jacobs had it on the 15th August. Thirteen million quid apart, then, and Saints still would not blink, not even on Monday when Correio da Manha reported the defender had told them he wanted out.
You can see why they felt confident. The contract runs to the summer of 2028, which means no cliff edge, no free transfer creeping into view, nothing for a buyer to lean on.
Then there is what he cost. Promotion triggered an obligation in 2024 and Manchester City took £20m off Southampton for him. Sell at £17m now and the club has lost three million quid on a defender who has got better every year he has been here.
He played his 134th game for Saints at Vicarage Road on Sunday, and headed a late chance wide that he usually buries. Plenty of you are still cross about that one.
Add up his Championship and Premier League years and you land on 189 games. Eleven goals in there, and eight assists, which is a lot of end product from someone whose day job is stopping the other team from scoring. Seven of those goals came last season, in 41 league games, which is exactly why Southampton keep telling everyone he is worth £30m.
Where the price goes from here
Deadline day falls on the 1st September, so there are just under two weeks of this left. Saints Marching has argued that Southampton hold one card in the saga, and Circati's move to Lisbon has just turned that card into a very good one.
Do not mistake it for a happy end to the saga. A player who asks to leave in August is rarely delighted about still being there in October, and Saints Marching has separately made the case that a new defender is needed whether he stays or goes.
But the price held. For a club sitting bottom of the Championship on minus four points, turning down £17m for the best defender in the division took some nerve, and today it looks like the smartest thing anyone at St Mary's has done all summer.
Add us as a preferred source on Google