Jordy Clasie is set to join Feyenoord meaning Saints will have loaned out £42m worth of talent this summer – with potentially more to come.

The forgotten midfielder, who spent last year at Club Brugge in Belgium, will head back to the Netherlands on a season long loan deal.

Saints had ideally wanted to try and sell the 27-year-old and recoup some of the £8m they spent when recruiting him from Feyenoord in 2015, but with no takers they have had to settle for a temporary deal.

Saints have already loaned out £15m midfielder Sofiane Boufal and £19.2m striker Guido Carrillo this summer.

It is mixed news for the club, who on the positive side are clearing the decks to give Mark Hughes a squad that he wants to work with as he tries to revive fortunes.

However, the heavy cost paid for misfiring recruitment is clear.

Saints have moved quickly and been widely praised for getting business done early in this transfer window.

But their net spend thus far of £36m is put into context by the total transfer value of the players they have loaned out – which totals some £6m more.

For a club without huge spending power, it underlines there has been a considerable amount of money spent on signings that have not come off.

Though Clasie, whose value will likely plummet as he will have just a year left on his contract at the end the Feyenoord loan, can be put down to a Ronald Koeman deal that didn’t work out, the likes of Boufal and Carrillo fall onto the shoulders of recruitment chiefs Les Reed and Ross Wilson.

Though they have got plenty of deals right down the years, there have more recently been some costly misses.

There could yet be more players loaned out too.

Fraser Forster is the highest profile of them with his position at the club under considerable threat.

Alex McCarthy will start the season as the club’s number one with £10m summer signing Angus Gunn expected to be his deputy.

Forster signed a bumper new contract only last summer and Saints can scarcely afford to have him as third choice, especially when they want to keep that pathway clear for one of the young keepers they have at the club, with Harry Lewis front of the queue.

Mark Hughes has admitted that Saints will probably need to move players on before they could consider signing anybody else, and that means plenty of work still to do.