Southampton weren’t really strong relegation favourites for the first half of the season, but so much went wrong that it all seemed quite inevitable in the end.

Was it all Nathan Jones’s fault?

Tempting as it is to blame the outcome on Nathan Jones and his losing run, there were deeper problems. There was a lack of overall player quality and some seriously weak positions which opposition managers were able to exploit. An effort to make the squad drastically younger couldn’t overcome the issues built up by weak transfers over several years.

Still, it’s not really clear that a Jones approach could ever really work. Separating shots into open-play and set-pieces shows the problem. Even if the apparent improvement in set-piece attacking under Jones is a real effect, and not just because of the easier matches, they still only make up a quarter of the team’s shots.

(Side point: set-piece ratio is possibly the stat that Jones believed Luton Town were the “best in Europe” at. The problem is that one way to make set-piece ratio a lot better by creating nothing from open-play.)

Meanwhile, some things out of the club’s control also happened, most significantly that the other teams at the bottom were all quite competitive at key moments.

There were also some player availability problems, such as Che Adams being injured and Selles unsuccessfully trying to find some kind of strikerless solution.

Was it unlucky that those things all happened at once?

Maybe, but taking the six relegation-threatened seasons out of the eleven since 2012-13, it’s not surprising that things wouldn’t work out in at least one of them. Maybe the team was fortunate to make it this far and mix in some successful seasons. In the end the margin of relegation was big enough that no single event can really be said to have changed the outcome.