Southampton FC hit the jackpot with £1.2m transfer - He is a St Mary's icon | OneFootball

Southampton unearthed a gem when they signed this Portuguese defender from Crystal Palace for only £1.2m back in 2010.

Southampton nowadays are a yo-yo team between the top two divisions, part of a group of teams who are too good for the Championship but can't quite cut it in the Premier League.

Go back only a few years, and the Saints were regularly challenging in the top half of the Premier League, going deep in the cup competitions and even having a stint playing in the Europe League group stage in the 2016/17 season.

A trademark of this era was the club signing undiscovered players for a cut-price and selling them on for huge profits.

Virgil van Dijk, Dejan Lovren and Sadio Mane to name a few, passed through St Mary's on their way to winning a Champions League with Liverpool, earning the south-coast club plenty of money as a result.

Jose Fonte's legacy at Southampton

Perhaps the best deal of all came before this period, as in 2010 Portuguese defender Jose Fonte was signed for £1.2 million from Crystal Palace.

Fonte spent seven years at the club, making over 250 appearances and becoming club captain in this period.

From being signed in League One to appearing in the Europa League, all within the space of seven years, Fonte's rise alongside Southampton's cemented his place as a legend for the club.

It is one of the club's biggest bargains in and was the first of a lot of shrewd acquisitions for Southampton in the 2010s.

Fonte was known for his consistent defending, leadership, and strong presence at the back.

He formed solid partnerships with several defenders and was part of a team that secured multiple top-half finishes in the Premier League.

Under Ronald Koeman and with Fonte as captain, they qualified for European football through the league for the first time since 1984, reaching the Europe League qualifiers after finishing seventh in the 2014/15 Premier League.

While they were knocked out in the play-off round by Danish side Midtjylland, one year later they went one better and Fonte led the Saints to the Europa League group stage.

It came courtesy of finishing seventh for the second year in a row, and this time they automatically qualified for the group stage, finishing third in a group with Hapoel Be'er Sheva, Sparta Prague and Inter Milan.

They lost out very narrowly, finishing with the same points and superior goal difference as Hapoel, but because the Israeli side drew 1-1 away at St Mary's and 0-0 at home, they went through on head-to-head away goals.

For all of the players who came and went during this period, Fonte was a consistent figure at the club.

Perhaps without a leader like the Portuguese defender alongside them, talents such as Virgil van Dijk or Dejan Lovren may not have settled so seamlessly into the setup at the time.

Life after Southampton for Jose Fonte

His departure from the Saints came in January 2017, when he joined West Ham United for a reported £8 million. A foot injury saw him miss a few months of football at the end of that year, and in February 2018 Chinese Super League side Dalian Yifang came calling.

Following a brief stint in China, Fonte joined Ligue 1 club Lille, with whom he had a renaissance late on in his career. Aged 34 when he joined the club, many expected him to only stay around for a couple of years and end his career.

Instead, the defender was there for five years, and won an unlikely Ligue 1 title for Les Dogues in the 2020/21 season, captaining the team for most of the campaign.

Still playing in the Portuguese Primera Liga for Casa Pia, aged 41, the centre-back has also been a regular fixture for the Portugal national team, with 50 appearances before his international retirement in 2022.