Southampton chairman Ralph Krueger has defended his decision to allow a number of key players to leave the club this summer.

The Saints enjoyed a successful campaign last season, but have suffered in the transfer market as a result, with Rickie Lambert, Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Calum Chambers and Dejan Lovren all following manager Mauricio Pochettino out of the door.

However, Krueger believes that it would have been an "insane risk" to have kept a group of players who were intent on leaving the club, especially with new boss Ronald Koeman coming in.

"Contracts should be respected, first of all. You sign contracts and both sides need to respect contracts. I am a person who still believes a handshake should be enough. There was a situation when there was so much change with the manager leaving and you theoretically ended up with a dressing room with half of your starters not really committed to being there," he told PA.

"That is an insane risk for any club and especially a club which was already quite thin last year. Of actual centrepieces of the club, a few have gone. Not all five were centrepieces or irreplaceable, but you know there were a couple. For me, if in the end a few players are disgruntled or maybe not sure about it, you can swallow that up. You can handle that, but you can't have half the team. You can't have a brand new manager [dealing with that].

"Whether that happened out of the past or whether it happened because of the success of the Saints last year or whether it happened because players were suddenly in the national team, I don't know and it doesn't really matter. But something happened and I don't need to do research on it. The fact was it was there and we needed to deal with it professionally, be in control of every deal. In the end, that's something we couldn't do to Ronald, to have a dressing room like that."

Southampton begin their Premier League campaign away to Liverpool on Sunday afternoon.