Tonda Eckert Transforms St Mary’s into a Fortress

Tonda Eckert looks around St Mary’s these days and barely recognises the place.

The noise is back. The edge is back. Most importantly for him, the bond is back.

Promoted from Southampton’s under-21s in November 2025, the 33-year-old German walked into a club sitting 21st in the Championship and a fanbase drained by frustration after Will Still’s sacking. Home didn’t feel like home. Not for the players, not for the supporters.

Now? St Mary’s has turned into a fortress.

Since Eckert took charge, Saints have taken 47 points on their own pitch – the best home record in the Championship over that spell – and they’ve opened the new campaign with three straight wins in front of their own crowd.

“You know the condition the club was in when I came in and you know the condition our supporters were in the moment I came in,” he told BBC Radio Solent, drawing a clear line between then and now. “It’s not easy to play home games if you don’t have that connection. And rightly so, there was not that connection at that very moment for a variety of things going on.”

That disconnect ran deep. Relegation scars, managerial churn, off-field noise – it all seeped into the stands. Eckert knew he couldn’t fix it with a slogan or a single result.

“Then you need to earn that right to connect again to the supporters, to the city, because it means so much more, the football, to the city of Southampton.”

He hasn’t forgotten what happened last season either. Southampton, revitalised under his watch, surged into the Championship play-offs, only to be thrown out in the aftermath of the Spygate scandal. The sense of injustice was raw. Anger spilled out. Many clubs would have watched crowds drift away.

Southampton’s didn’t.

Attendances have stayed around the 30,000 mark heading into this season, keeping Saints among the top 20 supported clubs in the country. The fans came back, and crucially, they stayed.

For Eckert, that loyalty hasn’t been won with grand gestures.

“It’s not one thing that you change. There are so many small steps that you need to take to earn the trust and build on a connection and build a relationship back up,” he said. “St Mary’s just feels completely different than it did a year ago and that is just many, many things coming together.”

The atmosphere now feeds the team, and the team feeds it right back. It’s exactly the cycle he wanted to create.

“However, I do believe that to ‘win’ a season, you must play a successful season at home.”

That’s his mantra. Titles, promotions, redemption stories – in Eckert’s mind, they all start with making your own stadium a place opponents dread.

In the short term, his focus turns to Saturday’s game against Bristol City, though he will be without one of the players he had hoped to reintroduce. Midfielder Caspar Jander, 23, is still sidelined after a quad injury picked up early in their first pre-season outing against National League side Eastleigh.

Eckert has ruled him out of the weekend, admitting the fixture has come “too early” for the German.

“We’re going to push, so hopefully it’s going to be some minutes against Wrexham (on 19 September),” he said. “We had to delay a little bit, but I think he’s on a good way now.”

Jander’s return would add another option to a squad already feeding off the energy from the stands. If St Mary’s continues to feel “completely different” and the points keep piling up, this rebuilt connection might yet drive Southampton into a very different kind of season.