Before Tonda Eckert’s promotion to senior head coach, Southampton had won just four league games in 51 attempts.
A club with a losing culture, the 33-year-old is attempting to change Southampton’s trajectory following failed manager after failed manager.
Since he originally took interim charge in November, only Coventry, Ipswich, Millwall and Middlesbrough have picked up more points than Eckert’s Saints, and no other team has scored more goals.
The Saints’ Sporting Director Johannes Spors is a huge admirer of Eckert, whom he has labelled as the catalyst for changes in atmosphere at the club in a recent interview with Mail Sport.
Southampton’s improved form is all thanks to Eckert, who has just won the Championship Manager of the Month award for February.
Eckert, who is the EFL’s youngest manager at just 33 years old, is usually the coolest man in the stadium.
He feels he has everything under control and is extremely tactically astute, shown in many games where he has adapted smartly to beat the opposition in front of his team.
“He never stops, I love it,” Johannes Spors told the Daily Mail. “Sometimes when managers are demanding, some of the staff think, “Yeah, give him a couple of weeks and he’ll calm down”. I don’t want him to calm down.”
When Eckert was appointed as Southampton U21s head coach in July 2025, it was viewed as an extremely clever coup to attract a Serie A club’s assistant manager.
But Tonda was always viewed as the potential future of Southampton, if Will Still was to leave, and Spors could see this at the time.
“I was convinced Tonda would be a first-team manager when I hired him for the Under 21s, I just didn’t know when and where, I didn’t even know if it would be at Southampton,” Spors said.
“You always have this question mark – ‘Is he ready?’ – when he has never done it before, but I thought he was. I thought about it in the summer but I felt it was too early. After three months with the Under 21s, I could see he was ready. I think those three months were extremely important for him.”
Tonda Eckert has raised standards at Southampton, and, if you discount a poor seven-game period in the middle of his spell in December/January, he has been unbeaten as Saints boss.
“Our standards were not high enough,” said Spors about life before Eckert. “That’s not a surprise when you get relegated as the second-worst team in Premier League history. Tonda was just able to raise the standards quickly.”
Southampton haven’t reached their goal yet, though, and still remain one place off the Championship play-offs.
It’s been a poor season on the whole, but Eckert has taken a club that was adrift in the table, sitting 19th in November, to the brink of their newfound goal.
“You go into the training ground and you just feel the environment is different, more positive and more focused on high performance,“ Spors told Mail Sport.
“Southampton was an environment not focused enough on winning but more focused on other things. Now, it’s very clear – we are here to win.”
Being awarded Championship Manager of the Month will be great, but Tonda will be the first to say that the job isn’t finished yet.
With ten games left of the 2025/26 Championship season to play, and Saints also one win away from reaching the FA Cup semi-finals, it’s set to be a huge end to the campaign that will define Tonda’s Southampton revival.
