Saints to face Bayer Leverkusen

The Bundesliga outfit will visit Southampton on Saturday 9th August, with the game getting underway at 5pm BST.

More information about the fixture, including ticketing details, will be announced in the near future.

The match will be Saints’ only home friendly ahead of the 2014/15 campaign, and is the fourth pre-season fixture to be confirmed so far.

The club confirmed last week that it will travel to Swindon Town, AFC Bournemouth and Brighton & Hove Albion towards the end of July.

There will also be one further game – an away friendly against a European side which the club hopes to confirm details of shortly.

Earlier this week, Executive Director Les Reed explained that, with six players currently at the 2014 FIFA World Cup finals, the fact that the squad will be reporting back at different times was taken into consideration when planning the side’s pre-season schedule.

“There’ll be players coming back from World Cup duty for different countries, so they’ll be coming back in a staggered sense,” Reed explained. 

“That means that, if we stay at home and train in the early days, we won’t have players travelling all around the world.

“We’ve got some good fixtures lined up. The domestic fixtures were announced last week – local, south-coast fixtures that are good for our fans to get to, and good for those clubs because we’re their local Premier League club. 

“I think the atmosphere at those games will be good because they will be quite competitive [for] pre-season games. They are our near neighbours, so we did that deliberately.

“Then we’ve got two marquee fixtures against European clubs, one away from home and one at home. They’ll be very good games for us and, by that time, we should have players recovered from their World Cup experiences and new targets coming in.”

Of the Leverkusen game, Reed added: “We’re hoping that’ll be a bit of a festival, presentation game where the fans will get the chance to see the new players that we’ve brought in and welcome the new manager and any new coaching staff, and hopefully kick off the season with a really upbeat atmosphere at St Mary’s.”