The story this morning about Ally McCoist confirming there was a Southampton scout at Ibrox for the Rangers match confirms just how lucrative our players are, and of course begs the question of who he or she was watching.

As we discussed earlier, we have a number of key assets, in many cases bought for buttons or indeed free, who are now clearly multimillion pound assets and will cost suitors sizeable chunks to prise away.

But just who would fourth-placed Southampton be looking at?

It’s not a side we often hear linked with our players, with the usual lazy journalism always claiming Crystal Palace or Aston Villa are ‘monitoring’ Alfredo Morelos. But Southampton is a slightly newer name and it’s a team with a major level of gravity and consistency in England, and who have plundered Scotland before not that long ago in the form of Celtic’s Stuart Armstrong.

So who would they be looking at?

There really are only a few that are currently the prize candidates and they’d be:

Glen Kamara, Borna Barisic, James Tavernier, Alfredo Morelos and maybe Ryan Kent.

There is an outside bet of Joe Aribo and Connor Goldson, but that first five are definitely prominent.

Of the top five, two are unsellable, Barisic is borderline, Kent is probably borderline, and the only one Rangers would be open to if the price was right is Morelos.

But any of these guys are going to take major money from St Mary’s to even come close.

And of course, two of them weren’t even playing yesterday, and one only had 45 minutes!

So you can be sure Southampton are preparing a bid January bid for one of our assets. The question is who…