RANGERS have taken the same approach to player recruitment as Southampton, who sold Virgil van Dijk to Liverpool for a world record £75 million transfer fee this week, during the build-up to the January transfer window, their manager Graeme Murty has revealed.

Murty has been helping Mark Allen, the Ibrox director of football, to identify potential signing targets since he took over from Pedro Caixinha on an interim basis back at the end of October.

However, the 43-year-old, who previously worked as an academy coach at Barclays Premier League club Southampton, has been outlining to Allan the type of individuals he would like to bring in rather than singling out specific targets.

That is the policy which has helped the St Mary’s Stadium club, where Scot and one-time Rangers director of football target Ross Wilson is their director of recruitment and scouting, flourish on and off the park down south in recent seasons.

Southampton laste week made a £62m profit on the sale of Van Dijk, who became the most expensive defender when he moved to Anfield, and Celtic, who they signed the Dutch internationalist from for £13 million in 2015, are set to receive at least £7.5 million of that due to a sell-on clause.

Murty, who has brought in Sean Goss from Queens Park Rangers on loan on Wednesday, believes Rangers, whose £8 million recruitment drive under Caixinha this summer has, with a couple of notable exceptions, proved nothing short of disastrous, would benefit from adopting the same model.

Murty said: “We have been looking more at people who fit the parameters rather than me saying: ‘I want this guy, I know him from the past, I need this guy’. It is more me saying: ‘What do we have that fits these parameters? What are options one, two, three, four’. Then we go and narrow it down from there.

“That is the way I saw it done at Southampton. I really enjoyed watching those guys do their recruitment, not just on the football side, but also on the management side. I watched their black box working. It is a fantastic thing.

“I think there are lessons to be learned from that. Identifying positions, identifying characteristics and then narrowing it down from there is beneficial for everyone.

“Any time when you can identify talent and buy it cheap, bring it in, develop it and sell it high and put a sell-on clause in, it makes a good business model to me.

“That puts a lot of emphasis on our recruitment department. But we have to make sure that, if it’s possible to do that, then we do that. Long term it’s a strategic thing.

"But we have to, in January, have people who can come in and impact our season immediately.

“I wasn’t thinking that I’d be saying I want this guy, these are my specific targets. Having said that, the recruitment department have put together shortlists for different positions.

“They’ve been hitting different markers so it’s my job now to spend long hours reviewing tape, on the phone talking about people, getting character references and judgement. Seeing what we can do to make sure that those characteristics we are talking about are fulfilled.

“I am somebody who likes to be positive and likes to push myself and I want to do a really, really good job. I want to be as aspirational as possible at all times. If I can improve myself if I can improve my practice then that will benefit myself and benefit this football club in the long term.”