MATT Le Tissier wants Saints to end two seasons of goal-scoring struggles and sign a striker with the potential to score 15 to 20 goals next season.

The Saints legend is under no illusions that a striker of such calibre will not come cheap and it might take the club taking a risk on someone with potential over a proven player, who will doubt cost a lot more.

“In terms of the squad we’re needing a goal-scorer who can get 15 or 20 goals a season,” he said.

“That’s the key to most things in football: sticking the ball in the net, and the last couple of seasons we’ve struggled with that.”

Dusan Tadic and Charlie Austin were Saints’ top-scorers with seven goals last term, with the latter top-scoring the season before with nine goals.

In 2015/16, Sadio Mane, Graziano Pelle and Shane Long all reached double figures but Saints have not had a player go beyond the ten-goal mark since.

“It doesn’t come cheap but you’ve got to have a sniff around and it might mean picking someone with a bit of potential as opposed to a proven player, as we did with Mane and people like that, who cost six or seven million quid,” Le Tissier, who netted 209 goals in 540 appearances for Saints, said.

“Those players (like Mane) are now double that cost considering what’s happened in the last couple of years, but around that £14/£15m mark you’re buying a bit of potential.

“That’s the market we are good in. When we went and broke our transfer record all those guys we did that with haven’t worked out quite as well as the ones we paid a little bit less for and buying the potential.”

Saints spent a club-record £19.2m on Argentine striker Guido Carrillo in January, but the striker signing from Monaco failed to score in any of his ten appearance for the club.

Carrillo ended the season out of favour and so did another record signing, Sofiane Boufal. The £16m man from Lille, who signed in 2016, was banished to train with the under-23s after an alleged bust-up with boss Mark Hughes.

Boufal’s future remains uncertain at Saints after failing to produce in his two seasons at the club, while another one-time record signing Mario Lemina, who was brought for £17m from Juventus last summer, has been far from consistent.

“There’s always luck involved. You can do all the homework in the world on a player, on his character but you never know for certain if he’s going to fit into the club and the way the team plays,” said Le Tiss.

"There’s lots of different areas of the game, not just what happens at 3pm on a Saturday and it all has to come together.

“There’s a little bit of luck involved but you also do as much homework as you can to try and get rid of that element of luck."