Saints chairman Ralph Krueger believes the club’s signing of Charlie Austin has made “a statement,” and insisted that the plan remains not to sell any star names in this transfer window.

Austin was today unveiled as a Saints player after sealing a £4m move from QPR, signing a four-and-a-half-year contract.

There have been plenty of rumours in the past few days about moves away from Saints for Graziano Pelle and Shane Long, but Krueger was clear it was is not a case of one in and one out in the striking department.

Instead, he feels the recruitment of Austin is a huge boost for the squad and manager Ronald Koeman.

Krueger said: “He fits right into our present needs and we feel that it was something that we wanted to make a statement about to strengthen our British spine.

“It’s something that’s been on the radar for a few months now. He’s been tracked by our recruitment department – Ross Wilson and his people – for quite some time now. There’s a lot of information about him on the black box.

“Above all it’s a signing that gives us a lot of depth in one of the critical positions in football which is the finishing, the need to score goals.

“We see huge potential in Charlie, we believe he is far from his prime.

“His age is a mature age at 26, turning 27 in the summer, but above all his hunger to take another level as a professional athlete was something that was clear in the discussions with him that Ronald Koeman and Les Reed especially had.

“You could see his desire to get on the national team was clear and that’s what we want – we want players to come in and grow with the club and he just checked every box for us and he was clearly the number one transfer target for us in this window.”

In terms of whether anybody could leave during January, he added: “It’s a pretty football specific questions for me in my role but I can tell you depth is something we are striving for.

“We all know the past couple of seasons in the second half of the season the lack of depth cost us dearly and we are hoping that in the second half this year the strength in depth shows up and takes us back to the top half of the standings where we expect to land.

“I think that players coming in and out here in the last two weeks is not in the plan.

“I would never say never on either direction because it’s the nature of the sport, you don’t know what opportunities present themselves.

“At the moment we are pleased with the depth and Ronald has shown that we have different looks and even I, with my limited football experience, understand we have different line-ups and looks and it’s difficult to prepare against us.

“Ideal would be to keep all those names in the line-up.”