Boss Mick McCarthy has reiterated that Town would be willing to sell left-back Aaron Cresswell if the right offer comes in this summer. The 24-year-old has continued to be linked with numerous Premier League clubs over the last few months.
"I’m not surprised,” McCarthy told the club site. "If a Premier League club comes in for him, at some stage Cressy has got to take that and go and play at that level.
"We are not going to let him go for silly money. We don’t have to let him go because he’s under contract but if a ‘proper’ offer came in, Cressy knew about it and it was a club that he would like to go to, we have to look at it.
"If we don’t he’s going to say ‘come on gaffer!’. We have to be fair to him. He knows what we think of him here and he loves the place as well.
"If the offer is right for the club and we don’t give him that opportunity, you can lose his head and his heart and if that happens, we won’t have the same player.”
Southampton were regular visitors to Portman Road during 2013/14 and were believed to be the front runners — with some Saints sources recently claiming that they had even got as far as making an unsuccessful £4.5 million offer earlier in the summer — but the departure of their manager Mauricio Pochettino to Tottenham this week is likely to put their interest on hold while his replacement is installed.
If Cresswell, who is contracted to Town until the summer of 2017, were to move on his former club Tranmere Rovers would be entitled to 20 per cent of the profit the Blues would make on the £420,000 they paid for him after his switch to Portman Road in the summer of 2011.
A Football League tribunal set a compensation figure of an initial £240,000 plus milestone clauses, with only a £100,000 payment on promotion to the Premier League not triggered.
With Town adhering strictly to the Financial Fair Play rules, McCarthy is unlikely to have much of a transfer war chest at his disposal this summer unless a current player is sold for a significant fee.
On the subject of additions to McCarthy's squad, joint-MD Ian Milne says there are currently few firm developments.
"I was talking to Marcus Evans, the owner, the other day and it’s very early at the moment,” he told BBC Suffolk. "There are a few twitters going on but there’s no news at this moment. Watch this space.”
Asked about McCarthy’s own future, Milne hinted that an extension to the Town boss’s contract, which is up next summer, could be under discussion: "Mick will be around for a while. Watch this space.”
Milne added that next year’s season ticket sales are up on last year’s total of around 12,000.