In Scottish football the days of any club having the nerve – let alone the arrogance – to claim that a player “is not for sale at any price” are long gone.

It is worth noting this again in the remorseless, repeated wooing of Hibs’ Scott Allan by Rangers.

In the time-honoured way of these things Hibs have batted away a Rangers bid of £175,000 for the player. This is just the start of a colourful, early season stand-off between the two clubs.

But the Allan situation is not easy, for either club. Both Hibs and Rangers have cautionary tales to tell and live by.

Most people view Allan as Hibs’ best player, and there would be quite a madness in the Easter Road club selling the midfielder to their arch rivals in the race for automatic promotion out of the Championship.

Can you imagine the disgust felt among the Hibs support were this to ever happen? It would severely dent the confidence and trust which have been impressively accrued by Leeann Dempster, the Hibs CEO.

If I were a Hibs fan today I’d trust this club executive. Dempster has shown a sure hand in her fraught Easter Road journey so far, and will deal with Rangers deftly.

All that being said, yes of course Scott Allan is for sale – for a fairly ludicrous amount of money.

Were Rangers to offer Hibs £900,000 for a player with a year left on his contract, and who is a self-confessed Rangers fan, then I think that would be the end of it. Allan goes.

This growing Allan saga is also complicated for Rangers – because it lures the Ibrox club back down a road that, ultimately, led to its ruin and enforced re-start just a few short years ago.

If any club today in Britain should know not to throw silly money around, then it should be Rangers. In this new Dave King reign at Ibrox the watchwords should be prudence, caution and self-sufficiency.

There can be no other way. King will be judged at Rangers by many things – not least his own personal investment promises – but ludicrous largesse should not be something he has to deliver on.

Rangers would be mad to shell out wildly on Allan – hence their miserly opening offer for him. It would, in fact, be a worrying sign if some of the Rangers-of-old financial bravura was at work.

Surely Rangers fans have come to accept this? There will surely be many of them who will admire King all the more if his club resists playing the financial-dictator of old?

More than that, the signing of Scott Allan cannot be the be-all and end-all for Rangers this season. Mark Warburton’s intriguing signings policy to date – and we can only judge it in time – looks far bigger and wider than any single make-or-break deal.

Rangers and their supporters have invested their hopes in Warburton. In doing so, they have to trust his judgement and give him a chance.

Warburton has brought some unlikely names to Ibrox, but let us see in time if his judgement can be trusted. Right now I cannot believe the Rangers manager sees Allan as an essential, crown-jewel signing.

King, meanwhile, has bigger issues to attend to – not least in working out what to do about Mike Ashley.

You get the impression the Rangers chairman feels powerless in the face of the Sports Direct tycoon’s retail deals at Ibrox.

If Rangers are to be self-sufficient then it seems reasonable that the club should be able to maximise its profits – or at least enjoy greater profits – from its own shirt sales.

Sports Direct’s involvement, and the fans’ reluctance to shell out on new kits, is a stumbling block to that.

King has quite rightly been doubted by some of us, given the infamous “baggage” he brought with him to Rangers. But he still, in the here and now, deserves the chance to show that he has the acumen to rebuild the club for the long-term good.

In this context, the bidding and rebuffing for Scott Allan is a mere sideshow. Allan should not be a key figure in the rebuilding of Rangers.

King and Warburton have far greater points to prove.