We first briefly review a treatment of the scalars in meson meson scattering based on a non‐linear chiral Lagrangian, with unitarity implemented by a “local” modification of the scalar propagators. It is shown that the main results are confirmed by a treatment in the SU(3) linear sigma model in which unitarity is implemented “globally.” Some remarks are made on the speculative subject of the scalars’ quark structure. © 2002 American Institute of Physics