Liverpool’s £10M number on Rangers
As we alluded to earlier in our piece on Ryan Kent, we’d hoped for Liverpool to ‘do us a deal’ over the on-loan winger which would see his market value become irrelevant as ‘friends rates’ gave us a cut-price transfer to permanently secure the young winger.
As it turns out, the Anfield side want around £7M-£10M for the ex-Barnsley loanee which, it would seem, falls some way outside Steven Gerrard’s budget this summer.
It is now inevitable that the Championship and lower Premier League sides monitoring Kent will snap him up for a price which is pretty much peanuts to them.
But then that leaves us at Ibrox Noise wondering if we’ve had a bit of a number done on us by Liverpool, and if there really is anything like a ‘relationship’ between the clubs.
Let’s set it out:
Liverpool Academy graduate spends years failing on loan at various clubs in Germany and England. His value is effectively nil and he’s more or less a busted flush to Jurgen Klopp.
Until he joins Rangers he’s managed a senior career total of 3 goals and 5 assists – that’s at four clubs from summer 2015 till summer 2018.
Liverpool have a player on their hands who won’t earn them any money – he’s close to being a release despite signing a new deal till 2022 in 2017. Two more rotten loans at Freiburg and Bristol make last summer’s new deal look like a mistake.
Then Steven Gerrard takes over at Ibrox – hey presto a season of developing Ryan Kent for Liverpool and suddenly this dead rubber worth next-to-nothing has a market value of around £10M and Rangers did all the work.
This doesn’t feel much like a relationship – more like they lent their failing product, Rangers spent time and money developing him and now we give him back and they sell him to the highest bidder for £10M.
We get it, all is fair in love and war – and Liverpool don’t really owe us anything at all. But this episode really should put to bed any notion they are ever doing us any favours at all, regardless of who our manager is.
There is no relationship.