A difficult path – Rangers must arrest a troubling direction after reports…

As we alluded to earlier, with the Ryan Kent deal now looking dead in the water following Aston Villa’s reported £10M bid for his permanent signature, Steven Gerrard turning to Sheyi Ojo from the Liverpool Academy instead is frankly not good news for Rangers fans at all.

While the player himself appears a significant upgrade from Kent and could actually do a lot more damage to the SPL, sadly the pattern Rangers fans are suffering is that every single loan we’ve had since 2012 bar Jamie Murphy (and technically Declan John) has ended either in failure or us boosting the value of the asset and earning his parent club a massive fortune.

And with the possible signing of Sheyi Ojo we can’t see much difference here – the kid will either fail Oduwa style (bears an uncanny resemblance to our former winger) or be such a success we boost his value and Liverpool get a sexy profit.

It’s just not the way we want to go forward but until we start having the cash to significantly buy players, it’s a depressing pattern we see no end to.

The only other route is the free transfer, and that too is penny pinching at its best.

It’s not that we want to see spending for the sake of. Look at the failures of Lafferty, Grezda, Barisic to name just three. But we also know that not having a major budget and seemingly being linked with little but loans or Bosmans isn’t the route to stopping Celtic.

Of course we can’t ‘magic’ money. Magic beans don’t buy you very much in the way of quality top-flight players – but it’s evident that we’re at a bit of a quandary.

The last two summer budgets were ultimately £10M a time. And as much as that will give us second place, more or less, stopping 9IAR depends on a much grander scale of investment. It’s hard to overcome a juggernaut like Celtic purely on momentum, and while the majority of the split performances were simply outstanding, we couldn’t rely on those XI or so players or indeed that system for the whole season.

But the crossroads is do we really want to end up as Liverpool’s developer club? Rather than feeder club where we give them our best players, or best youth, instead we’re paying their unwanted youth then earning them a massive profit at the end.

That is a path that it is not in Rangers’ interests to go down. But it’s one we seem to be on.

The only defence of it would be if Ojo and any other loans and Bosmans help to actually win us the title next season.

Otherwise all we’ve done is the same as we have for the past few years, and that is a worrying trend.