Earlier we were discussing the possibility of securing Heerenveen’s Joey Veerman, a player known to want to leave his current employer and the heavy links made with making the signing.

We know we bid around £4M for him, which was rejected in light of the €10M his club hopes for, but in the meantime, we plumped for Huddersfield’s Juninho Bacuna instead, a signing which absolutely has not worked out yet.

However, the current struggles of the Curaçao international are curious and we wonder who they benefit.

His former chairman, Phil Hodgkinson, confirmed the deal to bring him to Ibrox was a sneaky one:

Hodgkinson’s claims it’s a great deal could be as much aimed at Rangers’ side as his own, because Bacuna hardly plays. 2 starts, 9 sub outings.

The curiosity is he’s made an astonishing 4 appearances in the Europa League, including one start, so we wonder exactly who gets the best from this agreement. He appears to have come on as a token sub in 3 of the matches, without adding a thing to any of those matches, but that would fulfil Huddersfield’s Euro-based clause. If, that is, it does. Is it minutes-based or actual appearance based?

We just don’t know, because we’ve not seen the contract.

We might not have paid up front, but the sell-on could see Rangers move this player on without a penny being made into the Ibrox coffers.

It looks like this was a signing, as we said before, made in panic in event of losing out on Veerman, where we accepted a free player but one who wouldn’t make us much if any money if he was sold.

We suppose if we’ve not paid anything and we sell without seeing a penny, it’s not the end of the world. But it will have cost us wages. He was reported to be on £17K at Huddersfield, so it’ll be similar at Ibrox.

Maybe this one wasn’t the best deal for us at all.