There’s been a lot of reaction to the James Sands Niko Katic developments of the last 48 hours and we wanted to put out the facts of this and see where it takes us.

As we know, Giovanni van Bronckhorst brought his first Rangers signing to the table earlier this week when the club loaned NYC’s James Sands.

Sands is a fundamental holding midfielder, but he is equally as comfortable as centre back and has played wider as RB too.

So, Sands has been signed for his versatility, his ability to play defensively in midfield or as a pure centre half.

The big kicker for fans of Katic and for Katic himself is the American has taken Katic’s shirt number, and the Croat seemingly reacted angrily by removing all posts from his Instagram and taking his Twitter account offline entirely.

So, what does this leave us with?

Sands isn’t strictly a replacement for Katic, he’s just a GVB signing who also happens to be an adept CB too. However, the question a few are asking is why Sands got Katic’s squad number?

There are two answers to this:

1: Because that’s the available number he wanted. He clearly wasn’t informed he couldn’t have that number.

2: Because Rangers’ priorities are to the players we have, not the ones on loan, like it or not.

Katic’s reaction isn’t surprising because he’s done it before – he has taken his social media offline in the past and gone completely off the grid. Seeing him do it again isn’t that big a shock.

But the more subjective question for Rangers fans is was Katic treated a little unfairly? Should he have been informed?

Factually we don’t know if he was or wasn’t, his social media boycott could have been as a result of a courtesy club phone call telling him Sands was taking that number, as opposed to finding out in the press.

But there’s something else, another factoid about Katic and social media that some fans may have overlooked:

Katic removed EVERYTHING. Not just Rangers, not just Ibrox, but he removed it all, including snaps of himself, his family, his friends.

For whatever reason, the Croat wants a time out from everything, and we don’t know for sure his offlining was Rangers-related at all.

Indeed, some ‘angry internet people’ have decided he’s being petty and they don’t want an ‘immature boy’ like that at Ibrox. Which is more than a tad presumptious.

Does he have a future at Ibrox? No, in all probability he doesn’t. The day he went on loan was the end of his Rangers career – we told you at the time but no one believed us.

We really like this guy and what he could bring, but we don’t matter, Gio does.

And if he isn’t interested in him, he isn’t interested in him.