Speculation flies as Rangers assets line up for sale

We were intrigued by a comment today, an understandable one, which was unhappy with a Joe Aribo story whereby the Nigerian looks set to leave this summer.

His comment, which wasn’t abusive at all, appealed to us to stop posting comment like this because it made Rangers look like we’ll end up with a 5-a side team next season.

And we definitely see that point.

So far this summer, on top of the actual exits of Ced the Ted, Aaron Ramsey, Amad Diallo, Andy Firth, Lewis Mayo, Jake Hastie and of course Leon Balogun, there’s a real huge wad of speculation:

Allan McGregor (before he signed on), Connor Goldson (before he did), Steven Davis (yup), and Scott Arfield before, yes, you’ve guessed it.

But as well as them, Borna Barisic, Calvin Bassey, Glen Kamara, John Lundstram, Joe Aribo, Ryan Kent, Alfredo Morelos and one or two others have been linked with multimillion moves south, and if there’s one thing the guy was right about, it is that every asset player Rangers have is being heavily touted for sales.

There isn’t a single player we have, worth anything over £5M, who isn’t being hawked for a move – bar James Tavernier.

Apart from our captain, who rarely to never gets linked with moves anywhere, all our top asset players are.

Why?

Because of quite a few reasons.

1: It sells clicks. Rangers players get a lot of traffic online, and the Rangers name itself sure does. Nothing like easy traffic to publish a player leaving story.
2: Rangers DO need money, and player sales will help that.
3: Player sales are SUPPOSED to happen. We have a trade model, and we’re supposed to sell big at least once a year, preferably more. We got £16M for Nathan Patterson, but that’s already half a year ago. It’s time for another.
4: Agents deliberately put these stories out there for multiple reasons – inspire bidding wars, get their clients better contracts at Ibrox, you name it.
5: The end of a cycle. Some of these guys have been at Rangers for years. It’s getting to the point where Gio, as our manager, wants his own guard in, and selling a few of the talismen wouldn’t be the worst move to put his stamp on it.

These are just some. Yes, a lot of it is just speculation, but our job is to bring you everything we hear. We cannot always know how true what we hear is, we have to trust in our sources.

End of the day, you will believe what we tell or you won’t – sometimes you’ll be right to be sceptical, others you’ll be wrong to doubt us.

It is silly season after all.