Joe Aribo ‘rejects’ new Rangers deal amid PL interest

Talksport have tonight confirmed Joe Aribo will not be signing a new deal and will make a move to England when a suitable offer appears.

Southampton are the latest front runners but Crystal Palace, Fulham, Villa, Brentford and Forest have all been credited with interest in the playmaker, but as we reported earlier, his Rangers race is 99% done.

It is now beginning to look unlikely (don’t quote us on this one) that he will attend Rangers’ Portuguese training camp in pursuit instead of finding a new club, with Southampton’s apparent interest being useful to him due to its reasonable distance from London.

Aribo’s quote of the last international break in which he claimed he was happy and wasn’t thinking of leaving appears to have been a momentary faux pas, for follow up press interviews backtracked a lot on that and bigged up Steven Gerrard.

Due to his being in the last year of his deal, Rangers will not get his full market value, which for a player of his stock, quality and international caps not to mention experience would typically be considerably above £20M, instead the Ibrox club accepting around £10M.

Aribo misses England, but has carried himself extremely well at Ibrox, and while it would have been nice for him to sign a new deal and get the club his full market value, it wasn’t to be, and it will still represent a colossal profit for the club.

We expect this transfer to take place within a week or two at the most, but as with the window, to paraphrase the late great Murray Walker, anything can happen in transfer summer, and usually does.