The deal today for Ajax’s Antony at £85M has a lot of subplots which affect Rangers, and Ibrox Noise explains the situation and the implications for us.
The first and obvious one is that the Eredivisie giants will not have this Brazil winger when they face us. As we saw v PSV, the star winger of the Dutch side facing Rangers can make such a difference… but being serious, Antony is a talent, and we will not have to deal with him come matchday one.
The second one is more abstract – were we completely robbed over Calvin Bassey? Both he and Antony are the same age, same number of caps (roughly) for their countries, yet Ajax sell him for £85M, their star player, refusing to buckle to £65M, while we give them our star man for £23M?
Let’s not pretend Ajax are a much bigger club than Rangers, they’re not. And while the Eredivisie is obviously better than the SPL, the overall conditions of both sales are very similar.
And yet Rangers get a quarter for our star FROM Ajax who demand four times that FOR theirs?
It’s still our record sale and great money and along with UCL cash all our revenue issues are finished.
But it could and should have been better, especially given what Ajax got for their star man.
We know historically Dutch clubs can sell for bigger than Scottish, but we feel £20M+ these days for your star man just isn’t cutting it any more.
If newly-promoted Almeria are to sell Sadiq for £30M, we should really be looking for more for our star man.
But hey, at least we won’t be facing Antony anyway.
This has Scotland and SPFL written all over it. We have a biscuit tin tin pot league.
Nobody is going to spend more than 25 M in Scotland unless we are in the CL every year.
We didn’t need to wait for the transfer of Antony to discover we could’ve got more. At the time of the Bassey transfer Ajax had just sold Martinez to Manchester Utd for more than double what we got.
I think the boy was part of an outstanding ajax team which was running riot in CL and obviously ten haag rates him very highly indeed ,also ajax are in a vary comfortable position financially and can demand top dollar .If rangers are outstanding in the CL this year and one of our players stands out especially v liverpool ,we can also ask top dollar or tell them to GTF, as will also be in financially great position .
Congrats to Ajax! What a canny piece of business, selling a player several times his market value. I suspect they knew how desperate United were/are to strengthen their squad just before transfer deadline day and – with limited time to bring in an adequate replacement themselves – hiked up the transfer fee.
Never getting anywhere near that for our players. Ajax have been champions league regulars and have got to the latter stages of the competition a few times.
Yes we are a big club but we are not at Ajax level yet and to suggest otherwise is a bit daft. We’d need to have a few years of our players performing at CL level before that happens. We are not spending £20m on a single player.
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