Gio is missing NINE first team stars for Rangers

If there’s one thing Rangers fans are forgetting while the club languishes in indifferent form, it’s just how many first team players are either unfit, unavailable, outright injured or plain unsettled.

Filip Helander, John Souttar, Leon King, Ben Davies, Ridvan Yilmaz, Nnamdi Ofoborh, Ianis Hagi, Tom Lawrence, Rabbi Matondo, and Kemar Roofe are nine men who are quite simply not part of the first team picture, and many of them are long term.

This is almost a complete first team, and if you then add up the value of these guys it’s suddenly around £23M of talent that we’ve spent on, discounting market values of those we got for free.

In a ridiculous twist of fate, we have way, WAY more value unavailable to Giovanni than we started in Holland, with a team that day that cost around £14M.

So, starting in Holland, we had a first XI worth a huge amount less than the quality of the players we cannot currently call upon.

Gio definitely has his hands full. It’s one thing to lose your best player (Morelos) and have another key one out of form (Kent) but to lose that much talent, including SEVEN internationals, surely has to be a challenge for any manager no matter who they are.

Rangers’ dire run has not surely been helped by so many good players being unavailable. Of course, we know about Ofoborh, whose career appears over already, a damn shame, but we still signed him and he was supposed to be one for the future. Which doesn’t seem to be happening now.

But the rest are completely AWOL or not ready to make an impression on the first team. And that is not a healthy state of affairs for Gio to contend with.

Worth remembering.