Pre-transfer window Ibrox Noise explained that Michael Beale’s budget for the window was around £2.5M, and the reaction was unsurprisingly unhappy, fans arguing that he needed a lot more to make a difference.

Indeed, we reckon some supporters were expecting around £15M to be spent, when quite simply Rangers don’t have that kind of money.

So, in the end, what was spent by Rangers? Well, it appears we were around a £1M out, but our information was roughly correct overall.

Todd Cantwell cost somewhere in the region of around £1.5M-£2M, while Nicolas Raskin cost exactly £1.75M. That’s an estimated £3.5M give or take, which stands out on a major level – £3.5M is the most Rangers have ever spent in this window, beating the previous record in 2007 by £1.5M.

Rangers fans losing the plot and expecting us to spend £15M were miles off – yes, in an ideal world we’d spend a tonne and get in boatloads of players, but this isn’t an ideal world.

Some asked us where we got our information from, a question they don’t tend to ask other Rangers sites (who get things wrong far more often than we do), and naturally we can’t betray our sources. That’s the whole point.

But we can say anyone with a basic grasp of maths will have seen the accounts had very little disposable – we were in £5M profit but that didn’t mean we had £5M to spend. It just meant incoming and outgoing were £5M apart. In reality, at the time of late last year, £2.5M was about the roof we could go to.

The good news is we did seem to ‘magic’ another £1M, and that helped us get both players.

Why on earth did Raskin and Cantwell deals go on so long? Because we just didn’t have huge money to spend – we had around £2.5M-£4M and that was the absolute roof of it and even then we were going over budget.

For all those fans saying ‘just pay it’, they’re the same ones gutted when they see negative numbers in the accounts. So we do need to be careful and live within our means.

Rangers did their best to get these guys within our budget – we failed on that, and had to push the boat out a little to keep Michael Beale content that we had ambition. He needed a couple of players that he wanted to keep him happy.
In the east end of Glasgow they had no problem selling a few players for big millions again – Rangers couldn’t get a penny for anyone aside Charlie McCann. So it was far from profitable.

But in the end we spent the most at this time of year that we ever have, and we really hope we make one big sale this summer (who we don’t know) to bring in some extra cash which is needed if we are to further fund big signings.

It is… what it is.