Michael Beale has today confirmed Ryan Kent has NOT received a contract offer at all, and the entire thing has been left to negotiations whereby the club and the player have planned to sit down at March’s international break to properly talk.
Indeed, claims that Burnley and Leeds are in for him are no more or less true, given Kent is under precontract rules allowed to talk to other clubs, but while there are ‘rumours’ circulating that the winger is fed up of playing his football in Scotland, Beale has made it clear there has never been a proper formal discussion about his situation.
He said:
“We’ve had discussions around it and we’ve both parked everything until we find a moment, so the next moment will be the international break when we sit and have another chat. We’re both on the same page and I think it’s right after the amount of years he’s been here, and his third manager here as well, that he takes the time to consider his options and it’s the same time we do as well. We’ve not put anything in front of him. We’ve just had conversations. At this moment in time, I think that’s the best place to be.”
In simple terms, Kent and the board/Beale have had informal ongoing dialogue, but nothing with any numbers, no contracts, nothing formal with a sit down and a proper negotiation or offer.
Does this mean the information from last year that he’d received an offer wasn’t true? We just don’t know, Beale is a master of disinformation and feeding the press red herrings, and he’s extremely economical with the truth at best.
But to all intents and purposes, Kent doesn’t have an offer on the table under the modern Rangers era, and negotiations over his situation are impending.
So does this mean he will stay? It just depends on what Rangers offer, and what Kent gets from down south. Against any Premier League team Rangers’ offer will not be good enough, for obvious reasons, financially and footballing, and Kent himself has suffered from fan unpopularity in recent times, being an unfair scapegoat to a lot of supporters.
Maybe he’ll want the change of scenery. Time will tell.