While we’re being grumpy, the shocking state of Rangers’ transfer fails is pretty dire. Ok, it doesn’t really matter to us directly-speaking, but that we sold our jewels in the form of Joe Aribo, Nathan Patterson and Calvin Bassey and only Patto has come close to adequate is a bit disappointing.
We got good money for these guys, and we could include the £4.5M for Steven Gerrard, and every one of them has been a fail in their new careers.
What does that say about our club that our prize star players (and managers) all fail at higher levels?
Meanwhile loathe or loathe them, them lot across the city get big money for their assets and said assets thrive at their new clubs. One of them became a £75M defender for goodness’ sake. And the only thing that held Tierney back was injury. Till then he was the first choice at Arsenal.
The point?
We sell our best players and they fail at their new clubs. Every single time.
Barry was amazing at Blackburn back in the day, GVB after injury at Arsenal ended up a world class star at Barcelona, while Alan Hutton did well at Spurs for a while before becoming a bit of a Premier League journeyman.
But today Hutton’s modest post-Rangers career would be a thriving success by our standards these days.
Bassey, absolutely useless at Ajax, Patterson ok at Everton but then down the pecking order, Aribo a complete flop at Southampton and Gerrard absolutely crushed at Villa.
Our best players are supposed to go onto bigger leagues and shine, but these days they drown.
Patterson is as close to a success as we’ve had and he’s injured most of the time or down the pecking order at Goodison.
Bassey? Poor defender, and we pulled of a genius move getting £19M (let’s face it, it’ll never get to the addons). Aribo we thought was a bit better than he was, and he drowned in the Premier League.
What does this prove? That the grass isn’t greener? That Rangers is as good as it will get for many of our players?
We are a huge club, and yes, bigger than the bulk of even the Premier League, aside from the finances, obviously. We’re about the same as Ajax, fractionally smaller if we’re honest, so Bassey probably thought he’d completely made it when they signed him.
But his limitations were exposed by a far superior league and he’s been lambasted and he’s out of his depth.
The sign of a club’s status and success is often in how well its sold players do at other clubs. That Fabio Cardoso is about the only success Rangers have sold in a decade (and he exited mutual consent for heaven’s sake) gives some idea of how much work needs to be done.
There are two ways of looking at this. One is that these players were actually good players who have been mismanaged by a number of managers at their new clubs. But that seems a stretch. I would also note that Patterson suffered from sharing a target jersey with the team captain, never the easiest job (Ask Devine). I do think Bassey is getting a bit of a hard time, he has been better more highly rated by his manager than the media, or he wouldn’t have played as much as he has. Dutch football is also more technical than Scotland (which leagues aren’t) and that is not his strength, which Ajax should have known when they scouted him.
But there is another way to look at this. If these players were not that good, it shows what an excellent job Wilson did in screwing clubs for more than their fair value. Trades take a buyer and a seller and usually one side does better than the other. If the buying clubs did badly, that means the seller did well.
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