Michael Beale has mostly confirmed Rangers’ incoming business is ‘done’ for this window, and the big job now is shifting out the unwanted players.
Having decided he’s mostly happy with what he has, it is now a problem case to see a lot of players on the fringes of the squad being relieved of their place on the roster, because, frankly, few to none of these players are attracting bids.
The surplus seem to be Ben Davies, Scott Wright, Jon McLaughlin, Glen Kamara, Kemar Roofe, Ianis Hagi and possibly one or two others, with Borna Barisic and John Lundstram’s futures a little unclear.
And if there are to be any further additions in this window, they’d 100% depend on any sales coming in first.
Rangers have only sold four players this window – Zukowski, for around £500,000, Colak for £2.5M, Sakala for £4M and Mayo for around £300,000. That’s the region of about £7M which isn’t bad, but the expenditure has been well above it, being around £16M.
So to make any more signings now does require sales first and there are a host of players, as we can tell, who are not significantly involved in the first team. Ianis Hagi has already made it clear he’s not happy, and while Rabbi Matondo was on the fringes, his renaissance in recent weeks has made him a potentially viable player now for Michael Beale – early days though.
But either way, Beale is clear he needs to ship out. 11 players are gone, but more need to go as Beale steps up his effort to trim the squad.
Ibrox Noise’s report some months ago that up to 20 players could go, ridiculed as absolute nonsense at the time by some, doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous now does it…
Beale said:
“It is likely to be more outs than ins just because of the size of the squad. The board has invested well from January down, what is it £13million or £14m from January down on 11 players. When you say 11 players it doesn’t sound like a lot but then obviously you put the price of three or four. In the transfer market so far we have done extremely well if you think of Raskin, Cifuentes and Cantwell costing a combined £2m – there’s good business being done by this club. Butland coming on a free transfer, Dowell, Sterling, so the money has been spent on the front areas. We did lose six players in that area. Maybe one or two out. If we can get one in that I think can make the starting team stronger then that would be great. And I don’t think that depends too much on what happens in these two games.”
The intriguing part of this quote is Beale today is still raising the alarm about the ‘size of the squad’ when that was the very thing he stated he’d be fixing around two months ago. That Rangers’ squad is actually mostly the same size (11 out, 9 in ) at the start of the window means a lot of outgoings need to get done still.
There is still time.