With the soon-to-be-officially confirmed signing of Wolves striker Fabio Silva on loan, the obvious question is ‘how does this affect Shankland?’.
It is clear that move will not come cheap, and while sources told us Rangers had proposed a £3M plus player swap involving Alex Lowry to Tynecastle chiefs, the signing of 6ft 1 striker Silva does hint that Rangers, for now, have put Shankland on the backburner.
It’s more to the point that Rangers needed, desperately, a quality striker up front who could come immediately and within the club’s extremely modest January budget.
Silva, on loan, is actually kind of a risk, but worth taking.
Admittedly like Sam Lammers he has years of fails on his CV, but unlike the Dutchman he’s only a loan, he’s extremely young, and he’s got a high market value, plus physically is a bit of a unit and won’t be a shrinking violet in the Scottish Premiership.
His £35M move to Wolves just hasn’t worked, and he has everything to prove all over again.
Which has worked beautifully for fellow loanee Abdallah Sima.
The Senegal man was signed by Brighton for £7M and was expected to kick on out on loan at Stoke, before coming back to Albion and becoming a mainstay.
That didn’t materialise – instead he flunked at 2 loans before finally settling in at Rangers, so much so that the club is working on trying to make that deal permanent.
This is what is being hoped will happen for Silva too.
He badly struggled at PSV, struggled a little at Anderlecht, and now Philippe Clement and Nils Koppen, well aware Rangers seriously needed a body or two up front, have decided he’s the right stuff to give Rangers the boost there that the club required.
And it means the Shankland deal, while not dead, now calms a bit – it could still happen, if the fee can be agreed within Rangers’ budget, but for now Clement has a new striker up front who will likely join up when the transfer window formally opens, and that helps out a lot.
This does of course mean he surely will not be available for Celtic, but it takes us into the new year with more than just Cyriel Dessers up top.
Loans and Bosmans are likely to be Rangers’ main currency this window – it’s what Giovanni had to rely on in January ’22, and the budget doesn’t allow for a lot more this time around either.
This is a player who scored 9 goals and assists in 9 in UEFA’s Youth League in 2018. He has absolutely got talent, but evidently hasn’t found the right league to shine yet.
The Premier League (England), Eredivisie (Holland), Jupiler (Belgium) and Primeira Liga of sorts (Portugal) didn’t work out for Silva, which is, admittedly, quite a lot of fails.
Hopefully Rangers, Philippe Clement and the Scottish Premiership are the answer Fabio has looked for and we will see in time what happens, if anything, with Shankland.