Jefte to Rangers is officially off after what can only be described as a complete mess of a transfer pursuit.
The left back, on loan at APOEL, impressed Rangers over the course of the season, which led Rangers to make an enquiry to his parent club Fluminese.
The problems began here, when loan club APOEL refused to break the loan agreement, and in fairness, why would they, he was great for them this season.
And herein is the problem – we do not understand why so much time was wasted in this pursuit when Fluminese would have been well aware there was no recall option in the lad’s APOEL loan deal.
Ergo, APOEL were under zero obligation to relinquish arguably their best-performing player back to his parent club.
The issue here is a combination of Rangers’ bad due diligence, and potentially, Fluminese’s negligence.
The fact is the lad was on loan in Cyprus, IS on loan in Cyprus – the Cypriots had absolutely no reason to send him back to Brazil when he’s been great for them.
From what we understand, they demanded £500,000 to terminate the loan, and that’s a fair compensation, which Rangers refused – did we mention about Jefte going into hiding while this was being sorted out?
This would be akin to some team trying to take a fit Abdallah Sima on loan this month and just expecting Rangers to give him up, despite Brighton not having a recall option this month.
Rangers would expect to be compensated for that or keep the lad.
Rangers should surely have been aware from Fluminese that there was no recall on the loan, which begs the question of why so many days were wasted on this situation when it was a non-starter. Or did the Brazilians just neglect to mention that part?
Furthermore, the fact we wouldn’t pay Jefte’s compensation value to APOEL does seem to vindicate the notion there isn’t a bean in the coffer this January. Not even the £3M we believed there was.
In short, this was a shambles.
Jefte is back out of hiding and in Cyrpus and will play out the season there – word is that Rangers will sign him in the summer, but we guess time will tell on that one.