Rangers have today finally confirmed Côte d’Ivoire’s Diomandé Mohamed Baba on a loan with obligation to buy this summer for a confirmed initial £4.5M rising to £6M with addons.
This is, quite simply, an exceptional piece of work from the club, and after we were all ‘duped’ by club partners into thinking there were significant funds this January (there aren’t), the board has found an excellent way to sign a top-quality midfielder worth £6M+ and keep within the budget of January.
Ibrox Noise explained pre-January the upper roof of spending would be around £3M this January – we were shocked when Rangers Review announced Diomande was costing £4.5M initial rising to £6M, and it blew away everything we knew about the budget.
We altered a lot of our sourced information based on this apparent news.
It turns out we were right, and RR were slightly misleading in their reports, and the £4.5M will be spent this summer when the budget is much much higher than the modest-to-zero that Rangers currently have.
This news slightly invalidates a lot of the conclusions we drew about this signing and the implications over Lawrence Shankland and the club’s potential pursuit of him – we didn’t just splash £6M on Diomande and invalidate any interest in Hearts’ captain.
We still simply can’t afford their theoretical asking price of well over £3M. That is another story.
But for now, we absolutely love this new addition.
Yes, he’s not in a position we desperately needed filled, but he is a great player, and Rangers deserve great players.
Not a soul has made any critical comment about the Ivorian, the worst being that he’s a bit of a rough gem requiring a spot of polish, but Philippe Clement is certainly a pretty good boss to smooth him over.
Rangers needed better players, quality players to raise the level.
This guy is definitely that, but the club really pulled off a brilliant coup to get him effectively free. Well. For 6 months anyway.
In the summer he becomes our player permanently, and hopefully he’s shone as much as we think he will by then.
Welcome to Rangers Mohamed.