With the near-inevitable exit now of Borna Barisic to pastures new, with Turks Trabzonspor appearing to be the front-runners for his signature, it marks the latest chapter in what Rangers manager Philippe Clement has been very vocal about:
Losing lucrative assets for nothing.
This summer Rangers are almost certainly losing Croatia’s Borna Barisic, Jamaica’s Kemar Roofe, and could also be a John Lundstram down too.
Combined, this is a value, currently, of around £3-£5M for the LB, about £1-£3M for Roofe, and a clean £7M give or take for Lundstram whose stock hiked back up again this season.
So that would be, potentially, £15M for all three, gone under freedom of contract.
Bear also in mind the Croat’s max value was around £15M back in the day, while Roofe cost £3M and Lunny’s peak numbers creaked into the £10M range.
If we add this to the Filip Helander episode (he cost £3M), Ryan Kent (£7.5M) and Alfredo Morelos (£1M) where all three left under freedom of contract, Rangers sure know how to lose cash.
And the manager is very unhappy with how things have been run to this point.
If we go with realistic numbers, Helander was peak value of maybe £5M at his best, while Kent as a young winger with talent was said to have an escape clause in his deal at around £20M (Leeds had a £10M bid rejected), where Morelos at his peak was definitively around the £20M range and Lille bid the £16.5M sum.
Long story short, we lost a definite near-£40M from those three players, again, through bad management and poor decisions.
Clement is very decisive that this is very inefficient and a terrible trading model.
Rangers have haemorrhaged so much cash in the past 12+ years with bad trading, and while there was a brief spell in 2022 under Giovanni van Bronckhorst of £12M for Nathan Patterson, £19M for Calvin Bassey and £6M for Joe Aribo, it stopped there, and since then we’ve only accrued more modest sums.
And now we’re back to square one, losing yet more assets this summer it appears for no money.
No wonder Clement wants that fixed.