Philippe Clement has announced that Rangers’ plans to sign Abdallah Sima permanently remain unchanged, and that despite the Senegal international’s poor fitness record at the club, the board and Clement will seek to sign him on a permanent basis.
Speaking during his pre-Hearts presser, Clement confirmed the club seeks to keep Sima, but it has to be a price that works for Rangers, and ‘you don’t know which that will go’.
It’s a curious one – Sima has been a good scorer, no question, one of the best and most prolific scorers at Ibrox in some time.
But his 18 goals and assists in 38 appearances has convinced Clement he’s worth capturing permanently, despite Ibrox Noise’s information that Sima was almost certainly going to go back to Brighton based on the injury problems.
The fact is he’s missed almost 20 matches through injury, and Rangers making his deal permanent and paying close to £5M-£6M for the privilege of an unreliable player who can’t guarantee availability to us seems a very risky move.
We’ve already splashed out £6M on Danilo who we got about 3 minutes of football from, and Clement has also confirmed Oscar Cortes is another we’ll try to make permanent based on the price, so clearly the manager reckons he can fix the injury issues enveloping the club.
But £16M+ on 3 players who have basically missed well over 50% of the season so far doesn’t strike us as very good use of resources at all.
But that’s the club’s decision it seems.
Clement wants the boy, Sima wants to stay, and it seems Rangers are willing to shell out for him.
We do wonder if it’s the smartest move.