Rangers Facebook pages and the tabloid press were buzzing over the last 12 hours over a Serbian outlet’s claims regarding Partizan Belgrade’s Vanja Dragojevic. The midfielder, 20, has been the subject of intense transfer speculation, with it known that Rangers had a bid of €4.5M rejected. Rangers were then informed that to sign the Serbian, he would cost in the region of around £8M. In short, he will not come cheap. Even despite claims of Rangers agreement with Partizan.
Serbian report sparks debate
However, a dubious Serbian outlet called TV Arena Sport claimed last night that the youngster had been agreed by Rangers for just €4.5M. This did not make an awful lot of sense to Ibrox Noise, given that the Ibrox side clearly had a €4.5M bid rejected. We are not entirely sure about this story, to say the least.
Doubts remain over the claims
None of our sources can verify this story as being true. However, it is easy for overseas press to come out with stories like these. The Scottish mainstream media then pick them up and run with them. Of course, the clickbait press are running with it. So too are the various Rangers sites whose honesty is questionable at best.
Rangers must balance the squad
The problem, of course, fundamentally for Rangers is that we have so many midfielders already. We have around 10 midfielders in the squad, which is practically a third of the entire group. Rangers need to balance things out better and ship out players before they can sign anybody else. It is not even a question of finance, but of logistics. There is no point in signing 15 midfielders when that makes up half of the squad. Rangers need to thin the herd first. They need to cut away the bulk and the bloat.
So this story about Dragojevic is definitely an intriguing one. It does seem like Rangers may have some interest in the boy. However, at the end of the day, it still relies on shipping out many midfielders first. At the moment, Rangers are nowhere near doing that. We will see in time what happens, for example, with Nico Raskin and Connor Barron. However, at the moment, we cannot quite fathom the source or accuracy of this particular story of Rangers agreement with Partizan.