Nils Koppen admits Rangers didn’t achieve summer plan | OneFootball

In his first proper interview as Rangers’ Head of Recruitment, Nils Koppen has offered a lot of comments on Rangers’ strategy of signing, departures, and everything in-between.

Tellingly, the Belgian has admitted Rangers did not fulfil all of the summer ambitions the club had and that recruitment did fall short. While also stressing he was still happy with the work done:

Now, it’s hard to tell whether Koppen is stressing that not achieving all your ambitions is perfectly normal, or whether he’s suggesting that not doing so was disappointing.

Ibrox Noise sources had informed us the club was to spend around £25M in the summer, but in the end it was around £16M – the club did fall short in recruitment, and while a fair number of players came in, it wasn’t enough and quite a few positions lack certain additions. Such as a major alpha midfielder, or figurehead striker.

Koppen has hinted that the club wanted to do more this summer – and in all honesty, until the late work started to kick in, the additions were falling badly short in every department. For a long time Rangers’ additions were effectively Jefte, Barron and Nsiala. Not a great job lot.

It did get better – Bajrami, Propper, Cerny and Kasanwirjo did arrive to hugely improve things, but this was probably the kind of stuff needed at the start, not the end, and of course Rangers’ budget lost £4.5M through the permanent capture of Mohamed Diomande, a signing who is yet to work out.

So Koppen is suggesting that there’s room for improvement here, and he also stresses elsewhere that he really needed a full season of preparation for the window, as opposed to being plonked straight into the winter window where he started.

Does this mean things will get better?

We can but hope.