Rangers fans aren’t happy after official departure is confirmed | OneFootball

There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth this morning after the recent official confirmation that Rangers’ Academy Director Zeb Jacobs is to leave for Feyenoord.

We discussed his record at Rangers, and in all honesty, it just isn’t impressive at all.

He’s overseen next-to-nothing with just the rather underwhelming Ross McCausland breaking into the first team since Jacobs arrived in the January of 2022.

Aside that, not a single young player has remotely ‘cracked it’ into either Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Michael Beale or now Philippe Clement’s first team squad.

Yes, some younger players do appear on the bench, and even get the odd cameo, but in general Rangers’ youth policy continues to be underwhelming at best and dismal at worst.

The decline in it has been stark. 20 or 30 years ago it was Barry Ferguson, Allan McGregor, Allan Hutton, Danny Wilson, Charlie Adam, and many others who came up from youth and broke into seniors or were sold for healthy cash.

The last one to actually impress was Nathan Patterson, and he was sold the same month Jacobs arrived.

Since then, Adam Devine, so many fans’ popular pick to be the ‘new’ Nathan Patterson, just hasn’t cut it either and ended up farmed out into loan hell.

McCausland is the only player to break into seniors with any credibility, and so far he’s fallen well short of living up the level and standard set by Patterson. No one will bid £16M for McCausland. Almost 21, his market value according to transfermarkt is just £700,000. Sure, that site is quite conservative with its estimates at times, but it is still relative in the right ballpark.

Patterson was sold for £16M at 20. It’s a completely different level.

But this gets away from the point – Jacobs has done very little to fix things, and indeed Rangers overlooked him for the top job at Ibrox, giving that instead to Zurab Amirian. When that happened earlier this year, Jacobs’ number was up and he was more than happy to go to Feyenoord.

Fan reaction?

Disgust really, with Jacobs, with accusations he was more interested in raising his own profile via social media than actually doing his job.

We can’t verify this, it’s a subjective accusation, but it’s telling that Rangers didn’t make Jacobs academy boss and found someone else.

He’ll now leave this summer and we’re not sure anyone’s that sorry about that.