Retired at 28 – it’s time for Lewis Macleod to return to Rangers | OneFootball

The Lewis Macleod story really is a tragedy – officially retired at 28 having had 8 years of non-stop injuries, having left Rangers injured in the first place all those years ago.

Make no mistake, Lewis Macleod was good enough to go all the way in the game, to be a Barry Ferguson for Rangers, but that injury he sustained just before his £800,000 switch to Brentford was the end of his career, without him even knowing it.

In the end, he was offered one more very risky surgery to try to cure his issues, but that risk it carried was too great and he called time on it all, easily a decade before he should have had to.

In the end, 148 career appearances in 10 seasons is a tragic return for a career that promised the moon, for a player who could easily have been a Scotland regular.

Of course, equally, this was his destiny, and while it’s a tragedy how his career didn’t unfold, in many ways Rangers completely dodged a bullet of years of a player on the treatment table.

In the end, we got nearly £1M for him rather than spending thousands of medical treatment, and while it’s sad to think in those terms, the club is bigger than any one man.

Macleod wants to go into football in some capacity, we really would love him back at Ibrox coaching the youth – he’s in a very unique position, a ‘recent’ Rangers youth graduate who is young enough to still understand exactly what it takes at those younger ages but wise enough to be able to coach it onto the kids at Auchenhowie.

So it would be a nice path to see him returning to where he belongs.

Lewis Macleod has plenty left to give football – let’s see him do it at home.