33 in 77 – Rangers could have a bargain in Nedim Bajrami | OneFootball

As we are all aware here at Ibrox Noise and Rangers Towers, the club secured the summer’s big ‘new’ signing in Nedim Bajrami at £3.5M, a surprise capture from Sassuolo, and while we don’t all know a massive amount about the Albanian yet, his performance against Ukraine for his country in his 26th cap certainly has had some attention.

Despite not managing any goals or assists, the playmaker impressed a fair few fans of an Ibrox persuasion, so your favourite grumpy fan site wanted to take a look in numbers how he did.

We do like a stat at Ibrox Noise, although we rather stop short of justifying a bad result with them…

Anyway, Bajrami…

Against Ukraine he managed a solid 36 touches, no dribbles (one attempt), a single key pass, and a solid 86% passing accuracy. He lost the ball 8 times of his 36 touches, and won 3 of his 8 duels.

He had one crossing attempt, which was accurate, and was 50% for his long ball accuracy.

In terms of his positioning, he didn’t really stay in the left position that he was based on, he roamed fairly freely around and didn’t stick to any one precise area.

He was removed after 76 minutes.

You can’t really draw conclusions of a match based on stats alone, regulars will know our match ratings are based on both watching and the data. So we draw no conclusions from this.

We will say his 59 goals and 32 assists in 324 appearances is ok, it’s decent, but it’s not impressive. That’s more or less 100 goals and assists in roughly 300 outings. One in 3. He did solidly in Serie A but not magically – if he was outstanding, richer clubs than Rangers could have afforded him.

His market value when we signed him was more or less what we paid, the £3.5M. His peak value was in his Empoli days when he had a £10M price tag. His numbers back then were 16 goals and assists in 38 appearances in Serie A in 21/22 and 17 the season prior with the same amount of outings. He was impressive at that point, but he hasn’t really sustained that since then and the value dropped.

Rangers are hoping for a bargain here, for a player who hit big heights in a very credible league a couple of years ago to restore them.

If the scouting has judged right, there’s a lot of potential here from a 25-year-old who has just recently lost his way a bit.

Maybe he’ll find it back at Rangers.