Why do Rangers just refuse to buy SPL-based players? | OneFootball

Ever since 2012 Rangers’ trading model has been dire, to say the least. It’s not so much we don’t sell players for big money, which in fairness we don’t, that’s just one of the many symptoms; it’s the fact we simply refuse to sign players based in the Scottish Premiership, always electing to spend fortunes outside our league.

Walter Smith, Alex McLeish and even Pedro Caixinha of all people knew the value of quality SPL-based players, and that’s why the former two won titles and trophies. They knew Rangers need Scottish and SPL-based players, who know the drill, understand the league and know the pressure at Ibrox.

The big talk at the moment is Motherwell’s rising superstar Lennon Miller, valued at around £7M by the Fir Park side including addons. We’ve covered how Rangers are priced out by that, but more to the fact we won’t take interest in him ‘at that price’ etc.

And yet in the past two windows we’ve blown £21.5M on mostly players who are dead rotten rather than spending the cash on players with CVs that fit our league and our club.

Where did Rangers’ trading model collapse so badly that the club just refuses to recruit quality from inside Scotland, and scouts in the Colombian Z-League instead?

So it’s not like the cash hasn’t been there to sign a player like that in the past two windows.

Mohamed Diomande and Oscar Cortes alone are £9M, and neither has added a single thing to Rangers in terms of either value or consistency. We did like Cortes but goodness the boy is simply never available.

Then you bring in more rubbish like Hamza Igamane for £3M and suddenly we’ve just spent £12M on players who have added the square root of zero to our club. Bajrami is another £3M and while he’s not been a horrible fail, we can’t say he’s exactly incredible value for money yet.

What has made Rangers refuse to go near SPL clubs for their best players?

Sure, we’ve signed two freebies from Aberdeen in Jack and Barron, and we got Hastie from Motherwell and obviously Souttar from Hearts, but generally we’ve just avoiding the home market.

After all these years, we still have not signed Lawrence Shankland, despite the fact we could afford him.

The last player we can recall getting from a rival club prior to Barron was indeed Souttar from Tynecastle and that was a tussle in itself; we refused to pay their modest £500,000 asking price to be freed immediately.

Rangers’ conduct, targeting, scouting and trading system when it comes to Scotland really is dire.

We have no Scottish players in our team aside Barron or Souttar worth a damn, and yet every manager and scouting network seems to insist on some unknown ‘gem’ from the Belgravia National Division Z Conference.

It’s bewildering.

It’s astonishing.

And it’s one of many reasons we’re so far behind Celtic.