We all know that signing players isn’t as simple as it is on Football Manager and that trying to persuade the best available in our price range to come to Scotland isn’t always a foregone conclusion, even with a profile raised by reaching the Europa League final.
This is even harder when it comes to competing for players who are available on free transfers or pre-contract agreements, there is a reason why Todd Cantwell took a while and Nicolas Raskin is yet to be announced as Rangers players, they would have had a lot of clubs chasing their signatures – turning down Ligue 1, the Eredivisie or the Premier League to play against Kilmarnock and Livingston eight times a season is not an easy decision to make, regardless of how big a club we are.
Speaking shortly before his dismissal, Giovanni van Bronckhorst was quizzed about recruitment and revealed that who we signed wasn’t necessarily our top targets and there were a few that got away, as reported by The Daily Express:
“I was not over-ruled. We were looking at players in certain positions but we had a situation where players maybe didn’t want to come or the transfer fees and salaries were too high. Of course you have an idea you want this player or that player but we have to keep to our budget.
“As always you work with a list from the scouting team but there are players I follow too and in the end due to various reasons we ended up with the players we have now.”
One of those was Danilho Doekhi, a long-time Vital Rangers favourite as a potential replacement for Connor Goldson who was quite open about an offer from Rangers, however, he chose to move to the Bundesliga with Union Berlin, is challenging for a Champions Leageu place and attracting interest from Italy and the Premier League.
Danilho Doekhi, performing at top level with Union Berlin after joining the club on a free last summer. He scored two goals against Hoffenheim – Italian and English clubs are monitoring him for the summer 🇳🇱
Union Berlin will announce Juranovic as new signing very soon. pic.twitter.com/MLW48lDDju
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) January 22, 2023
What this does highlight is that, like Joey Veerman and Andreas Skov Olsen or Lovro Majer, is that we can identify good, promising players, however, we just aren’t in the right place, financially, to be able to sign most of them just now. The scouting and recruitment team has taken a lot of stick in recent years but, in the case of Doekhi, it proves that finding good players isn’t a problem, where we play and the size of our bank balance is.