The £5million signing of Ridvan Yilmaz was one that caught a lot of Rangers fans off guard, a 21-year old Turkey international with huge potential tasked with replacing the sizeable hole left behind by Calvin Bassey, although you couldn’t get two players who looked so different physically.
What Ross Wilson and Giovanni van Bronckhorst have done though is give Borna Barisic the clearest indication yet that he is no longer first choice left-back and that he will need to significantly up his game if he is to get a regular game on merit rather than just on rotation.
The other option, is that Rangers decide to cash in on the Croatian international, who, at 29-years old, would still command a decent transfer fee, something that former Ger, Alan Hutton, reckons that we could well see before the transfer window shuts in September, as told to Football Insider:
“It’s been spoken about £4-5million possibly.
“Look, he is 29 now. Obviously Yilmaz came in for about £6million so you’d like to think he’s in the future plans.
“Borna Barisic hasn’t had the best of starts to this season so I think it’s probably an option that both parties might look to explore moving forward.
“Will Rangers need to bring somebody else in? I’m not so sure? [Ben] Davies can fill in that area but obviously we’ll have to wait and see.“
Hutton could well be right, however, having paid just over £2m for Barisic’s services, even if he sees out the last years of his deal, we will have got our money’s worth out of him and there has been interest this summer already.
We don’t quite have an understudy available to step up from the academy in terms of a natural left-back, Adam Devine and Leon King have played there for the first-team but you wouldn’t want them to have to play out of position regularly as they look to develop, it would be a difficult role to recruit for given the money spent on Yilmaz should Barisic go.
Yilmaz should be able to replicate James Tavernier’s availability on the other side so we should be able to cope with Barisic leaving, if we can make a profit on any potential deal it would be even better – either way, the Croatian’s days could be numbered if he wants to be playing regularly ahead of a winter World Cup.