Transfers are never guaranteed to work in football, and Rangers have had their fair share of flops and successes over the years at Ibrox.
Some players join the Gers and set the world alight and exceed initial expectations, whereas some fail to make the grade and end up moving on sooner than expected.
However, sometimes it is difficult to assess moves fairly until many years into the future, and that is often the case when making judgements on sales that a club has made.
Disasterclass
One sale for which the Ibrox club ended up paying dearly was Gennaro Gattuso’s move to Salernitana in 1998, having joined the Gers from Perugia on a free transfer the previous summer.
The midfield enforcer, who Kaka once dubbed a “phenomenon” as a player and coach, played 49 times for the Scottish giants in all competitions, scoring five goals and racking up 12 yellow cards from central midfield.
This led to the club selling him to Italian outfit Salernitana in 1998 for a fee in the region of £4m. Gattuso later revealed that then-board member, and ex-James Bond actor, Sean Connery attempted to stop him from making the switch.
He said this about the late film icon: “I only met him once. The president then was David Murray, he was part of the board and, it’s true, one evening he spoke to me and he didn’t want me to leave.”
Whilst making £4m off a free transfer in one season may seem like a great piece of business on paper and a deal worth applauding, what happened after Gattuso’s return to Italy proved that it was a disasterclass from Rangers.
Salernitana sold him to AC Milan for £7.2m after less than a year and he thrived at the San Siro. He made 468 appearances for the Rossoneri, winning two Champions League titles, two Serie A titles and the World Cup with Italy in that time.
In October 2004, Transfermarkt valued the midfielder at a stunning £22.5m. He was valued at £14.4m or higher between 2004 and 2010, showing that the Gers missed out on a significantly bigger payday by selling him after just one season.
This is all with the benefit of hindsight, of course, but they may have been able to make a much larger sum of money from Gattuso’s sale had they kept him for another couple of years. Therefore, the club paid dearly for selling him when they did, because it cost Rangers a potential windfall of millions of pounds as his value skyrocketed after leaving Ibrox…
AND in other news, Big setback as GvB dealt worrying Rangers injury blow, Ibrox faithful will surely be livid…
