He’s heading to Glasgow for a medical: Rangers closing in on their best signing since Raskin – opinion
So this Raskin comparison piece is actually about Kim Min-su, not Cerny, worth remembering since that’s a shift from earlier in our chat. Here’s the full picture pulled together from everything we found tonight.
Start with the state of the Ibrox squad, because that’s really the engine behind this whole piece. John Souttar is the longest-serving outfield player at the club and he only arrived in 2022, with Nicolas Raskin next in line for tenure — and Raskin himself looks close to leaving before deadline day. Sit with that for a second: basically nobody outfield has been there longer than three years. That’s not just bad luck, that’s structural — ownership churn, manager churn, recruitment strategy churn, all stacked on top of each other. There was even a stretch where a permanent Cerny deal reportedly fell through partly because of instability at the club, with ownership changing hands and Russell Martin coming in to replace interim boss Barry Ferguson. Different player, same underlying story — the ground keeps shifting under whoever’s trying to build something there.
Against that backdrop, Raskin becomes this weird outlier, almost accidental proof of concept. He’s had his ups and downs for sure, but his time in Glasgow gets described as a clear success, arguably the standard other Ibrox signings get measured against. What makes that even more notable is that so much of the club’s best output recently hasn’t come from permanent business at all — it’s come from loans. Mikey Moore, Vaclav Cerny, Abdallah Sima, Malik Tillman — all guys who arrived temporarily and ended up being some of the most talked-about performers of their respective seasons. That’s a strange thing for a club to lean on, because it basically means the permanent recruitment engine keeps missing while the loan market keeps hitting, and that’s not sustainable. You can’t build continuity or resale value or squad identity off a rotating cast of borrowed players who leave again in May.
It’s worth filling in a bit on a couple of those loan names since they explain the pattern so well. Cerny signed on a season-long loan from Wolfsburg, 26 at the time, with 17 caps for the Czech Republic and one appearance at Euro 2024, having made just 14 starts in his first Wolfsburg season after arriving from Twente as the club finished 12th in the Bundesliga. Philippe Clement called him an exciting player with valuable European experience at the time, saying he’d already shown his attacking qualities in the Eredivisie and at Wolfsburg and would strengthen the squad’s attacking options. And it wasn’t just talk — he was genuinely excellent in flashes, scoring twice and assisting once in a 4-0 win over FCSB in the Europa League, part of Rangers’ biggest-ever win in that competition. That kind of direct goal involvement is exactly why his name still comes up as the type of player Rangers wish they’d held onto. And yet even with performances like that, Kris Boyd was reportedly unconvinced a deal would get done to keep him, citing Sima and Tillman as examples of loan players whose valuations shot up at Rangers to the point the club couldn’t afford them. Almost a nice problem to have, but it ends the same way — good player, no permanent deal, gone.
That’s the pattern this new piece is reacting to when it brings up Kim Min-su. The framing is basically: we keep having loan players be our best players and permanent signings be hit or miss, Raskin’s the one big permanent hit, and Kim might be the next one because unlike a loan he’s reportedly being pursued as a proper deal. Girona’s Kim Min-su is reportedly closing in on a move to Ibrox, per TEAMtalk — 20 years old, seemingly set to head to Glasgow. The article frames him as even more of a talent than another target Rangers had been tracking, which tells you the club, or at least whoever’s writing this, rates him pretty highly relative to alternatives already linked.
Context on why Derek McInnes specifically needs this to work matters too. There’s a line in the piece saying Rangers have prioritised quantity over quality this summer, still chasing their tail after what’s called a dismal 2025 window, and that the loan-heavy approach from last season mostly flattered to deceive outside of Moore, with Antman and Rothwell both already moved on just a year after arriving. That last detail is the sharpest part of the argument, honestly, because it’s not abstract — it’s literally guys who were at the club twelve months ago and are already gone, which is exactly the cycle the piece says needs to stop. The framing is that under McInnes, the club needs consistency, needs players it isn’t desperate to offload again within a year — which, by implication, is the standard Kim is being held to efore he’s even signed.
There’s real weight behind why Rangers are moving fast and working multiple fronts at once here, not just Kim. Separate reporting from the same news sweep mentions Rangers still pushing to sign a forward described as an exciting 19-goal striker, as part of what’s being called a crucial double deal, plus other lines about the club still chasing a late winger transfer, with only two scenarios reportedly left in that particular pursuit. None of that is Kim-specific, but it paints a picture of a club working the market hard in the closing days, trying to get multiple attacking additions over the line simultaneously rather than banking everything on one deal — which tracks for a club that knows it can’t afford another underwhelming window after last year’s reviews.
It’s worth putting Raskin’s actual standing at the club into the mix too, since he’s the whole benchmark being invoked here. Rangers were reportedly ready to offer Raskin a contract extension beyond his deal running to 2027, not wanting to lose both him and forward Hamza Igamane amid interest from clubs in England and France. Separately, a Scottish football analyst described him as phenomenal, someone who’d improved the whole team since coming back from injury. On the money side, Scott Arfield reckoned Rangers might have to settle for something close to £10million if Raskin gets sold this summer, telling fans to get realistic about the price. So you’ve got a player the club wanted to extend, who’s been praised as transformative to the team’s level, and who’s now valued in eight figures if he leaves. That’s the full arc of what a genuinely successful Ibrox signing looks like, from arrival to potential departure — and it’s the exact arc this piece is hoping Kim Min-su can replicate, just hopefully without the “and then we sell him” ending quite so soon.
On the fee and structure of the actual Kim deal, I’ll be straight — it’s just not in what’s been reported yet, at least not in what surfaced tonight. No number, no contract length, no confirmation of permanent versus some loan mechanism, nothing on wages. What we have is “closing in,” what we have is “seemingly set to head to Glasgow,” what we have is him being rated above at least one other target Rangers were considering. That’s meaningfully different from confirmed, and it’s worth not treating it as done business even though the framing throughout is pretty optimistic about how advanced things are.
Zooming out on why this particular framing — best signing since Raskin — lands the way it does, I think it’s because Raskin’s success wasn’t really about hype, it was about durability and week-to-week reliability, showing up game after game and being good more often than not, across managers even, across all the instability described above. That’s a different kind of praise from “scored a great goal on loan” praise — it’s closer to “you can build a team around this guy” praise. So tagging Kim with that comparison before he’s even completed a medical is a pretty big bet from whoever’s writing it. It’s saying this isn’t just another exciting attacking name, this is a foundation piece. Whether that holds up is obviously all still ahead of us, and given Rangers’ recent history with exactly this kind of hopeful framing not always working out, I’d treat the comparison as aspirational marketing language dressed up as analysis until he’s actually played twenty or thirty games in a row and the club hasn’t already flipped him for a profit.
Happy to go find the actual fee and medical timing specifically if you want — that’s the part of this story that’s still genuinely developing, and a follow-up search there would get you real new information rather than me reorganizing the same handful of facts again.
