There is a particular kind of regret that follows a football club around long after the paperwork on a transfer has been signed, the fee banked, and the player’s shirt taken off the rail. It’s the regret of watching someone you once had, someone you decided you could live without, go on to get better, sharper, and more prolific somewhere else — while the position he used to fill is still, three windows and two managers later, not properly solved. Rangers are living through exactly that kind of regret right now, and the name at the centre of it is Fashion Sakala.
It has been three years since Michael Beale sanctioned the sale of the Zambian winger to Al-Fayha in Saudi Arabia for a fee in the region of £3m, a deal that looked, at the time, like tidy business. Sakala had arrived on a free transfer from Belgian side Oostende in the summer of 2021, so turning him into a seven-figure sale two years later was pure profit on the balance sheet. Nobody at Ibrox was going to lose sleep over cashing in on a player who had joined for nothing. But football has a habit of punishing clubs who measure transfers purely in accounting terms, and Sakala’s rise since he left Scotland is becoming a case study in exactly
Beale’s rationale in the summer of 2023 wasn’t unreasonable on its face. He wanted to remould his attack, and Sakala, for all his end product, was viewed as an inconsistent, mercurial figure — capable of moments of real quality but not someone the manager felt he could build a system around. Selling him to the Saudi Pro League, at a time when the division was hoovering up wages and fees at an alarming rate for clubs across Europe, felt like the kind of deal a selling club takes without hesitation.
What got lost in that calculation was exactly what Sakala had actually given Rangers across his two seasons in Govan. Twenty-four goals and fifteen assists in ninety-one appearances is a genuinely productive record for a wide forward at a club competing on multiple fronts, including a run to the Europa League final under Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Sakala wasn’t merely a squad option who chipped in occasionally — he was a starter-level attacking threat who could be deployed on the right wing, cutting in onto his favoured left foot, or centrally as an out-and-out striker when Rangers needed a different profile up front. That versatility is worth dwelling on, because it’s precisely the kind of attribute that tends to be undervalued at the point of sale and painfully missed once it’s gone.
Sakala’s move to Al-Fayha never generated much attention in Scotland. The Saudi Pro League, for all the noise around its superstar imports, isn’t a division that British football pays close attention to for players outside the marquee names, and a Zambian international heading there in his mid-twenties barely registered as a footnote once the transfer window shut. But three years on, the numbers coming out of Saudi Arabia paint a picture of a player who has not just survived the move but improved.
In the current Saudi Pro League campaign, Sakala has racked up thirteen goals and five assists in twenty-nine appearances, a return that puts him comfortably clear of every teammate at Al-Fayha in terms of combined goal involvements. He leads the squad in expected goals, in expected goals on target, in shots and shots on target per ninety minutes, in successful dribbles per ninety, and in chances created — a spread of underlying numbers that isn’t the profile of a player coasting through games on reputation, but one who is genuinely driving his team’s attack. His goals-per-ninety rate of roughly 0.52 this season is the kind of return most Rangers strikers over the last three years would have taken gladly, and it’s a rate that has been building rather than flattering to deceive: as recently as February, Sakala had seven goals and three assists from nineteen appearances, meaning he has more than doubled his output in the months since while barely missing a match, having started all twenty-nine of Al-Fayha’s league games this season.
That durability matters as much as the raw numbers. One of the recurring criticisms of Sakala during his Ibrox days was fitness and consistency — spells on the sidelines and stretches where his end product dipped alongside his overall involvement in games. The version of Sakala now playing in Saudi Arabia looks like a considerably more complete and reliable operator, someone who is starting every week, playing close to ninety minutes most of the time, and delivering a level of output that would walk into most Scottish Premiership attacks without a second thought.
Rangers, of course, moved to address their centre-forward problem this summer by signing Kevin Kelsy from Portland Timbers for a fee in the region of £9.5m, making the Venezuelan international the second-most expensive signing in the club’s history behind only Tore André Flo’s £12m move from Chelsea back in 2000. It’s an enormous outlay for a 22-year-old who arrived with a modest, if promising, MLS scoring record, and the size of the fee alone tells you how urgently Derek McInnes needed a focal point up front after Youssef Chermiti’s serious ACL injury against Hibernian effectively wiped out his first-choice striker for the season.
Kelsy has the physical profile that excites recruitment departments — 6ft 4in, powerful in the air, comparisons to Victor Osimhen doing the rounds before he’d even kicked a ball in Scotland — but physical potential and the finished article are two very different things, and even the people closest to him have been honest about that gap. Phil Neville, who managed Kelsy at Portland Timbers, was refreshingly candid when the deal was completed, describing a player who “does the little things incredibly well” and possesses genuine star quality in his runs, his arrogance and his self-belief, while also stressing in the same breath that Kelsy is not the finished product and has a long way to go before he delivers on that promise consistently. That’s about as honest an appraisal as you’ll get from a manager talking about a player he clearly rates.
Set against that, the comparison with Sakala becomes stark rather than subtle. Whatever ceiling Kelsy might eventually reach, right now he is an unproven quantity in a new country, a new league, and a new football culture, still searching for his first meaningful run of form on this side of the Atlantic. Sakala, by contrast, has already done the hard part. He has taken time to adapt to a demanding league, found his level, and is now consistently scoring and creating at a rate that few wide forwards or second strikers in his league can match. He has shown, repeatedly and over an extended run of matches, that he can be relied upon as the primary source of goals for his team. Kelsy, for all his talent, has that proof of concept still to provide. In pure goalscoring terms, right now, Sakala is doing something Kelsy hasn’t yet done anywhere near Ibrox: delivering on a nightly
The other deadline-day arrival worth weighing Sakala against is Badredine Bouanani, the Algeria international who joined Rangers from Stuttgart after impressing during a breakout campaign at Nice that persuaded the Bundesliga club to pay a substantial fee for him little over a year ago. On paper, Bouanani ticks a lot of boxes: an explosive dribbler with genuine international pedigree, comfortable playing off the right flank in a way that should complement the rest of Rangers’ attacking options, and still only in his early twenties with what should be his best years ahead of him.
The reality of his season in Germany before the move tells a slightly different story, though. Bouanani struggled for regular game time and end product at Stuttgart this season, managing only a handful of Bundesliga appearances without registering a goal or an assist, and rarely completing a full ninety minutes. That’s not necessarily damning for a player who was adapting to a new country and a physically demanding league for the first time, but it is a reminder that raw ability and end product are not the same thing, and that a big transfer fee is no guarantee that a player will hit the ground running in an unfamiliar environment.
Sakala’s game, when he’s at his best, actually shares a fair amount of DNA with what Bouanani is supposed to offer — pace in behind, comfort taking on a full-back one-on-one, a willingness to cut inside and shoot rather than just deliver a final ball. The crucial difference, again, is output. Where Bouanani is still searching for his first real purple patch in men’s football at the top level, Sakala is in the middle of one right now, in a league that, whatever reservations people have about its overall standard, is not short of well-drilled, physically imposing defences designed specifically to stop wide players like him. He is doing it consistently, against organised opposition, and doing it as the focal point of his team’s attacking play rather than as a squad rotation option.
None of this is to say Kelsy or Bouanani are bad signings, or that either is destined to fail at Ibrox. Both arrived with genuine reasons for optimism, and both are young enough that patience is not just reasonable but necessary. But “better right now” is not the same question as “better eventually,” and on the question of who is producing the more reliable goal and creative output today, the answer is clearly the player Rangers sold three years ago for a fraction of what they’ve just spent on his supposed successors.
What makes the Sakala situation sting a little more is that it isn’t an isolated example. Rangers’ recent recruitment history is littered with players sold too soon who have gone on to thrive elsewhere, sitting alongside a string of high-profile arrivals who have failed to deliver on the pitch. It’s a big part of the explanation for why the club has gone the best part of two years without a trophy, their last piece of silverware coming under Philippe Clement in the League Cup back in 2024, and their last league title stretching all the way back to Steven Gerrard’s triumph in the 2020/21 campaign.
Nicolas Raskin’s departure this past summer is one of the more recent examples of the same pattern playing out — a combative, technically gifted midfielder whose performances for Belgium at the World Cup drew serious interest from clubs across Europe, with Real Betis and Bologna both credited with interest, and whose valuation only rose once he’d left Ibrox rather than while he was still contributing to the team. The saga around Beşiktaş’s rejected bids for Raskin, reportedly worth up to £10.3m, and the suggestion that the Turkish club turned instead to signing Vaclav Cerny — a player Rangers themselves had tried and failed to bring back to Ibrox on a permanent deal after his loan spell — only reinforces how often the club finds itself a step behind in these situations, either selling assets whose value keeps climbing after they leave or losing out on targets to sides more decisive in the market.
Thelo Aasgaard’s loan move to Anderlecht this summer fits a similar shape, a talented attacking player deemed surplus to requirements at Ibrox being given the chance to rebuild his reputation and his market value somewhere else, with the very real possibility that Rangers end up watching him do exactly that from a distance. Add in longer-standing cases of players who left Ibrox and kicked on elsewhere, and a clear theme starts to emerge: Rangers’ academy and recruitment structure has, time and again, proven better at identifying talent than at judging precisely when that talent is about to take the next step forward. Sell too early, and you bank a profit on the balance sheet while a rival reaps the football benefit. It’s happened often enough now that it can no longer be dismissed as bad luck
For Derek McInnes, none of this is really about relitigating a decision made under a different manager, in a different market, with different pressures. Beale is long gone, and Sakala’s sale predates the current manager’s entire tenure at the club. But the pattern matters for McInnes because it’s a preview of the exact trap his current recruitment strategy risks falling into. Spending roughly £9.5m on Kelsy and a substantial fee on Bouanani represents a serious financial commitment to two players who, whatever their long-term ceilings, are unproven in Scottish football and have yet to show the kind of consistent output Sakala is currently producing on a weekly basis in Saudi Arabia.
That’s not an argument against having made those signings — Chermiti’s injury left McInnes with little choice but to move for attacking reinforcements, and both Kelsy and Bouanani arrived with genuine reasons to believe they can grow into their price tags. But it is a reminder of how quickly the calculus around a transfer can flip. Twelve months from now, if either player has settled and started producing numbers to match his fee, this whole conversation will look very different. If they haven’t, Rangers will be having the exact same conversation about two more attacking players who cost significant money and didn’t immediately deliver, while the player they let go for a fraction of the price keeps piling up goals and assists somewhere el
Right now, on the evidence in front of us, Fashion Sakala is a better and more productive attacking player than either Kevin Kelsy or Badredine Bouanani. He is doing it in a league that rarely gets scrutinised by British football media, which is part of why his emergence as one of the most productive wide forwards in Saudi Arabia has gone almost unnoticed back in Scotland. But the underlying numbers — leading his club in goals, chances created, expected goals and expected assists, while starting almost every match — don’t lie. He has answered every question that was being asked of him when Rangers let him go, and answered it more emphatically with every passing month.
That doesn’t mean Rangers made the wrong call in isolation back in 2023. Circumstances change, managers change philosophies, and sometimes selling a good player for a modest profit is simply the pragmatic thing to do given the state of a squad and a wage bill at any given moment. But taken together with Raskin, with Aasgaard, and with the long list of departures who have gone on to better things, Sakala’s rise at Al-Fayha is becoming one more entry in an uncomfortably long ledger — proof that Rangers’ recruitment department still has real work to do, not just in identifying who to bring in, but in recognising who they should be holding onto in the first place.
