Rangers must go all out to sign 122-cap free-agent international as Shankland injury
Rangers’ injury crisis in attack has reached a point where simply hoping the current squad can cope may no longer be a sustainable strategy. With Youssef Chermiti already ruled out for a significant period and now captain Lawrence Shankland facing an extended spell on the sidelines with what manager Derek McInnes has described as a “significant” hamstring injury, the argument for the Ibrox club to explore the free agent market has grown considerably louder. One name being floated prominently in that conversation is Jordan Ayew — the 34-year-old Ghana international with 122 caps to his name, who remains available having left Leicester City at the end of last season
To understand why the idea of a free agent striker signing has gained such traction, it’s worth laying out exactly how difficult Rangers’ attacking picture has become in a remarkably short space of time. The trouble began earlier this season when Youssef Chermiti, who had been one of the club’s most reliable goal threats, suffered a serious knee injury against Hibernian — reportedly shortly after Rangers had turned down a substantial bid from Galatasaray for the forward. That injury was subsequently confirmed as significant enough to potentially rule him out for the remainder of the entire campaign, an enormous blow given how heavily the team’s attacking output had relied on his contributions.
That left Rangers leaning almost entirely on their summer signing Lawrence Shankland to lead the line, and for a period, that reliance appeared to be paying off. Since arriving from Hearts, Shankland scored three goals in his opening five league appearances for the club, including a run of form immediately prior to his injury that saw him net in back-to-back matches against Aberdeen and Falkirk. That form made his subsequent injury against Motherwell all the more painful — struck down just eight minutes into the match, with McInnes admitting afterward that it looked “quite significant” and drawing a direct parallel to a similar hamstring problem Shankland suffered during his time at Hearts, an issue that kept him out for a lengthy period on that occasion.
With both of the club’s primary attacking outlets now unavailable, Rangers find themselves in a genuinely precarious position. The club currently sits fourth in the Scottish Premiership table, having won just three of their opening five league matches — a position that leaves little margin for further disruption, particularly with the transfer window now closed and no conventional route available to bring in reinforcements through the usual
It’s against this backdrop that Jordan Ayew’s name has been raised as a potential solution. The Ghanaian forward remains a free agent having departed Leicester City following the end of last season, and at 34 years old, he brings a wealth of experience gathered across multiple leagues and countries throughout a lengthy professional career.
His recent output offers some genuine encouragement for anyone at Ibrox considering whether he might be worth pursuing. Despite playing for a Leicester City side that endured a difficult campaign overall, Ayew still managed to contribute nine goals and assists in the league last season — a respectable return given the broader struggles of the team around him. That followed an even more productive Premier League campaign the year before, in which he found the net five times, underlining that even at this stage of his career, he retains a genuine ability to contribute to a team’s attacking output at a reasonably high level.
Beyond the statistics, Ayew’s 122 international caps for Ghana speak to a level of consistency, professionalism, and quality that has seen him remain a fixture in his national team setup across a lengthy international career. That kind of experience — having represented his country at major tournaments and competed at the highest level of the international game for well over a decade — is the sort of profile that could bring genuine value to a Rangers dressing room currently navigating a difficult and unexpected attacking crisis, offering not just goals and assists but the calming influence of a player who has seen and dealt with pressure situations many times before.
There’s a reasonably compelling logic underpinning the argument that Rangers should pursue Ayew or a similar free agent option. With the transfer window closed, the club’s ability to address its attacking shortfall through conventional means has effectively evaporated — whatever solutions McInnes has access to for the next several months will need to come either from within the existing squad or from the free agent market, which remains open to clubs regardless of the broader transfer window’s status.
Given the scale of what Rangers have lost in Chermiti and Shankland — the pair combined for 31 league goals between them last season, both finishing in the top four of the division’s scoring charts behind only Motherwell’s Tawanda Maswanhise and Celtic’s Benjamin Nygren — the gap left in the squad’s attacking output is significant. Shankland’s 16 league goals for Hearts and Chermiti’s 15 for Rangers represented genuinely elite production at Scottish Premiership level, and replacing anything close to that combined output using only the remaining options at McInnes’s disposal represents an extremely tall order.
A free agent signing like Ayew wouldn’t need to be a long-term, transformative addition to the squad. Given his age and the specific circumstances of his availability, any deal would likely be structured as a short-term measure, designed purely to provide additional cover and competition for places during the specific window in which Rangers are missing both of their primary strikers. That kind of pragmatic, short-term thinking is exactly the sort of move plenty of clubs across Europe make when hit with unexpected attacking injuries mid-season, and Ayew’s specific profile — proven Premier League and international-level quality, available on a free transfer, with no transfer fee required — makes him a logical name to have emerged in that context
It’s worth noting that Ayew isn’t the only free agent option being discussed in connection with Rangers’ current predicament. Other reports covering the club’s situation have floated a wider range of possible free agent strikers, reflecting just how actively the idea of an emergency signing has been debated across Scottish football media in the days since Shankland’s injury was confirmed.
Among the names mentioned elsewhere in this broader conversation are players with varied profiles: some viewed more as facilitators who might not be expected to score twenty goals a season but could offer a different dimension to the attack, potentially freeing up other forwards to focus more heavily on finishing; others with extensive experience in leagues like the Eredivisie or in markets such as Saudi Arabia, where certain forwards have found notable goalscoring success in recent seasons. There have even been more speculative names floated with previous, decade-old connections to Scottish football, including one player Rangers were reportedly linked with as far back as 2019, who has since built a reliable goalscoring record across various leagues including South Africa, Romania, and Azerbaijan.
The sheer breadth of names being discussed underlines both the genuine urgency of Rangers’ situation and the reality that there’s no single, obvious solution readily available. Free agent markets, by their nature, tend to consist of players who, for one reason or another, haven’t secured a new club through the conventional transfer window process — meaning any option Rangers pursue is likely to come with its own set of question marks, whether related to age, recent form, adaptability to Scottish football, or simply the unpredictability that comes with signing a player who has been without a club for an extended period.
For all the logic behind pursuing a free agent striker, there are meaningful counterarguments that suggest Rangers may ultimately choose a different path. Perhaps the most significant practical consideration relates to squad management and the club’s wage structure. Discussion among Rangers’ own supporter community has highlighted a fairly pragmatic concern: bringing in an additional free agent striker at this stage would leave the club carrying six strikers on the books simultaneously, once Chermiti, Shankland, Kevin Kelsy, Ryan Naderi, and Bojan Miovski are all accounted for alongside any new arrival. That represents a considerable financial commitment to a single position, particularly for a squad that will eventually need Chermiti and Shankland back to full fitness and full involvement once their respective recovery periods conclude.
There’s also a historical dimension to this discussion worth considering. According to conversation among Rangers followers monitoring the situation closely, the club has apparently not made a habit of signing free agents once a transfer window has already closed in recent history — suggesting this kind of emergency market move would represent something of a departure from how the club has typically approached similar situations in the past, even during previous periods of attacking injury crisis.
Instead, the more likely outcome, at least according to that same body of supporter discussion, is that Rangers will simply lean more heavily on Bojan Miovski to fill the void, rather than pursuing an external free agent solution. That’s a notable consideration given everything that’s been reported separately about Miovski’s own situation in recent days — with the Macedonian forward having confirmed he’s currently without agent representation and handling matters relating to his career personally, a situation widely interpreted as a signal that he may be looking to force through an exit from Ibrox given his previously limited involvement in the first-team picture this season.
If Rangers do indeed choose to lean on Miovski rather than pursue a free agent addition, it creates an interesting subplot to this entire situation. Miovski’s numbers from his time in Scottish football prior to signing for Rangers were genuinely eye-catching — he scored 44 goals across two seasons for Aberdeen before making his move to Girona in Spain, a return that made him an attractive target when Rangers eventually brought him to Ibrox. His output in Spain proved considerably less prolific, managing only five goals in twelve months there, and since arriving at Rangers, his tally of 13 goals last season came largely from appearances off the bench rather than as a regular starter.
This season, prior to Shankland’s injury, Miovski had featured for only around 40 minutes in total — an extraordinarily limited role for a player signed for a fee in the region of £2.6million little over a year ago. That lack of game time, combined with his subsequent decision to part ways with his representation, paints a picture of a player who had, at least until very recently, appeared to be drifting toward the exit door at Ibrox rather than positioning himself as a central figure in the club’s attacking plans.
Circumstances, however, have a way of changing rapidly in football, and the sudden void created by Shankland’s injury may yet offer Miovski an unexpected route back into regular first-team contention — provided he’s willing to embrace that opportunity rather than continuing to push for a move away from the club. Whether McInnes trusts him to deliver in a significantly expanded role, given his previously peripheral involvement and the swirling speculation around his future, remains to be seen, but it’s clearly one of the options under genuine consideration as the club weighs up how to navigate this period without either of its primary strikers.
Any conversation about Rangers’ response to the Shankland injury inevitably circles back to Kevin Kelsy, the club’s £9million deadline-day signing from Portland Timbers. Former Rangers goalkeeper Cammy Bell has been particularly direct in his assessment of the situation, suggesting that Kelsy represents the most natural replacement for Shankland and will likely need to “step up to the plate” far sooner than originally anticipated, given the confluence of circumstances that have left Rangers so short of attacking options.
Bell’s reasoning is straightforward and grounded in simple financial logic: when a club invests £9million in a striker, there’s a natural expectation that he’ll be the one relied upon to lead the line when needed, regardless of how settled he’s actually had the opportunity to become since arriving. McInnes himself acknowledged as much when asked directly whether Shankland’s injury made Kelsy’s arrival all the more significant, confirming that it did in fairly unambiguous terms.
That reality arguably strengthens, rather than weakens, the case for Rangers still pursuing a free agent addition like Ayew. Rather than viewing an emergency signing as a replacement for Kelsy specifically, it could instead be framed as additional depth and competition designed to relieve some of the pressure being placed on a young player who has barely had any time to settle into Scottish football, let alone carry the primary goalscoring burden for a club with genuine Champions League ambitions this season.
Ultimately, the decision over whether to pursue Ayew, another free agent option, or simply trust the existing squad to navigate this period will come down to a combination of financial pragmatism, McInnes’s own assessment of what his squad genuinely needs, and the club’s broader strategic thinking around squad management for the remainder of the season.
There’s a reasonable argument that the cautious, incremental approach — trusting Kelsy and Naderi to share the goalscoring burden, with Miovski offering an additional experienced option if required — represents the more sensible path, avoiding the financial commitment and squad-balance complications that come with adding a sixth recognised striker to the wage bill for what would likely be a relatively short-term period before Shankland and eventually Chermiti return to full fitness.
Equally, there’s a compelling counter-argument that with genuine Champions League qualification ambitions on the line and an Old Firm double-header against Celtic looming on the calendar, Rangers can ill afford to gamble on unproven or inexperienced options carrying the goalscoring burden through such a pivotal stretch of the season. A short-term free agent addition with the proven top-level pedigree that a player like Ayew offers could provide exactly the kind of experienced insurance policy McInnes might value, even if it does mean carrying an additional player on the books for a relatively brief
For now, Rangers’ approach to this situation remains something of an open question. The club has given no strong public indication of whether it intends to move for Ayew, explore any of the other free agent names that have been floated in various reports, or simply back its existing squad to cope with the situation using internal resources alone. What is clear is that McInnes and his coaching staff have a genuinely difficult decision to make in the coming days and weeks, with significant fixtures — including the looming Old Firm clashes with Celtic — arriving fast and offering little time for lengthy deliberation.
Whatever direction the club ultimately chooses, the broader picture underlines just how quickly circumstances can shift in football. A squad that appeared to have reasonable attacking depth at the start of the season now finds itself scrambling for solutions after losing both of its primary centre-forwards to serious injuries within the space of a few short weeks. Whether that solution comes from within — via Kelsy, Naderi, or a reintegrated Miovski — or from an external addition like Jordan Ayew, brought in specifically to provide experienced firepower and depth during this unexpectedly difficult period, will likely go a long way toward determining how successfully Rangers navigate the months ahead without their captain and one of their most reliable attacking outlets.
