He’s Set to Leave Ibrox”: Is John Souttar the Signing Rangers Got Least From?
A FootballFanCast opinion column this week argues that Rangers have been “rinsed dry” by a signing worse than Cammy Devlin, and that the player in question is on his way out of the club. The piece names John Souttar, the 30-year-old Scotland defender who joined from Hearts in 2022 and who now finds himself training at Auchenhowie without a place in Derek McInnes’s matchday squads.
It is a deliberately provocative framing. Devlin, the free-signing Australian midfielder recruited from Hearts this summer, has himself been the subject of a run of similar columns questioning whether his style suits a team that expects to dominate games. To say that Souttar is worse is to make a stronger claim, and it is worth testing against what has actually happened, because the underlying situation is both real and unusual: a senior international, with a contract renewed only eight months ago, who has been told publicly by his manager that his long-term future lies elsewhere.
A note on sourcing: FootballFanCast blocks automated access, so I could not read the full column. What follows draws on the argument visible in its published excerpts, together with reporting from Football Insider, Yahoo Sports, Inside Ibrox, Give Me Sport and FootballFanCast’s own earlier news coverage of Souttar’s situation.
The FootballFanCast argument, as far as it can be reconstructed, rests on a comparison. Devlin arrived on a free transfer on a two-year deal, with earnings the column puts at a little under £460,000 across the contract. The suggestion is that whatever Devlin’s limitations, his cost is modest, so any disappointment is limited. Souttar, by contrast, is presented as the more expensive mistake, a player brought in for his Scottish top-flight experience who never became the defensive foundation Rangers hoped for.
The column also places Souttar inside a wider pattern. Rangers, it argues, have repeatedly signed players because they are proven in Scottish football rather than because they meet the technical and physical standards a dominant club needs. It points out that Souttar arrived in 2022 having played more than 160 times for Hearts and already capped by Scotland, and that his time at Ibrox has coincided with one of the club’s driest spells for trophies in the top flight, with a single League Cup to show for it.
That is an opinion, and a harsh one. But it is anchored in a genuine sequence of events.
Souttar’s Rangers career began with a free transfer. A pre-contract agreement was announced during the 2021-22 season, and the move was completed on 1 June 2022. He made his debut in a 2-1 win over Livingston that July, but his first season was disrupted by injury, and he did not play again until early March 2023. His first goal for the club came in a 3-0 derby win over Celtic that May, the kind of moment that briefly suggested he might become a fixture.
Over the following years he accumulated 132 appearances and four goals, a solid if unspectacular return for a first-choice-calibre centre-back across four seasons. The club took the view in February this year that he was worth keeping, announcing a new agreement that runs to May 2027 with an option for a further year. Yahoo Sports noted at the time how sudden the subsequent change of status appeared.
That change came in the summer. Souttar was part of Scotland’s squad at the World Cup but, in the words of Give Me Sport’s reporting, his lack of minutes led to him returning early to Auchenhowie. When McInnes took the squad to its pre-season camp in Spain, Souttar was left behind. Reports at the time said he had been told he had no future at the club, and that interest had emerged from clubs in England.
What followed was a drawn-out attempt to find him a way out. Greek side Aris Thessaloniki pursued him through the summer, and the move repeatedly changed direction. The sticking point was money. According to reports, Souttar wanted Rangers to pay up the remainder of his contract, which runs until summer 2027, before he would commit to the move. Rangers were willing to let him leave if a compromise could be reached, but declined that request, and for a time the deal looked dead.
Football FanCast reported an apparent late breakthrough, saying that sources understood an agreement was close to void the rest of his contract so that he could join Aris before the Greek window closed. It did not happen. Football Insider subsequently reported that the two clubs failed to agree a deal before the deadline passed.
Other names have been mentioned along the way. Souttar has been linked with a reunion with Russell Martin at Leicester City, with MLS clubs, and with a return to Hearts, the club where he came through. None has progressed, and Rangers’ own domestic window is now shut, meaning any move before January would have to be to a club abroad.
McInnes has been unusually direct. Speaking before a home game against St Mirren, he said the likelihood was that Souttar had been told his long-term future would be best served elsewhere. He added that going somewhere to play regular football might be the best option for the player, and stressed that if nothing materialised the club would honour the contract and bring him back into the group.
That last point matters. It means Souttar is neither being frozen out permanently nor being offered a route back into the team. He is in a holding pattern, on Rangers’ books and paid accordingly, with the manager publicly saying the door is open to a departure but not to an early termination.
The latest reporting suggests the holding pattern will not last past the winter. Football Insider says Souttar will leave in the January window because he has no realistic chance of becoming a regular under McInnes. It notes that he has not made a competitive matchday squad so far this season, and that he has lost his place in the Scotland squad under new head coach Sebastien Pocognoli, giving him an additional reason to seek weekly football to win it back. The same report says Rangers are unlikely to agree a pay-off that would let him walk away as a free agent.
The financial logic explains why. With his contract expiring in June 2027, Rangers face the prospect of losing him for nothing at the end of the season unless they either sell him in January or use their option to extend the deal to 2028. Yahoo Sports has pointed out that taking up that option might be a way of securing a transfer fee, since a club cannot sell a player it has already lost. Souttar’s situation is one of several at Ibrox where a contract is running down, alongside Ross McCausland and Jose Cifuentes, and the club has a clear interest in limiting the number of players it loses on a free.
The comparison is the weakest part of the column, and it is worth being honest about that. Devlin has been at Ibrox for a matter of months. He has been rotated in and out of a midfield that has settled around Nicolas Raskin and Dan Neil, and he was recruited on a free precisely because he was a known quantity to McInnes. Judging his signing over so short a period is premature, and even the critical FootballFanCast pieces on him concede that his low cost limits the downside.
Souttar’s case is different because it is complete. He arrived, played 132 times, signed an extension, and has now been moved out of the plans. The relevant question is not whether he was a bad player, because a regular Scotland international with more than 100 appearances for a club is not that, but whether Rangers received value from the arrangement. On that, the evidence is mixed. He gave the club four years of service and a League Cup medal but also a first season lost largely to injury, and his exit will leave the club with a contract that has to be resolved one way or another.
The word “rinsed” is also worth examining. It implies that Rangers were taken advantage of, but nothing in the reporting suggests that. Souttar was signed on a free transfer, renewed at the club’s own initiative in February, and is now being moved on because the manager wants a different profile of defender. That is squad management, not exploitation. The more accurate reading is that Rangers made a sensible signing in 2022, made a questionable call to extend him in February, and are now dealing with the consequences of a change of manager and philosophy.
The Souttar situation is also a marker of how thoroughly McInnes has reshaped the squad. James Tavernier departed before he arrived, a raft of loanees have gone, and in the space of a summer he brought in Lawrence Shankland, Ben Godfrey, Devlin, Ross McCrorie, Dan Neil, Ivor Pandur and others. Give Me Sport described his approach as making the kind of brutal decisions Rangers have needed in recent years, and the treatment of Souttar, alongside that of Jack Butland, illustrates the point.
That approach is now producing results, with back-to-back wins over Celtic and a run of unbeaten matches. It has also produced a set of players who were not part of the plan and have to be moved on, and Souttar is the most prominent of them. Whether he leaves in January, sees out his contract on the periphery, or has it extended by the club to secure a fee, his story will be a reference point for how Rangers manage the cost of change.
