Despite never meeting him, Rangers may have made a mistake letting this star go

Derek McInnes has already braced Ibrox for life without him, reinforcing the engine room with Dan Neil, Cammy Devlin and Vanja Dragojevic in a summer rebuild that has touched almost every position on the pitch. The manager has publicly admitted that Nicolas Raskin was always viewed as a flight risk the moment his stock rose at the World Cup, and with Fenerbahce now making early contact to sound out the financial terms of a move, the sense inside Ibrox is that this saga is edging toward its final act. Reports out of England suggest Raskin could be gone by deadline day, with Rangers reportedly ready to lower their asking price in the closing stages of the window just to get a deal over the line. On paper, it all sounds like smart, forward-thinking business: cash in on your most saleable asset while his value is at its peak, reinvest the money across the building blocks of a squad in transition, and let a player who has made his ambitions clear go and chase them elsewhere. But peel back the noise, the swap-deal fantasies and the pressure of a rebuild that desperately needs funding, and there’s a strong case that letting Raskin leave this window would be one of the costliest calls this Rangers board has made in years.

Start with what he actually is on the pitch, because it is easy to lose sight of the football underneath all the transfer speculation. Raskin has made 145 appearances for Rangers since arriving from Standard Liège in January 2023 for a fee in the region of £1.5million, a deal that already looks like one of the great pieces of business under the previous regime given where his valuation sits now. He has operated as a nominal defensive midfielder for most of that spell, but anyone who has watched him regularly knows that label barely does justice to what he offers. He drives the team forward from deep, he carries the ball through midfield thirds that other players would rather pass their way around, and he has the engine to both break up opposition attacks and arrive late in the box to finish them off. Across the 2025/26 Premiership campaign he was directly involved in double figures for goal contributions, chipping in with goals and assists from a role that is not designed to produce end product, and he did it while playing full 90 minutes in a long, consecutive run of matches once he nailed down his position under the previous management. Few players at Ibrox in recent seasons have combined that level of defensive discipline with attacking output, and fewer still have done it as a nailed-on first name on the team sheet.

The numbers only tell part of the story. What Raskin represents to this Rangers side right now is control. In a Scottish Premiership where matches are so often decided by moments of chaos, by second balls won or lost, by a midfield that either dictates tempo or gets dragged into a scrap, Raskin is one of the very few players in the building capable of imposing calm on a game through sheer physical and technical presence. He wins duels, he recycles possession under pressure, and he has the range of passing to switch play and relieve pressure when Rangers are pinned back. That is an unusual and valuable profile, and it is precisely the sort of player that title-chasing sides in Scotland cannot easily replace from within their existing squad, no matter how many midfielders arrive through the door over the summer. Neil, Devlin and Dragojevic are all sensible additions and each brings something to McInnes’s engine room, but none of them arrives with Raskin’s ceiling, his Belgium pedigree or his proven record of performing week in, week out at the level Rangers require domestically and in Europe. Building a midfield around three or four cheaper alternatives is a reasonable strategy in theory, but it assumes those players can collectively replicate what one exceptional individual currently provides, and that assumption rarely survives first contact with a genuinely difficult away fixture or a European night against sharper opposition.

That international pedigree is worth dwelling on, because it is central to why this transfer saga has accelerated so quickly. Raskin only made his senior Belgium debut in 2025 after working his way up through every age group from under-15 level, but he wasted little time making himself impossible to ignore. He featured at the 2026 World Cup in North America, coming off the bench against Egypt and playing a genuine role in Belgium’s fightback to salvage a draw, and he continued to be involved as the tournament progressed. For a Rangers player to go to a World Cup and come back with his stock higher rather than lower is not something that happens often, and it is a testament to how far his game has come since he first arrived in Glasgow as a promising but unproven 21-year-old. It has also, inevitably, been the single biggest driver of the transfer speculation. Scouts do not need convincing anymore. They watched him do it on the biggest stage there is, against senior international opposition, and they liked what they saw enough to start picking up the phone. There is also a wrinkle worth noting on the international side: with Rudi Garcia having moved on and Mark van Bommel now in charge of the Belgian setup, Raskin’s path to nailing down a regular starting berth is not entirely secured, particularly with Amadou Onana’s long-term injury creating an opening rather than guaranteeing one. That uncertainty has, if anything, sharpened the belief around Raskin’s camp that a bigger club and a more prominent European stage will do more for his international prospects than another season in Glasgow, however productive that season might be.

And the phones have not stopped ringing. Over the course of this saga, Raskin has been strongly linked with an extraordinary spread of clubs across multiple leagues. Villarreal and Roma were reported as the frontrunners for a period over the summer, with Voetbalkrant and other Belgian outlets suggesting genuine movement on that front. Atalanta made contact over the interest of representatives after selling Ederson to Manchester City and identifying Raskin as a possible option under Maurizio Sarri. Hull City had an opening offer knocked back, while Aston Villa, West Ham, Leeds, Crystal Palace, Wolves, Tottenham and Brighton have all been credited with scouting him at various points over the past eighteen months. Real Betis, Porto and Besiktas have registered interest from further afield. And now, in the closing stretch of the window, Fenerbahce have emerged as the latest name in the frame, with Turkish sources indicating the Istanbul giants have opened dialogue with Ibrox to establish what a deal would cost. That is not the profile of a squad player being politely enquired about. That is the profile of a wanted man, chased by clubs across four or five different leagues, all of whom have watched the same tape and reached the same conclusion: this is a serious footballer entering the peak years of his career. It is worth pausing on just how rare that kind of universal admiration is for a player operating outside one of Europe’s traditional big five leagues. Scottish football does not often produce midfielders who draw sustained interest from Serie A, La Liga and the Premier League simultaneously, and the fact that Raskin has managed it speaks to a level that goes well beyond simply being the best player in a two-horse domestic race.

Which is exactly why letting him leave now, rather than fighting to keep him or at the very least delaying the sale by another year, carries such risk. Raskin only has his contract running until 2028, and Rangers are understood to value him at somewhere between £18million and £20million, though reports throughout the summer suggested the valuation crept as high as £25-30million at various points depending on the source and the moment. That is a substantial fee by Scottish football standards, and there is no pretending it would not represent a significant boost to a summer rebuild that has already been extensive under McInnes. But football history, and Rangers’ own history in particular, is littered with examples of clubs selling their best asset for what looked like a healthy fee at the time, only to watch that money get spread thin across multiple signings that never come close to replicating what was lost. Selling one genuinely excellent, proven, homegrown-feeling player and hoping three or four incoming additions can collectively replace his output is a gamble more often lost than won. Raskin is not simply a good player Rangers happen to have; he is arguably the closest thing this current squad has to an undisputed best player, and there is a meaningful difference between selling a very good squad member and selling the one player opposition managers plan specifically around. Rangers fans have watched this film before, losing key departures during previous managerial transitions only to spend a full season trying to patch the gap they left behind, and there is a legitimate fear that history could be about to repeat itself in the middle of yet another rebuild.

There is also a footballing romance to this that shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly, even in an era where sentiment rarely wins arguments in modern boardrooms. Raskin has, by all accounts, embraced life at Ibrox in a way that goes beyond the usual platitudes players offer when a transfer saga drags on. During his break after the World Cup, rather than disappearing on an extended holiday, he made time to visit his childhood club, Royal Stade Waremmien, and surprised thirty children at a summer football camp being run by his own brother. It is a small detail in the grand scheme of a transfer saga worth tens of millions of pounds, but it speaks to a player who has never given off the sense of simply passing through Glasgow on his way to somewhere bigger, even while acknowledging that his ambitions ultimately point elsewhere. His grandfather has previously spoken about how close Raskin came to leaving in an earlier window and how genuine his disappointment was when that deal collapsed, alongside insisting the player remains committed to Rangers and loves both the club and its supporters. None of that guarantees loyalty overrides ambition forever, and few would blame a 25-year-old at the peak of his powers for wanting regular European football at a higher level. But it does complicate the simple story that this is a player desperate to escape at the first opportunity, and it raises a fair question about whether Rangers have done everything possible to build a project compelling enough to make him stay, rather than simply accepting his departure as inevitable and planning around it from the moment his World Cup stock started rising.

The football argument against selling only strengthens when you consider the fixture list ahead. Rangers have Europa League qualifying commitments against Jagiellonia Białystok fresh in the memory, a Scottish Premiership title race that promises to be as competitive as ever, and cup competitions layered on top of an already congested calendar. Losing a player capable of playing 90 minutes across dozens of matches in a single season, in a specific and difficult-to-replicate role, in the middle of that kind of schedule, is not a decision to be taken lightly regardless of how the incoming transfer funds get reinvested. Midfielders who can shoulder that workload without a dip in quality are rare, and rushing replacements into that void midway through a title challenge is a considerably riskier proposition than integrating them during a calmer close-season spell. If Rangers do sell, the timing of any incoming departure relative to the qualifying rounds and the opening months of the league campaign becomes almost as important as the fee itself, because a squad light on control in central midfield during a run of fixtures against Europa League opposition and direct title rivals is a squad exposed at exactly the moments that matter most. There is also the question of who actually replaces him in a like-for-like sense. Reports have floated the idea of using Raskin funds to finally land Lewis Ferguson from Bologna, a player McInnes has admired for some time, but there is no guarantee that deal gets done even with the money in place, and even if it does, integrating a new arrival from Serie A into a title race is a very different proposition to simply keeping the player who already knows the league, the club and the demands of Ibrox inside out.

There is a counterargument, of course, and it deserves to be represented fairly. Rangers do need the money. The scale of the rebuild under McInnes has been considerable, touching goalkeeper, defence, midfield and attack, and funding that kind of turnover requires sales as well as spending. Pundits close to the club, including Kris Boyd, have made the point publicly that Rangers need the revenue a Raskin sale would generate, and that his departure could in turn trigger further outgoings to balance the books. There is also a case that selling a 25-year-old at what may be close to peak value, rather than risking a dip in form, an injury, or a contract standoff closer to 2028, is simply sound financial management, the kind that keeps a club competitive over a longer horizon rather than mortgaging the future for one more strong season with him in the team. Raskin himself has been open about wanting to test himself at a higher level, telling reporters during the World Cup that he was leaving the situation in the hands of his representatives while focusing on the tournament, language that hardly suggests a player fighting to stay. And with his contract ticking down toward its final year, there is a rational argument that this genuinely is the last realistic window to maximise his value before Rangers risk losing more leverage in any future negotiation. There is also a sell-on clause owed to Standard Liège worth factoring into the club’s thinking, which slightly reduces the net benefit of any sale but does not remove the broader financial logic of cashing in while interest remains this widespread.

Those are not trivial points, and any fair assessment of this saga has to hold both sides in view at once. But even accounting for the financial logic, there remains something uncomfortable about a club as historically significant as Rangers treating its best individual talent as primarily a funding mechanism for the rest of the squad, rather than as the foundation you build everything else around. Great sides are not assembled by selling their best players and hoping the sum of several replacements adds up to what was lost; they are built by identifying the players capable of lifting everyone around them and doing whatever it takes to keep them in the building for as long as possible, then adding smartly around that spine. Fans have already made their unease known across social media and phone-ins, with plenty resigned to the sale but few genuinely enthusiastic about it, and that gap between resignation and enthusiasm tends to be where regret quietly builds over the course of a season. If Raskin does depart before the window closes, whether to Fenerbahce, a return to Villarreal or Roma’s interest, or any of the other clubs that have circled him this summer, Rangers will bank a significant fee and McInnes will no doubt talk about reinvestment and squad depth and the inevitability of losing your best players in a league of this size. All of that will be true, up to a point. But the harder truth, the one that tends to only become obvious in hindsight once a midfield lacks the control it once had and a title race slips narrowly away, is that some players are simply worth more to a football club than any transfer fee can compensate for. Nicolas Raskin looks very much like one of them, and Rangers letting him go, whatever the financial case, risks becoming a mistake this club is still discussing for years to come