Full confirmed list of Rangers ins and outs as 14 join and 19 leave after deadline day

Another summer, another wholesale Rangers rebuild, and this one has been more comprehensive than most. With the transfer window now firmly shut, the scale of the overhaul Derek McInnes has overseen since taking charge at Ibrox can finally be assessed in full: fourteen players arriving, nineteen heading for the exit, a revolving door that has barely stopped spinning since the moment McInnes finally landed the job he had long been linked with. It represents one of the most significant single-window squad rebuilds in recent Rangers history, and with the dust now settling on a frantic deadline day that saw Kevin Kelsy and Badredine Bouanani both arrive in the closing hours, it is worth taking stock of exactly what has gone in, what has gone out, and what kind of Rangers squad McInnes has ended up assembling as a result.

The scale of the challenge facing McInnes when he finally walked through the Ibrox door cannot be overstated. He inherited a squad that had limped home third in the Premiership behind both Celtic and his own old club Hearts the previous season, a collapse under the weight of title pressure that had cost his managerial predecessors their jobs and left Rangers requiring not incremental tinkering but a genuinely structural rebuild across almost every area of the pitch. His first priority, by his own evident design, was stiffening what had become a soft spine to the team, addressing goalkeeping, central defence and central midfield before turning his attention to the attacking positions that would eventually come to define the more eye-catching, big-money end of this summer’s business.

That process had, in truth, already begun before McInnes’s own arrival, with his predecessor Danny Röhl having laid the groundwork for one particularly significant piece of business that would only be completed once McInnes himself was installed in the Ibrox hotseat. Lawrence Shankland’s free transfer switch from Hearts to Rangers was a deal Röhl had a hand in initiating, only for the Scotland striker’s old Tynecastle manager to be the one who ultimately welcomed him through the door and handed him the captaincy. It set the tone for what would follow: a Rangers squad increasingly stocked with players who had worked with McInnes before, trusted faces from his time at Hearts who he clearly felt could help translate the success he built at Tynecastle onto a bigger stage at Ibrox.

Cammy Devlin’s free transfer from Hearts followed Shankland along the M8 not long after, giving McInnes a second player from his old dressing room to build around, this time in central midfield rather than attack. He was joined in reinforcing that particular area of the pitch by two rather different profiles of midfielder: former Sunderland captain Dan Neil, arriving with genuine Championship leadership experience and a point to prove at a bigger club, and Vanja Dragojevic, a promising young talent signed from Partizan Belgrade for a fee in the region of £4.6million, representing the kind of forward-looking, potential-driven investment that sat alongside the more experience-focused signings elsewhere in the same window.

The defensive reinforcement that followed was similarly thorough. Ivor Pandur arrived from Hull City in a £6million deal to take over the goalkeeping duties, a switch that, notably, saw Jack Butland move in the opposite direction to Humberside as part of the broader reshuffling of that position. Ross McCrorie returned to Scottish football from Bristol City for a fee of £900,000, adding experienced defensive cover, while Ben Godfrey arrived on loan from Atalanta, bringing genuine Premier League and Serie A pedigree to a Rangers back line that had looked short of exactly that kind of experience during the previous season’s collapse. Olwethu Makhanya joined from Philadelphia Union for £3million and James Penrice arrived on loan from AEK Athens, further deepening McInnes’s defensive options across what had become, by the time all four defensive signings were completed, one of the busiest and most thoroughly restocked positions of his entire rebuild.

Only once those foundational positions had been addressed did McInnes turn his full attention to the creative and attacking areas of the pitch that this Rangers side had so visibly lacked the previous season. Daisuke Yokota arrived from Hannover 96 for £2.75million to add width and directness, while Kosta Nedeljkovic joined on loan from Aston Villa, bringing further Premier League pedigree into a squad increasingly stocked with players who had proven themselves at a higher level than Scottish football before making the move north. Min-su Kim’s £8.5million arrival from Girona represented one of the marquee pieces of business of the entire window, a genuinely significant fee for a player McInnes clearly views as central to the more expansive, creative football he wants his side to play. And then, right at the very death of deadline day itself, came the two final, dramatic additions that took the summer’s incoming business up to a full fourteen: Kevin Kelsy, arriving from Portland Timbers for around £9million to address the gap left by Youssef Chermiti’s ACL injury, and Badredine Bouanani, completing a loan move from Stuttgart to add one final piece of attacking quality to McInnes’s reshaped forward line.

The outgoing side of the ledger tells an equally significant story, and arguably a more emotionally charged one for Rangers supporters who have watched a genuinely substantial number of familiar faces depart Ibrox across the course of this single window. Six separate loan spells from last season came to their natural conclusion, with Max Aarons returning to parent club Bournemouth, Nasser Djiga heading back to Wolves, Mikey Moore’s temporary stay ending with a return to parent club Tottenham before a subsequent move on to Cologne, Jayden Meghoma going back to Brentford before also moving on again to Portsmouth, Derek Cornelius returning to Marseille, and Andreas Skov Olsen heading back to Wolfsburg before himself moving on to Istanbul Basaksehir. That cluster of six departing loanees alone represented a significant void in terms of squad numbers that McInnes needed to address even before considering any further permanent business, and it goes some way to explaining just why the incoming list ended up needing to stretch to fourteen separate additions across the summer.

Beyond those expiring loan arrangements, the most symbolically significant departure of the entire window was undoubtedly James Tavernier’s exit, bringing to a close an extraordinary eleven-year stint at Ibrox for a player who had become one of the most recognisable and successful captains in the club’s recent history. Tavernier’s departure was confirmed as a straightforward release rather than any kind of transfer fee changing hands, and the framing around the decision has been notably candid: Ibrox hierarchy concluded that breaking apart a leadership group that had ultimately failed to deliver sustained success in recent seasons required moving on even a figure as central and long-serving as Tavernier himself. It is a bold, potentially painful call for any football club to make, moving on a genuinely legendary servant not because of any single failing on his own part but as part of a broader strategic decision about resetting the culture and leadership structure of the dressing room, and it underlines just how thoroughgoing McInnes and the Ibrox hierarchy have been prepared to be in reshaping this squad from top to bottom rather than simply making changes at the margins.

Jack Butland’s departure to Hull, engineered as a direct swap for Pandur arriving in the opposite direction, represented a similarly clean, structurally logical piece of business, while a host of further departures cleared space and recouped fees across various areas of the pitch. Ben Davies left for Bolton on a free transfer, Bailey Rice was sent out on loan to Kilmarnock in the hope of following the same developmental path enjoyed by fellow academy graduate Findlay Curtis during his own loan spell at Rugby Park the previous season, and Leon King departed for Ayr United on a free transfer. Danilo’s loan return to Botafogo in Brazil carries an option to be made permanent, giving both parties flexibility over how that particular situation ultimately resolves itself, while Oliver Antman’s £4.5million move to Anderlecht represented a straightforward permanent sale that will have provided a useful boost to the funds available for McInnes’s own incoming business elsewhere in the window.

The central-midfield department, in particular, underwent almost as dramatic an outward overhaul as it did an inward one. Paul Nsio departed on loan to St Mirren, Nedim Bajrami left on loan for Saudi side Al-Taawoun, and Mohamed Diomande completed a permanent £4.5million move to Turkish club Çorum, a transfer that notably saw Rangers recoup almost exactly the fee they had originally paid Nordsjaelland for the midfielder back in 2024. Lyall Cameron joined Premiership rivals Dundee United on loan, reuniting with a boyhood club he supported as a youngster despite beginning his career at bitter city rivals Dundee, while Connor Barron’s own season-long loan move to Middlesbrough added yet another central-midfield departure to what had already become a heavily thinned-out area of the squad by the closing days of the window. Rounding out the list of central-midfield exits, Thelo Aasgaard completed his own loan switch to Anderlecht, reuniting with fellow Finn Oliver Antman in Brussels in a deal that, should Anderlecht choose to make the move permanent next summer, could yet net Rangers a further £6million on top of everything else already banked across this remarkable window of business.m

Amid all of that outward central-midfield traffic, the single most significant story of the entire deadline day period was arguably the one player McInnes managed to keep hold of rather than the various players who departed. Nico Raskin’s situation dominated headlines throughout the closing stages of the window, with Rangers twice rejecting approaches from Turkish side Besiktas, first a loan proposal and then an improved permanent offer worth £13.7million, still some way short of the £20million valuation Rangers had set for their prize Belgian midfielder. That McInnes was ultimately able to hold onto Raskin despite Besiktas’s genuinely persistent efforts to prise him away represents, in its own way, just as significant a piece of squad-management business as any of the fourteen incoming transfers completed across the summer, ensuring the head coach retains his most talented and proven central-midfield performer even after shipping out so many of that same position’s other occupants across the preceding weeks.

Taken together, the sheer scale of this rebuild, fourteen in, nineteen out, thirty-three total transfer movements across a single window, represents one of the most comprehensive squad overhauls Scottish football has witnessed from a single club in recent memory. It reflects both the scale of the problem McInnes inherited, a squad that had visibly collapsed under pressure the previous season, and the resources and appetite for change the Ibrox hierarchy have clearly been willing to back him with in order to address it. Position by position, the pattern is unmistakable: a goalkeeping swap engineered cleanly through the Pandur-Butland exchange, a defence substantially reinforced with a mixture of permanent signings and loan additions bringing genuine higher-level experience into the group, a central midfield almost entirely turned over, with established performers like Diomande, Bajrami, Cameron and Barron all moved on while Neil, Devlin and Dragojevic arrived to replace them, and a forward line reshaped around the marquee, statement additions of Kelsy and Kim, supplemented by the pace and directness of Yokota and, eventually, Bouanani in the closing hours of deadline day itself.

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether a rebuild of this scale and speed can actually translate into the kind of on-pitch improvement and sustained title challenge that eluded Rangers so painfully last season. Wholesale squad turnover of this magnitude carries obvious risks alongside its evident upside: new signings need time to gel with one another and with the players retained from the previous campaign, a completely reshaped central-midfield unit needs to develop understanding and cohesion at genuine pace given Rangers’ lack of European football this season removes some of the natural rotation opportunities that might otherwise have eased that transition, and the departure of a figure as experienced and symbolically important as Tavernier leaves a genuine leadership void that someone within the reshaped dressing room will now need to step up and fill. But for a club that finished last season a distant third, watching both Celtic and Hearts finish above them, the appetite for radical change rather than incremental tinkering was always going to be the price of any genuine attempt at closing that gap, and McInnes and the Ibrox hierarchy have, by any measure, delivered exactly that kind of radical overhaul across this remarkable summer of transfer business. Whether it proves to be the foundation of a genuine Rangers revival, or simply the first chapter of another period of turbulent transition, will only become clear once a domestic season already shaping up to be one of the most closely-fought in years begins to unfold in earnest.