He really wants to join: Rangers now in active talks to sign “very exciting” forward alongside Kelsy

Rangers’ summer of transfer activity has produced one more twist in its final hours, with reporting from TEAMtalk indicating the club is now in active negotiations to sign Brighton winger Amario Cozier-Duberry, a move that would land alongside the club’s expected capture of Portland Timbers forward Kevin Kelsy rather than instead of it. The framing of the story, that Cozier-Duberry is “very keen” on a move to Ibrox and is looking to take the next step in his career, appears to be accurately drawn from the original reporting, though as with every transfer story at this stage of a window, it’s worth being precise about what’s confirmed, what’s attributed to a single outlet, and what remains genuinely uncertain until a deal is actually completed.

Start with what’s most solid. Kevin Kelsy’s move to Rangers is the more advanced of the two situations by some distance. The twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan international striker has already undergone a medical ahead of completing his switch from Portland Timbers, a transfer reported to be worth somewhere in the region of nine to nine and a half million pounds, depending on the outlet, with some reports in dollar terms citing a figure closer to thirteen million. Kelsy was left out of Portland’s matchday squad for their recent fixture against Austin FC, a standard signal in the transfer world that a move is close to being finalized, since clubs typically shield a departing player from further match involvement once terms have been agreed. His background adds useful context to why Rangers have been willing to move for him: he originally arrived in Major League Soccer via a reported transfer fee just under six million dollars from Shakhtar Donetsk, after Portland acquired the right of first refusal on him from FC Cincinnati, where he’d spent a season on loan scoring six goals in twenty-three appearances. Portland’s head coach at the time of his original signing described him as one of the brightest young center forwards in world football, someone with pace, power, and significant scope for further development, credentials that align with why Rangers, in the market for attacking reinforcements after Youssef Chermiti’s injury left them short up front, moved to bring him to Ibrox. If completed, this would be Rangers’ thirteenth signing of an unusually busy summer rebuild under new head coach Derek McInnes.

The Cozier-Duberry story is a separate and, at this point, less advanced piece of business, though the reporting behind it is specific enough to treat as more than idle speculation. According to TEAMtalk’s report, Rangers have entered active talks for the twenty-one-year-old winger, who spent last season on loan at Bolton Wanderers from Brighton and played a significant role in helping the League One side win promotion. His numbers on loan were genuinely impressive: eight goals and twelve assists in thirty-four regular season league appearances, followed by two further goal involvements across Bolton’s play-off campaign, a return that marks him out as one of the more productive attacking loanees in English football’s third tier last season. That kind of output has evidently caught attention beyond just Rangers. Former Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere, who has coaching experience with young players at Arsenal, has previously praised Cozier-Duberry’s game, highlighting his ball-carrying ability as a particular strength. Separately, another admirer quoted in the coverage compared him stylistically to Bukayo Saka, noting that Cozier-Duberry plays in the same inverted wide role, possesses the same kind of unpredictable, matchup-winning quality in one-on-one situations, and, like Saka early in his own development, still needs to sharpen his decision-making in the final third. The framing used was that in certain moments he looks unplayable, capable of creating something out of nothing even against a well-organized defensive setup, the kind of individual quality that can break down a game plan regardless of how well the opposition has prepared for it.

The obstacle standing between Rangers and actually completing this deal, according to the same report, is straightforwardly financial. Brighton are said to be holding out for a fee in the region of ten million pounds, a valuation Rangers have so far been unwilling to meet. That gap matters enormously given how little time is left to close it. The report specifies that Rangers face a deadline of five p.m. on Thursday to get a deal for Cozier-Duberry over the line, a detail worth flagging clearly because it differs from the widely reported Tuesday, September first, seven p.m. Premier League registration cutoff that has governed most of the deadline-day coverage around Rangers’ other business this window, including the Raskin saga. It’s possible this reflects a different registration pathway or a specific arrangement tied to how a deal involving a player under contract to an English club would need to be processed, though the original reporting doesn’t spell out that distinction, so it’s worth treating the exact deadline mechanics with some caution rather than assuming every Rangers deal this week operates on an identical clock.

What makes this pairing of Kelsy and Cozier-Duberry interesting as a story, beyond the individual merits of either player, is what it suggests about the shape of Rangers’ business as the window closes. This is not a club making a single marquee signing and calling its summer complete; it’s a club that has been rebuilding across multiple positions simultaneously, and the timing of the Cozier-Duberry link, surfacing specifically “alongside” the more advanced Kelsy deal, suggests McInnes and Rangers’ recruitment staff are treating the closing days of the window as an opportunity to add wide areas as well as central striking depth, rather than viewing Kelsy’s arrival as the finishing touch on the squad. That reading is consistent with everything reported about Rangers’ broader approach to this transfer window. The club has already been credited with a dozen signings before Kelsy, including South Korean winger Kim Min-su’s roughly eight and a half million pound move from Girona, left-back James Penrice’s loan arrival from AEK Athens, and three central midfielders, Dan Neil, Vanja Dragojevic, and Cammy Devlin, brought in earlier in the summer. Layered against the ongoing uncertainty over Nicolas Raskin’s future, with McInnes having stated as recently as this week that no formal offer had arrived for the midfielder despite heavy interest from clubs in England, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, the overall picture is of a club conducting an unusually comprehensive squad overhaul on both sides of the ledger, adding attacking reinforcements in Kelsy and potentially Cozier-Duberry while simultaneously bracing for one of its most valuable and sellable assets to depart before the window shuts.

There’s a useful historical echo worth noting here too, since Rangers’ history with late-window forward signings has been a recurring theme across different eras of the club rather than a new phenomenon tied to this specific summer. Searching back through the club’s transfer history turns up a similar pattern repeating itself: back in 2021, Rangers moved to sign Zambian forward Fashion Sakala from Belgian side KV Oostende on a precontract agreement, with then-manager Steven Gerrard and sporting director Ross Wilson both describing the move in the kind of enthusiastic terms that echo how Cozier-Duberry is being talked up now, praising his pace, power, and eagerness to join the club despite reported interest from elsewhere. Wilson at the time noted that the club had specifically wanted to add more pace and power to the squad, first with Scott Wright and then with Sakala, in language that closely mirrors the current framing of adding attacking dynamism alongside an already-agreed forward signing. That’s not to suggest history is repeating itself in any deterministic sense, only that Rangers’ recruitment pattern of pairing a marquee attacking name with a lower-profile, high-upside wide player in the same window has precedent at the club, which lends the Cozier-Duberry link a bit more credibility as a genuine strategic fit rather than a speculative story invented from nothing.

It’s also worth being clear-eyed about the sourcing here, since that’s been a consistent theme throughout this conversation. This story traces back to a single outlet, TEAMtalk, as reported and aggregated by Football FanCast, rather than being corroborated across multiple independent reporters with their own sourcing, which is a meaningfully different evidentiary position than, say, a claim confirmed directly by the club or by a reporter with a long, verified track record on Rangers transfer business specifically. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Single-source transfer reports turn out to be accurate constantly in modern football journalism, and TEAMtalk has broken genuine transfer news before. But it does mean the appropriate level of confidence to attach to “Rangers are in active talks for Cozier-Duberry” should sit somewhere below “this deal is happening” and somewhere above “this is baseless speculation,” which is really the same calibration that’s applied to every transfer story throughout deadline week, including the various claims about Raskin’s destination that have circulated without ever firming up into a confirmed departure.

The player at the center of this story also deserves a bit more context beyond his loan statistics, since his path to a potential Ibrox move says something about the kind of profile Rangers appear to be targeting. Cozier-Duberry came through Arsenal’s academy system before moving to Brighton, a club well known across English football for its recruitment model built around identifying technically gifted young players and either developing them into first-team contributors or selling them on at a significant profit once their value has risen, a model not dissimilar in spirit, if not in scale, to how Rangers themselves have operated with academy and reclamation projects over the years. His loan spell at Bolton represented his first sustained taste of first-team football at a level where he could genuinely influence results on a weekly basis, and the numbers he produced there, particularly the twelve assists, suggest a player whose primary value lies in creating chances for others as much as scoring them himself, a profile that would complement a more traditional out-and-out finisher like Kelsy rather than duplicate his role in the squad. If Rangers are indeed thinking about the front line as a unit, adding a direct, one-on-one wide threat in Cozier-Duberry alongside a more central, physical presence in Kelsy would represent a coherent attacking rebuild rather than simply stockpiling names for the sake of it.

Whether any of this actually gets over the line by Thursday’s stated deadline remains genuinely uncertain, and the ten million pound gap between Brighton’s valuation and what Rangers have so far been willing to pay is not a trivial one to close in a matter of days. Transfer negotiations at this stage of a window can move in either direction extremely quickly: sometimes a selling club softens its stance once it becomes clear no other suitor is prepared to match even a reduced asking price, and sometimes a buying club finds late-arriving funds, whether from a player sale elsewhere in the squad or from ownership backing, that allow it to meet a valuation it had previously called unrealistic. Given that Rangers are simultaneously managing the financial and structural implications of a potential Raskin sale, a departure that multiple sources have said would trigger an immediate recruitment mandate of its own, there’s a plausible scenario in which incoming funds from that specific sale, if it happens, could be redirected toward closing the gap on Cozier-Duberry, though nothing in the current reporting confirms that the two situations are formally linked in the club’s own financial planning rather than simply coinciding in the same tight window of days.

For now, the most accurate way to describe the situation is this: Kevin Kelsy’s move to Rangers is genuinely advanced, with a medical already completed and a fee reported with reasonable consistency across outlets, making it the closest thing to a finished deal in this specific story. Amario Cozier-Duberry’s situation is real, sourced, and specific, with a credible outlet reporting active talks, a stated asking price, and a concrete deadline, but it remains unresolved, with a meaningful financial gap still separating Rangers from Brighton as of the most recent reporting. Both moves would fit into a summer that has already seen Rangers conduct one of the more extensive squad rebuilds in the club’s recent history, spanning central midfield, full-back, and now potentially both central and wide areas of the attack, all while the club continues to manage the unresolved and separately significant question of whether its most sought-after outgoing asset, Nicolas Raskin, will still be at Ibrox once the dust settles on deadline week. Anyone following this story closely over the next few days would do well to watch specifically for confirmation from Brighton or Rangers themselves, or from a reporter with an established track record on deals involving either club, rather than treating “active talks” as equivalent to “signed,” a distinction that has mattered throughout every thread of this transfer window and continues to matter here.