Nicolas Raskin told he is ‘wasting his time’ at Rangers as Premier League transfer bafflement expressed

There’s a particular kind of transfer story that only really comes into full focus once a deadline has passed and the dust has settled — the story of the deal that almost happened, unpacked and dissected with the benefit of hindsight by people who watched it unfold and came away genuinely baffled by the outcome. Nicolas Raskin’s summer at Rangers is exactly that kind of story, and former Belgium international Philippe Albert has become its most vocal, most pointed critic, insisting the Rangers midfielder is “wasting his time” in Scottish football and expressing genuine bewilderment that no Premier League club stepped forward to sign him before the window shut.

Albert’s credentials for making this kind of assessment carry real weight. A former Newcastle United defender who represented Belgium at both the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, Albert has watched Raskin’s career from close quarters as a fellow countryman with genuine insight into the standards required to succeed at international level for the Red Devils. Speaking to Le Soir, his comments were unambiguous in both their praise for Raskin’s ability and their frustration at his current situation. “Nicolas Raskin doesn’t belong in Scotland,” Albert said. “In recent years, he has proven he is a cut above the rest. He’s Rangers’ best player.” He continued with a pointed observation about the broader state of the club Raskin currently plays for: “It’s a club with a rich history but one that is currently adrift, winning few trophies and, what’s more, already eliminated from European competition.

That last remark lands with particular sharpness given Rangers’ recent history — a club that reached a European final as recently as 2022, now eliminated from continental competition at the qualifying stage for a second consecutive season, having lost to Jablonec in the Conference League play-off round after already exiting the Europa League to Jagiellonia Bialystok earlier in the summer. For Albert, that trajectory represents exactly the kind of environment a player of Raskin’s calibre shouldn’t be spending his prime years within. “I have respect for the Scottish league, but a guy like Raskin is wasting his time there,” he said, in comments also relayed by La Capitale. “As for not getting a transfer? I don’t understand why no Premier League club made a move.”

To understand why Albert’s frustration carries such genuine sting, it’s necessary to walk through exactly how close Raskin came to actually leaving Rangers this summer — because this wasn’t simply a case of interest that never developed into anything concrete. According to reports out of Turkey, Rangers and Besiktas had, at one stage, reached what appeared to be a genuine agreement over a transfer. Raskin himself, having reportedly been persuaded that the move represented the right next step in his career by his Belgium international teammate Leandro Trossard — a player who has himself experienced considerable success in England with Arsenal, and whose endorsement would carry genuine weight with a fellow member of the national squad — seemed set to complete the switch to Istanbul. Turkish media reporting at the time suggested the move was destined to be finalised on a specific Wednesday, with all the hallmarks of a deal genuinely close to completion rather than merely speculative interest being floated by an interested party.

But that confidence evaporated almost as quickly as it had built. Rangers, in the closing stages of the negotiation, moved to change the terms of the original agreement — a shift in position that ultimately proved fatal to the deal’s completion. Whatever the specific commercial or structural reasoning behind that eleventh-hour repositioning, the practical consequence was straightforward: Besiktas and Rangers couldn’t find fresh common ground on the revised terms, and the move collapsed entirely. Raskin himself, reportedly resigned to the fact that his path to Turkey had closed, cancelled his own plans around the move and turned out for Rangers in a match that same Wednesday evening — a remarkably swift psychological pivot from a player who, by all accounts, had genuinely believed his Ibrox exit was imminent only days, if not hours, earlier.

There’s also a specific structural detail that helps explain why Rangers ultimately balked at completing the deal on the terms available: reports indicate Besiktas were, in the end, only prepared to offer a loan arrangement for Raskin rather than the permanent transfer Rangers had been seeking throughout the process. Given Raskin’s contract situation — he remains signed to Rangers until May 2028, giving the club no pressing financial or contractual urgency to sanction a departure purely on a temporary basis — it’s entirely understandable why Rangers would resist converting a genuinely valuable, long-contracted asset into a loan deal that would deliver no permanent transfer fee and leave the player’s rights, and any future sell-on value, still attached to Ibrox regardless of how his time in Turkey unfolded. From a pure asset-management perspective, rejecting a loan-only offer for a player under contract for almost three more years is a defensible, even prudent, decision — even if it left both Raskin and Besiktas’s own supporters disappointed by how close the move had appeared to get before falling apart

The Besiktas saga, dramatic as its final-days collapse proved to be, was really just the last and most advanced chapter in what had been a considerably longer, more sprawling story of transfer speculation surrounding Raskin across the entire summer window. Spanish sides Villarreal and Real Betis were both consistently linked with the Belgian midfielder at various points throughout the window, part of a broader pattern of interest that had been building steadily since Raskin’s performances for Belgium at the World Cup earlier in the year significantly raised his profile among clubs across the continent. Reports throughout the summer also referenced interest from clubs in England and Italy, painting a picture of a player who had genuinely captured the attention of recruitment departments across several of Europe’s major footballing nations.

And yet, for all that breadth of reported interest, none of it — not the Spanish links, not the English or Italian speculation, and ultimately not even the seemingly advanced Besiktas negotiation — actually converted into a completed transfer. That’s a genuinely unusual outcome for a player who’d generated as much sustained, cross-continental interest as Raskin had across the course of a single summer, and it’s precisely that gap between reported interest and actual outcome that Albert’s comments are directed at. It’s one thing for a player to attract speculative links that never amount to anything; it’s another entirely for a deal to advance as far as apparent agreement with a major European club, only to collapse at the final stage over structural terms, while — according to Albert’s specific framing — an entire continent’s worth of Premier League clubs, ostensibly the wealthiest and most resourced league in world football, never even entered the conversation with a serious offer of their own.

It’s worth noting that Albert’s framing of the situation, while widely reported and amplified, hasn’t gone entirely unchallenged. One response to the broader coverage of Raskin’s situation pushed back specifically against any suggestion that Rangers’ handling of the saga reflected some kind of disrespect toward the player or a mismanagement of his career trajectory. The counter-argument runs as follows: essentially nobody connected to Rangers — not Raskin himself, not the club’s supporters, not manager Derek McInnes, and not the club’s own ownership and recruitment hierarchy under Andrew Cavenagh — genuinely expected Raskin to remain a Rangers player once the summer transfer window had concluded. There had, by most reasonable readings of the situation, likely been an internal expectation within the club that a Raskin sale would materialise and that the resulting fee would help fund the substantial outlay Rangers made reshaping the rest of their squad this summer — a summer that saw the club bring in over a dozen new signings, including significant fees for players like Kevin Kelsy and Kim Min-su

But, in the end, no offer arrived that genuinely satisfied Rangers’ valuation of the player — reported at various points across the summer to sit anywhere from the low tens of millions of pounds up toward higher figures depending on the specific reporting and stage of the window — and Raskin simply remained on the books by default rather than by any deliberate strategic choice to retain him at all costs. That’s a meaningfully different framing from Albert’s implicit suggestion that Rangers somehow actively prevented or obstructed a move that should obviously have happened; instead, it positions Rangers as a club that would likely have been perfectly willing to sell at the right price, but simply never received an offer — Besiktas’s collapsed loan proposal included — that cleared the bar the club had set

Beyond his headline comments about Raskin “wasting his time” in Scotland, Albert also offered a pointed, practical warning about what continued uncertainty or reduced playing time could mean for Raskin’s international career specifically. “He knows how to recover, as he showed at Standard, and he always delivers on the pitch,” Albert said, referencing an earlier difficult period in Raskin’s career at Standard Liège, where a contract standoff and subsequent fallout with then-manager Ronny Deila saw him frozen out of the first team entirely for a two-month stretch back in the early stages of his professional career — a period serious enough that Belgium’s Under-21 coach at the time, Jacky Mathijssen, publicly expressed concern the young midfielder might need to be left out of a major international tournament squad purely because he wasn’t accumulating the match fitness required to justify inclusion.

That historical parallel is instructive, because Albert’s underlying message carries a similar warning for the present moment: regardless of the specific reasons behind Raskin’s continued presence at Rangers, what matters most for his ongoing involvement with Belgium’s senior national team is consistent playing time, not necessarily the specific league or club he’s accumulating that playing time with. “I have no worries about him,” Albert said. “If he wants to keep his place with the Red Devils, he will have to play and accumulate match fitness.” It’s a notably pragmatic conclusion to reach after such pointed criticism of Raskin’s current situation — Albert isn’t suggesting Raskin’s international prospects are doomed by remaining at Ibrox, simply that regular, high-quality game time is the non-negotiable requirement, wherever that game time happens to be

With the major European transfer windows now closed for the season — Scotland’s own deadline having passed alongside England’s and the rest of the continent’s primary trading windows, even as certain smaller leagues like Cyprus, Greece, and several others technically remain open for a while longer — Raskin’s immediate transfer saga has reached its natural conclusion, at least until the January window reopens the conversation. He remains contracted to Rangers until May 2028, with a reported market value in the region of €12.1 million, giving the club considerable structural leverage over any future sale conversation whenever it eventually resumes.

What’s changed most tangibly in the immediate aftermath of the collapsed Besiktas move is Raskin’s on-field status at Rangers itself. Having spent significant stretches of the summer left out of matchday squads entirely — including a deliberate, transfer-related omission from Rangers’ travelling party for the Conference League play-off tie against Jablonec, a decision that itself generated considerable debate and criticism from former players including Alex Rae — Raskin appears to have been swiftly and fully reintegrated into Derek McInnes’s plans now that his exit route has definitively closed. McInnes has publicly praised the manner in which Raskin has trained since the transfer saga concluded, and has handed him a central role in the side across recent matches, suggesting both player and manager have moved quickly to put the disappointment of the collapsed move behind them and refocus

There’s a wider, more structural observation embedded within Albert’s criticism that’s worth drawing out explicitly: the specific bafflement he expresses isn’t really about Rangers’ handling of the situation at all, but about the apparent reluctance of Premier League clubs specifically to move for a player who, by Albert’s own assessment and by the evidence of Raskin’s performances for Belgium at the World Cup, has clearly demonstrated the technical and physical capability to perform at a considerably higher level than the Scottish Premiership offers. That’s a criticism levelled not at Rangers, nor really even at Raskin himself, but at the broader recruitment culture of English football’s top flight — an implicit suggestion that Premier League clubs, for whatever reason, either overlooked or undervalued a player who’d made himself increasingly conspicuous on the international stage over the preceding months.

Whether that reflects genuine scouting oversight, a simple mismatch between Raskin’s valuation and what Premier League clubs were prepared to offer for a Scottish Premiership midfielder regardless of his individual quality, or simply the ordinary unpredictability of transfer markets where even highly-regarded players sometimes fail to generate the concrete offers their form might suggest they deserve, is a question Albert’s comments raise without fully answering. What’s clear, at least for now, is that Raskin’s immediate future remains at Ibrox — not through any active decision by Rangers to block a move, according to the club’s defenders, and not through any lack of genuine interest across multiple leagues, according to the extensive reporting that dogged his situation throughout the summer, but simply because no offer, Besiktas’s collapsed loan proposal included, ever cleared the specific bar Rangers had set. For a player Philippe Albert insists is “a cut above the rest” and “the best player at Rangers,” that outcome — regardless of how it eventually came about — leaves a genuine sense of unfinished business hanging over Raskin’s situation heading into the new season, one that will likely resurface with renewed intensity once the January transfer window reopens the conversation all over again.