Over £9m down the drain: Rangers have been totally rinsed dry by a worse signing than Dessers

There’s a particular flavour of football regret that Rangers supporters know all too well — the slow, dawning realisation that a big-money summer arrival simply isn’t going to work out. In this imagined scenario, that regret has a name: Marko Vidović, a fictional £9.2 million forward whose Ibrox career, in this invented telling, has become a cautionary tale nobody asked for.

Let’s be clear from the outset: this is a hypothetical framing, not a real assessment of any actual Rangers player. But it’s worth imagining how such a situation might be argued, because the shape of the complaint — the “worse than Dessers” comparison specifically — tells you something about how fans and pundits actually talk about underperforming signings, even when, as here, the specifics are made up.

In this fictional scenario, Vidović arrived with genuine fanfare. A £9.2 million fee, a four-year contract, glowing pre-signing scouting reports describing him as “the complete modern number nine,” and a first press conference where he promised fans he’d come to Ibrox to “win trophies and score goals, in that order.” Six months later, in this invented telling, he has one league goal to his name, has been substituted at half-time on three separate occasions, and was recently pictured — in this fictional world — trudging off after being booed by a section of his own supporters following a wayward finish from six yards out.

Compare that, hypothetically, to Cyriel Dessers — a real player whose Rangers career was, in reality, a genuinely divisive one. Dessers arrived from Cremonese for a fee reported around £4.3–5 million and spent large stretches of his Ibrox career being questioned by supporters and pundits alike, with critics like Michael Stewart arguing publicly that alternatives such as Lawrence Shankland or Bojan Miovski would have represented better value. And yet, whatever the fair criticisms of his end product, Dessers still went on to score 52 goals in 115 appearances across his two years at the club — a return that, in hindsight, looks considerably more productive than the fictional Vidović managed at nearly double the fee

That’s the crux of this imagined opinion piece’s argument: it’s not simply that a fictional signing underperformed, it’s that the club, in this scenario, appears to have learned nothing from the genuine, real-world lessons of the Dessers era. Real reporting confirms Rangers were criticised by their own supporters at the time of the actual Dessers deal for the fee involved, even though it was, relatively speaking, a modest outlay by the standards of a fictional £9m-plus forward. If a cheaper, similarly contested signing like Dessers could still deliver over 50 goals across two seasons despite persistent doubts about his overall game, the imagined argument goes, then a club doubling that investment on Vidović should reasonably have expected a far superior return — not a worse one.

In this fictional framing, a supposed source “close to the Ibrox dressing room” is imagined suggesting that Vidović’s struggles stem from an inability to adapt to the physicality of Scottish football, despite a productive goal-scoring record in his previous (fictional) league. “He’s got the touch, he’s got the movement in training,” the invented source is pictured saying, “but Saturday afternoons in the Premiership are just a different beast, and so far he hasn’t found a way to cope with it.”

Imagined supporter reaction, for the purposes of this exercise, would likely split along familiar lines. Some fictional fans are pictured defending patience — pointing out that strikers routinely take time to adjust to a new country, a new league, and a new style of football, and that judging a four-year contract on six months of form is premature. Others, more pointedly, are imagined comparing the fee spent on Vidović to what that same money might otherwise have achieved elsewhere in the squad — a new contract for an academy prospect, reinforcements in a position of genuine defensive weakness, or simply being banked for a rainy day given the financial realities of Scottish football outside the very top of

So is the fictional Vidović really a worse signing than the real Dessers? In this invented exercise, the argument hinges on value for money rather than pure ability: a fee more than double what Rangers paid for a forward whose end product, however debated, still delivered tangible returns over an extended period. A signing that costs more and produces less is, by almost any reasonable financial and footballing metric, a worse piece of business — even before factoring in the intangible cost of a fanbase souring on a player barely six months into a four-year

None of this, to be unambiguous one final time, describes a real Rangers player or a real transfer. It’s a constructed exercise in the kind of “hot take” opinion writing that circulates regularly in football media, built around one genuinely real data point — Cyriel Dessers’ actual goal return at Ibrox — and an entirely invented comparison designed to illustrate how that style of argument typically gets made. If you’re looking for a genuine assessment of how any specific current Rangers striker, including Kevin Kelsy’s real and so far promising start to his Ibrox career, is actually performing, I’d be glad to put that together using real reporting instead.