Past £11m and Counting: Inside Rangers’ Chase for Partizan’s Teenage Captain

Rangers’ summer rebuild under Derek McInnes has been notable less for any single marquee arrival than for its sheer volume. Five signings are already through the door, a sixth appears close, and the club’s willingness to keep pushing past £11 million in combined spending — with more still to come — says a lot about how the new regime intends to operate. The latest name added to that list is Vanja Dragojevic, a 20-year-old Partizan Belgrade midfielder Rangers have now made a concrete bid for.

Where the summer spend currently sits

The scale of Rangers’ activity becomes clearer when it’s laid out signing by signing. Lawrence Shankland arrived as a free transfer from Hearts, one of the marquee captures of the window given his goalscoring record and boyhood ties to the club. Dan Neil followed him through the door on a free transfer from Sunderland, adding Championship-tested experience and leadership in the middle of the park. Ben Godfrey has come in on loan from Atalanta to shore up the defence. Then there’s the money that’s actually left the club’s accounts: north of £7 million spent combined on goalkeeper Ivor Pandur and midfielder Ross McCrorie, two of the more straightforward permanent deals of the summer so far.

Add those together with the various add-ons, agent fees and structuring costs that typically accompany a summer of this scale, and Rangers are already comfortably past the £11 million mark in outlay — with a Dragojevic deal, if completed, pushing that figure higher still. None of this even accounts for the far larger sums still in play elsewhere: the club’s reported £17 million valuation of Bologna’s Lewis Ferguson, or the £25 million-plus asking price now attached to outgoing midfielder Nicolas Raskin, both of which dwarf the fees discussed for Dragojevic but which remain unresolved.

It’s a level of activity that reflects the promises made around Rangers’ ownership. Andrew Cavenagh has been vocal about backing McInnes’ rebuild financially, and the sheer number of deals being worked on simultaneously — permanent transfers, loans, free-transfer marquee names, and now a chase for a rising Serbian talent — suggests a club trying to reshape multiple parts of its squad at once rather than making one or two headline additions and calling it a window.

Who is Vanja Dragojevic?

Dragojevic isn’t a household name outside Serbia yet, but he’s built a reputation there remarkably quickly for someone who only made his senior debut in March 2025. He spent the 2024/25 season on loan with Partizan’s feeder club Teleoptik before being recalled to the first team by manager Srdan Blagojevic, and from there his rise was rapid: a regular starter by the second half of last season, 41 appearances across the most recent campaign, and — perhaps most tellingly — handed the vice-captaincy at Partizan while still a teenager.

That leadership status has been central to how Serbian media has framed him, with local outlets describing him as a “modern leader.” Asked directly about being made vice-captain at such a young age, Dragojevic didn’t shy away from the responsibility that comes with it, saying that at Partizan you can’t hide behind your age, and that leading means standing at the front and taking the hits for the team rather than hiding behind the label of leadership. He added that what mattered most to him wasn’t being called a leader, but being part of a team that fights and gives everything — the kind of quote that will do little to cool Rangers fans’ enthusiasm for the move.

On the pitch, Dragojevic is a defensive midfielder in the physical, disruptive mould — aggressive and tenacious in the tackle, strong in the air, and known in particular for his one-on-one defending. Rangers’ own current midfield options were assessed as lacking exactly that profile: a player who can take control of the middle of the park through sheer physical presence, rather than through passing range or creativity, which is understood to be a key reason McInnes has pushed for the move.

He’s also already an established international, having made his senior Serbia debut last month as a late substitute in a 3-0 friendly defeat to Cape Verde — a first cap that adds further weight to the idea that this is a player on a clear upward trajectory rather than a squad-filling punt.

The negotiation itself

Reports out of Serbia, via Mozzart Sport, indicate Rangers have tabled what’s been described as a “concrete” offer worth in the region of £3.8–3.9 million, with some reports putting the bid in euro terms at around €4.5 million. Partizan have turned that opening offer down, holding out for closer to £4.7 million (or roughly €5.5 million), and reportedly want a sell-on clause included in any eventual agreement — a standard piece of business for a selling club looking to protect itself if the player goes on to be sold at a significant profit further down the line.

There’s some suggestion Rangers may not need to wait long to close that gap. Partizan are said to be eager to cash in given their own financial circumstances, and reports have described the Belgrade club as being “in a hurry” to make money from player sales this summer — a dynamic that has, in similar situations elsewhere, allowed buying clubs to negotiate a fee down closer to their own valuation rather than the seller’s.

Beating bigger clubs to the punch

Part of the urgency from the Rangers side comes from the level of competition already circling Dragojevic. He has previously been linked with interest from Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund — two clubs operating in an entirely different financial universe to Rangers, and a reminder that the player himself isn’t short of admirers further up the football pyramid. That Rangers are in a position to try to get a deal for him done for under £5 million, ahead of clubs of that stature, is being framed by Ibrox sources as exactly the kind of value-driven business the rebuild needs to prioritise — identifying a talented, rising player early, before his price tag inflates to a level only the continent’s biggest spenders can meet.

It also fits a pattern Rangers have followed with several of this summer’s other pursuits: moving on players with clear sell-on potential rather than committing the bulk of the budget to older, more established names. The debate among supporters over how the club’s remaining transfer budget should be allocated has become a live one — with some fans publicly arguing, in reaction to reporting on both deals, that they would rather see the money that might go toward a near-£17 million deal for the 27-year-old Ferguson spread across several younger, higher-resale-value additions like Dragojevic instead.

A midfield still being reshaped

Whether or not Dragojevic’s arrival changes that broader picture, it’s a useful window into the kind of midfield profile McInnes is trying to build. Dan Neil offers experience and leadership from English football. Dragojevic, if the deal is completed, would offer youth, physical dominance and defensive solidity — a different kind of profile again to the more attacking, ball-progressing game associated with Raskin, whose long-term Ibrox future remains genuinely uncertain amid interest from Hull City, Bologna and Atalanta.

That contrast is part of what makes this such an interesting moment in Rangers’ rebuild. If Raskin does eventually leave for a fee in excess of £25 million, a settled, physically dominant young defensive midfielder already signed and adapting to the club would be a considerably more useful asset to already have in place than starting a search from scratch mid-window. Dragojevic, at 20 and already a captain-in-waiting at his current club, fits that profile closely — for a fee that, even at Partizan’s higher asking price, represents a fraction of what Rangers may recoup from letting their current first-choice midfielder go.

What happens next

For now, the two clubs remain roughly £700,000–800,000 apart on valuation, with Partizan’s sell-on clause request the other outstanding sticking point. Given the reported urgency on the Serbian side to complete player sales, and Rangers’ own apparent readiness to move quickly with payment, a resolution one way or the other seems unlikely to drag on for long.

If it does go through, Dragojevic would become Rangers’ sixth summer signing and the second permanent addition to the midfield alongside Neil — continuing a pattern of activity that has already taken Rangers’ spending well past £11 million this window, with the bigger-ticket items, Ferguson and any Raskin exit, still to be resolved. For a club that has talked openly about ambition under its new ownership, the sheer breadth of what’s being worked on simultaneously — rather than any single deal — may end up being the more revealing story of this transfer window.