Rangers let him leave after three matches , he is now outscoring Haaland and Kylian Mbappe

There will be a temptation among some Rangers supporters to laugh this one off as a quirk of football’s stranger statistical corners. A 22-year-old striker who managed barely two minutes of first-team football in a Rangers shirt currently sits above Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland and reigning Golden Shoe winner Harry Kane in the race for Europe’s most prestigious individual scoring award. The temptation to laugh, though, doesn’t survive much scrutiny of just how good Robbie Ure has become since Ibrox let him go — nor of how honestly, and without bitterness, he has talked about why he had to leave in the first place.

Ure’s tally of 22.5 points in the European Golden Shoe standings — built on the coefficient system that rewards goals scored in stronger leagues more heavily than those scored in weaker ones — currently places him above two of the sport’s biggest global superstars. Only three players in the whole of Europe sit ahead of him: Latvian league top-scorer Joseph Ede Oloko on 25 points, Barcelona’s Raphinha on 24, and Kristian Stromland Lien on 24. Haaland, Mbappe and Kane, three of the most feared strikers on the planet, are all currently behind a forward Rangers let leave for nothing more than a sense that he “wasn’t good enough” to break into their first team.

The numbers behind Ure’s rise are as remarkable as the ranking itself. His entire senior involvement in a Rangers shirt amounted to two brief substitute cameos — one minute against St Mirren at Ibrox in November 2022, and a further minute against Hibernian in May 2023 — before he made the decision, at just 18, to leave the only club he had ever known. He had been on Rangers’ books since the age of eight, working his way up through the Ibrox academy and into the Rangers B side, and had even been offered a contract extension to stay. He turned it down anyway.

“Yeah, it was [a hard decision],” Ure told BBC Sport of that call. “All I’d ever known was Rangers. Going in every single day since I was probably eight years old, but it was something that I felt I had to do.” Speaking more recently about the thinking behind the move, he was even more direct about the reality he faced trying to break into a first-team squad at a club of Rangers’ size: “So it was something I felt I had to do. Of course, I would have loved to have stayed. But I felt like I needed to leave. I think I knew myself that I wasn’t going to play, which I think I accepted. Because you’re at a club like Rangers, it’s difficult for many 18-year-olds to play.”

That honesty — no bitterness, no accusation, simply a clear-eyed acceptance of where he stood in the pecking order — has been a consistent thread throughout Ure’s rise. In another interview he put it just as plainly: “I felt like I wasn’t good enough to play for Rangers at the time. I needed a change of scenery and a fresh start, somewhere that I could go to play at a level that would be good enough for me at the time.” It is a mature, almost clinical assessment from a player who was still a teenager when he made the call to walk away from boyhood-club status in search of first-team football elsewhere.

Ure’s route away from Ibrox in the summer of 2023 took him first to Anderlecht in Belgium, initially into the Belgian side’s youth development set-up, before his career found its true breakthrough two years later in Sweden with IK Sirius. It was in Sweden that the raw promise Rangers had spotted as a boy finally translated into consistent senior output. Ure scored four goals in a wild 4-4 draw with reigning champions Mjallby in his first Allsvenskan season, part of an 11-goal debut league campaign that helped Sirius — a club with little historical pedigree — finish mid-table before an extraordinary follow-up campaign saw them surge to the top of the Swedish top flight.

By the summer of 2026, Ure’s form for Sirius had become impossible to ignore. He finished the year with 31 goals in 50 appearances for the club across all competitions, including a stretch of 15 goals in just 14 games that caught the eye of clubs across the continent. Sirius, mindful of what they had on their hands, extracted what is understood to be a club-record fee from the sale — reported at around £6.5million (some reports put the add-on-inclusive figure closer to £8million) — as one of Spanish football’s genuine giants came calling.

That giant was Sevilla, who agreed an initial £5.5million deal for Ure in the summer of 2026, with a further £2.5million in potential add-ons, as the La Liga club moved to secure a forward they clearly believe can make an immediate impact at one of Spanish football’s most storied institutions. Ure signed a five-year contract at the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán, a remarkable step up in level for a player who three years earlier had been unable to force his way into a matchday squad at Ibrox.

He has wasted little time adjusting to life in Spain’s top flight. Ure has already made seven appearances for Sevilla, including a full 90 minutes away at Barcelona, in which he found himself directly up against Pau Cubarsi — man of the match in the World Cup final over the summer — and sharing a pitch with Rodri, the tournament’s outstanding individual performer, and Lamine Yamal, one of the most talked-about young players anywhere in world football. To have played the full match in that company, at 22 years old and barely a year removed from Swedish top-flight football, says as much about Ure’s rapid development as any statistic attached to the Golden Shoe race.

He has yet to get off the mark in front of goal for his new club, but that has done nothing to dampen the momentum behind his rise. If anything, it has simply added another layer to the story: a forward already being talked about in the same breath as some of the finest strikers in the world, purely on the strength of goals scored in Sweden earlier in the year, before he has even opened his account in Spain.

The most tangible reward for Ure’s rise arrived with his first senior call-up to the Scotland squad, handed to him by new head coach Sebastien Pocognoli for the Nations League double-header that includes an away trip to Slovenia. The call-up comes at a moment of genuine need in Pocognoli’s forward line — Lyndon Dykes and George Hirst are absent from the squad entirely, while Che Adams, Lawrence Shankland and Ross Stewart, all of whom were part of Scotland’s World Cup squad in the United States over the summer, are all currently sidelined through injury. Ure’s emergence, in other words, comes at exactly the moment his country needs a fresh attacking option most.

It is a landmark moment for a player still uncapped at senior level, and one that has understandably prompted reflection from Ure on the path that brought him here — including on the club he left behind. Asked whether a return to Ibrox might ever be something he’d consider, Ure did not rule it out. “Of course, up until I was 19, Rangers was all I ever knew,” he said. “I feel like the opportunity, if it was to ever come in the future, to go back there would be something I would really think about. It would mean a lot to a lot of people.” He has also spoken of feeling there could be “some unfinished business” between himself and the Ibrox club — a striking admission from a player who left because he felt he simply wasn’t going to get a chance, and who has since gone on to outperform two Ballon d’Or contenders on the continental scoring charts.

It would be easy, and not entirely unfair, to frame this as another entry in the long list of talented young players Scottish clubs have let slip through their fingers only to watch them flourish elsewhere. The Scottish FA has actively used Ure’s story as the poster case in its own campaign to persuade clubs across the country to give younger players more of a chance, and it’s not difficult to see why: few examples make the point as starkly as a striker going from two first-team minutes at Ibrox to outscoring Erling Haaland’s Golden Shoe tally within three years.

But the fairer reading, and the one Ure himself has consistently offered, is less an indictment of Rangers specifically and more an honest acknowledgement of just how hard it is for any 18-year-old to force his way into a squad at a club competing at the level Rangers operate at, particularly in a forward position where established, experienced options are usually prioritised in must-win matches. Ure was offered a new contract to stay and chose, with a maturity well beyond his years, to walk away instead and take his development into his own hands. That the gamble has paid off as spectacularly as it has says as much about his own character and application over the following three years — through Anderlecht’s youth ranks, a breakout campaign in Sweden, and now a full season adjusting to a completely different level of football in Spain — as it does about any failure in Rangers’ underage

There is no suggestion Rangers are actively pursuing a reunion, and Ure’s Sevilla contract — a five-year deal at a club of that stature — makes any short-term return to Ibrox extremely unlikely regardless of the sentimental pull he has described. But his story does carry a wider relevance for Derek McInnes and the current Rangers hierarchy as they continue to reshape the club’s approach to squad building and player pathways. Rangers have, in recent seasons, invested heavily in recruitment from abroad to solve problems in the first-team squad — this summer’s deals for Vanja Dragojevic and others among them — while promising academy graduates have periodically found first-team opportunities hard to come by, much as Ure did.

Whether Ure’s rise ultimately proves to be an outlier or the first of several similar stories to emerge from that generation of the Ibrox academy remains to be seen. What is beyond doubt, for now, is the scale of what Rangers let leave the building in the summer of 2023. A player who managed two minutes of first-team football at Ibrox is now genuinely competing, statistically at least, with the best center-forwards on the planet — a reminder, whatever the specific circumstances of his departure, of just how unpredictable player development can be, and of how difficult it remains for any club, however well-resourced, to correctly judge which of its academy graduates will go on to make it at the very top of the game.

For Ure himself, the focus now is squarely on what comes next: cementing his place in Pocognoli’s Scotland squad, finding his first goal for Sevilla, and continuing to justify the faith a genuine European heavyweight has shown in a player Rangers once felt wasn’t ready. Given everything he has achieved in the three years since leaving Ibrox as a rejected teenager, few would bet against him doing exactly that.