Derek McInnes is not done yet. With Scotland’s transfer deadline bearing down at five o’clock this afternoon, Rangers have launched a late, dramatic push to bring Stuttgart winger Badredine Bouanani to Ibrox, with reports suggesting the twenty-one-year-old Algerian international was undergoing a medical as talks over a season-long loan, complete with an option to make the move permanent, edged towards completion. It caps off a chaotic final day of business for Rangers, one that has already seen a striker arrive, a midfielder’s future dramatically resolved, and now, right at the death, a fresh attempt to add the wide attacking option McInnes has made clear all summer he still wants.
To understand why Bouanani has emerged as such a prominent late target, it helps to look at the winger role Rangers have been quietly restocking throughout this window without ever quite completing the puzzle to McInnes’s satisfaction. Daisuke Yokota arrived earlier in the window for a fee in the region of three and a half million pounds to add competition on the right-hand side, Findlay Curtis has been getting his own share of minutes in recent matches, Djeidi Gassama has impressed operating from the left, and Min-su Kim, while primarily deployed centrally, offers McInnes the option of shifting wide when required. On paper, that already represents a reasonably well-stocked group of wide options. But McInnes has been explicit that he wanted one further addition in the wide areas specifically, and Bouanani, a player who fits the profile of a left-footed attacker comfortable cutting in from the right flank, has been squarely on Rangers’ radar as the mechanism for delivering exactly that.
Bouanani’s own career path has been an eye-catching one, even before this potential Ibrox move enters the picture. A product of the storied LOSC Lille academy, a production line that has turned out plenty of talent to have gone on to bigger things across European football, he began his senior career with fellow Ligue 1 side OGC Nice, where his performances marked him out as one of the most promising young players in French football at the time. A loan spell at Lorient added further senior experience before Stuttgart came calling last summer, completing a move worth around thirteen million pounds that represented a significant step up in level for a player still only twenty years old at the time of the switch. It was, by any measure, a considerable outlay from the Bundesliga club for a young wide player still developing his final output at the very top level, and it reflected genuine confidence in Bouanani’s long-term ceiling as an attacking talent.
That confidence, however, has not yet translated into the kind of regular first-team football his profile and price tag might have suggested was coming his way. Bouanani made thirty-two appearances for Stuttgart across all competitions last season, a reasonably healthy number in terms of squad involvement, but scored only twice in that time and has, by most accounts, struggled to command a truly regular starting berth at a club with genuine European ambitions of its own in the Bundesliga. That gap between investment and output is precisely the kind of situation that so often produces exactly this sort of deadline day loan move: a talented young player who has not quite forced his way into an established side’s first-choice XI, and a selling club willing to sanction a temporary departure, ideally with an option to convert it into a permanent sale further down the line, rather than continuing to carry a player who is not featuring as regularly as either party would like.
The road to this point has not been entirely smooth for Rangers either, and Bouanani’s emergence as a live deadline day target only really gathered pace after an earlier pursuit appeared to have stalled. RC Strasbourg had reportedly been in advanced negotiations of their own with Stuttgart over a loan move for the winger earlier in the week, positioning themselves as the frontrunners for his signature, while Rangers and German side Schalke were both understood to have fallen out of contention as that Strasbourg deal looked to be progressing. That Rangers have since been able to reinsert themselves into the race and, by Thursday afternoon, apparently move ahead of any rival interest to the point of arranging a medical, represents a genuinely dramatic turnaround in the space of just a few days, exactly the sort of late swing in fortunes that tends to characterise the most chaotic corners of deadline day business across Europe.
Rangers’ interest in Bouanani also needs to be understood as something of a plan B, or perhaps more accurately an alternative route to the same destination, after an earlier winger target failed to materialise. McInnes and his recruitment staff had been linked with Brighton prospect Amario Cozier-Duberry earlier in the window, a versatile young attacking talent who ultimately ended up completing a season-long loan move to Championship side Middlesbrough instead, the very same club that has since taken Rangers’ own Connor Barron on loan as part of a separate piece of deadline day business. With that specific target unavailable, Rangers appear to have pivoted towards Bouanani as an alternative means of solving the same underlying problem: adding genuine quality and depth to the wide areas of McInnes’s squad before the window shuts for good.
The timing of this pursuit says something interesting about how Rangers’ summer transfer business has unfolded more broadly. This is not a club still working through its priority list from a standing start; McInnes has already overseen a substantial amount of incoming business across the window, and Rangers were reportedly on the verge of confirming the signing of Venezuelan striker Kevin Kelsy from Portland Timbers in a deal worth around nine million pounds, a piece of business that, at one stage, looked set to represent the final arrival of the summer. It was only after winger Thelo Aasgaard’s own departure on loan to Belgian side Anderlecht that Rangers decided they wanted one further body in through the door, with McInnes hinting in the aftermath of the club’s two-one win over Falkirk on Wednesday night that further incoming business remained a possibility before the deadline arrived. That the club has followed through on that hint with a genuine, medical-stage push for a thirteen-million-pound Bundesliga winger, rather than simply talking a good game before quietly closing the window, suggests real conviction behind the move from within Ibrox.
It is worth setting this pursuit against the backdrop of everything else that has been happening at Rangers on this same deadline day, because Bouanani’s potential arrival is very much one thread among several. Nicolas Raskin’s future dominated much of the day’s early headlines, with Rangers turning down interest from Turkish side Besiktas and McInnes expressing his expectation that the Belgian midfielder would remain at Ibrox beyond the deadline. John Souttar finds himself out of the first-team picture entirely and has been positioned as a potential option for other Scottish Premiership clubs seeking an experienced defender. Bojan Miovski has been attracting interest from clubs in Europe amid his own struggles for regular game time, while Northern Irish winger Ross McCausland has been the subject of loan speculation of his own. Rangers have, in other words, been conducting business across almost every area of the pitch simultaneously as the deadline approaches, adding and subtracting in roughly equal measure as McInnes continues to reshape the squad he inherited into something closer to his own image.
There is also a fascinating subplot involving another PSV Eindhoven winger that speaks to just how active and, at times, snake-bitten Rangers’ pursuit of wide attacking reinforcements has been throughout this window. Bosnian World Cup star Esmir Bajraktarevic, a twenty-cap international who switched allegiance to Bosnia having come through the youth ranks at New England Revolution in the United States, has also been floated as a live option for Rangers according to various reports circulating on deadline day. That interest carries an obvious echo given Rangers’ well-documented near-miss with Bajraktarevic’s PSV team-mate Couhaib Driouech last month, a deal that collapsed entirely after Driouech failed his Ibrox medical over a minor injury issue before going on to complete a move to Celta Vigo in Spain instead. Whether Rangers are genuinely working two parallel winger targets simultaneously, in Bouanani and Bajraktarevic, or whether one represents a contingency should the other fall through in the closing hours, remains to be seen, but it underscores just how determined McInnes has been to add specifically to his wide areas before the window shuts, even after the disappointment of losing out on Driouech earlier in the summer.
From a financial perspective, the structure of the reported Bouanani deal, an initial loan with an option to make the move permanent, represents a sensible piece of business for a club in Rangers’ position at this particular stage of a transfer window. Committing to an outright permanent fee for a twenty-one-year-old who has not yet nailed down a regular starting role at his current club carries obvious risk, however talented his underlying profile might suggest he is. A loan arrangement allows Rangers to assess exactly how Bouanani fits into McInnes’s system and the demands of Scottish football over the course of a season, without the club needing to commit the kind of significant transfer fee that a permanent deal for a player of his valuation would require up front. Should the loan spell prove a success, the option to buy gives Rangers the mechanism to convert that arrangement into something more permanent on terms that reflect however his form and fit at the club develop across the campaign. It is, in short, a low-risk, potentially high-reward structure of exactly the kind clubs increasingly favour when working the final hours of a transfer window against a specific positional need rather than an open-ended wish list.
For Bouanani himself, a loan move to Rangers offers a clear route back towards the kind of regular first-team football that has proven elusive during his time at Stuttgart, alongside the opportunity to test himself in a different European footballing environment, playing regular Scottish Premiership football under a manager in McInnes who has shown throughout this window a clear appetite for backing young, technically gifted wide players. Scottish football has increasingly become a credible destination for talented young attackers from major European leagues who find themselves short of regular minutes at their parent clubs, offering competitive, well-watched domestic football and, in Rangers’ specific case, a genuinely sizeable platform and passionate fanbase in front of which to rebuild form and confidence. Should the move be completed before this afternoon’s deadline, Bouanani would arrive at Ibrox with the chance to establish himself as a first-choice attacking option in a way his time in the Bundesliga simply has not afforded him so far.
As the clock ticks down towards five o’clock, the outcome of Rangers’ pursuit remains, as with so much of deadline day business, genuinely uncertain until pen is actually put to paper. Medicals can and do occasionally throw up late complications, as Rangers themselves discovered so painfully with Driouech only weeks ago, and the gap between “close to tying up a deal” and an actual confirmed announcement can, in the chaos of a transfer deadline’s final hours, prove considerably wider than reports suggest at any given moment. But with Stuttgart apparently willing to sanction the move, Strasbourg’s earlier interest seemingly having cooled sufficiently to let Rangers back into contention, and Bouanani himself reportedly already undergoing his medical examination as talks reach their conclusion, Ibrox supporters have real reason for optimism that this particular piece of deadline day business, one final wide attacking addition to cap off a genuinely eventful summer of change under Derek McInnes, will be confirmed before Scotland’s transfer window closes for good this afternoon
