Rangers Star Admits He Was “Mentally Ready” to Leave and Disappointed at Lack of Move

Nicolas Raskin has confirmed what most of Ibrox had already suspected throughout the closing days of the summer transfer window: he wanted out. The Rangers midfielder, fresh off a breakout World Cup with Belgium, has admitted that he was psychologically prepared to say goodbye to the club that turned him from a peripheral squad player into one of Scottish football’s most coveted midfielders, only for the move to collapse in the dying hours of the window. It is a rare piece of candour from a player who spent most of the summer deflecting questions about his future, and it confirms that the frantic, contradictory reporting around his proposed switch to Besiktas was not just noise generated by transfer insiders chasing clicks. Raskin himself wanted it to happen.

Speaking to Belgian outlet Sporza, Raskin did not try to dress up his emotions or pretend that staying at Rangers was always the plan. “It is a bit of a disappointment, because I was mentally ready to leave,” he said, reflecting on what he described as a “complicated summer.” “But that is football, and it is not a big deal. There are many parameters and off-field matters you have to take into account during a transfer. The timing wasn’t perfect. But I want to keep doing my best now, and then we’ll see in the next transfer windows.”

It is a measured response, but the underlying message is unambiguous. Raskin had one foot out of the Ibrox door. He had convinced himself that this was the summer his Rangers story would end, and when the mechanics of the deal fell apart around him, he was left to process the gap between what he expected and what actually happened. For a player who has spent close to four years steadily building himself into a first-team fixture and eventually the armband-adjacent leader of Derek McInnes’s midfield, that is a significant admission to make publicly, and it will not have gone unnoticed inside Ibrox.

To understand why Raskin felt so mentally prepared to depart, you have to rewind to the early stages of the transfer window, long before Besiktas ever entered the picture. Reports in Spain in July had Raskin closing in on a move to Villarreal worth in the region of £17 million, with suggestions that Rangers were ready to accept the offer and reinvest the proceeds in two midfield reinforcements. That deal never materialised in the form reported, but it set the tone for a summer in which Raskin’s departure was consistently treated as a matter of when, not if.

The World Cup only intensified that sense of inevitability. Raskin arrived in the United States as a fringe figure in Rudi Garcia’s Belgium squad, having endured what he himself would later admit was a difficult campaign under previous Rangers boss Russell Martin, who had accused him of having his head turned by transfer speculation the previous summer and dropped him from the matchday squad altogether. Martin’s departure and McInnes’s arrival gave Raskin a platform to rebuild his standing at club level, and he responded by playing more than 4,000 minutes across the season, contributing seven goals and nine assists.

That form carried into the World Cup, where Raskin’s trajectory shifted dramatically. He started the tournament on the periphery, coming off the bench in the opening group game against Egypt and helping Belgium salvage a 1-1 draw, before starting against Iran and dropping back to the bench for the New Zealand fixture. It was in the knockout rounds that he made his name. With Belgium trailing Senegal 2-0 in the round of 32, Garcia made the bold decision to withdraw both Kevin De Bruyne and Jeremy Doku and introduce Raskin and Dodi Lukebakio. The gamble paid off spectacularly as Belgium turned the tie on its head, and Raskin’s tenacity and energy in the middle of the park became a talking point across the tournament. His performance against a toothless United States side in the last 16, in which he effectively snuffed out Folarin Balogun and forced the Americans into aimless long balls, was widely regarded as one of the individual highlights of Belgium’s run. Belgian journalist Sacha Tavolieri had already flagged him during the qualifying campaign as delivering “XXL” performances and cementing his status as a starter, and by the time the World Cup reached its latter stages, that assessment looked entirely vindicated.

The transfer speculation that followed was not restricted to a single suitor. Reports linked Raskin with a host of clubs across Europe’s top leagues, including interest from Manchester United, who were reportedly weighing him up as an alternative to a more expensive move for Ederson, and Atalanta, who were said to be in direct competition with United for his signature. Rangers, sensing the leverage that a World Cup breakout and a contract that runs until 2028 afforded them, held firm on a valuation reported to be in the region of £20 million or more, roughly €30 million. Hull City had a bid in the region of £16.5 million turned down earlier in the window, a gap significant enough, by some estimates, to represent the difference between Rangers feeling respected in negotiations and feeling lowballed.

Through all of this, Raskin himself remained publicly non-committal, insisting during the tournament itself that he had put his club future entirely in the hands of his representatives. “I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m not occupied with that at the moment,” he said in June, while still on World Cup duty. “I leave that to those who represent me in Belgium and I’m focused on what’s happening here. I am not concerned with a possible transfer, nor with the amount of a future transfer fee.” It was a diplomatic answer at the time, but his admission to Sporza now retrospectively colours those comments. Even as he spoke about staying focused purely on Belgium’s tournament, the player was privately steeling himself for an exit that, in his own words, he was “mentally ready” for.

If the summer-long speculation set the emotional stage, it was the extraordinary final 48 hours of the window that produced the most dramatic twist. With the major European leagues’ deadlines already passed, attention turned to markets that remained open, Turkey among them, where clubs could continue trading business until midnight on the Friday. Besiktas emerged as the surprise late suitor, and for a period it looked as though the transfer that had eluded Raskin all summer might materialise from an unexpected direction.

Transfer insider Fabrizio Romano posted to his tens of millions of followers that Rangers had verbally accepted an offer from Besiktas, describing it as a loan move with a purchase option, and stating that the decision now rested with the player. The framing suggested that after months of speculation, a genuine pathway out of Ibrox had opened up, and that Raskin’s willingness to go would be the final hurdle rather than any resistance from Rangers. Turkish outlets echoed the story, reporting that the two clubs had reached a “principle agreement” over the transfer of the 25-year-old, with Besiktas hopeful of completing the paperwork in time to fly him to Istanbul before the Turkish deadline.

Within hours, though, the picture had changed entirely. Sky Sports reported that there was, in fact, no agreement in place, and that Rangers had rejected the Besiktas approach outright. The sticking point, according to multiple reports, was straightforward: money. Besiktas had proposed a loan with a “significant” up-front fee and an option to buy, but that structure fell well short of the £10 million-to-£20 million valuation range Rangers were said to be holding out for on a player they signed for a modest £1.5 million plus add-ons from Standard Liège back in January 2023. A loan, however well-dressed with add-ons and options, was never going to meet a valuation built on the assumption of a permanent, immediate sale.

That should have been the end of it, but Besiktas were not so easily deterred. Speaking after Rangers’ 2-1 win over Falkirk, McInnes indicated that he expected Raskin to still be an Ibrox player once the window shut, confirming that the club had turned down the initial loan bid earlier that day. Yet Besiktas returned within hours with a fresh, permanent offer, only for that too to be knocked back for falling below Rangers’ valuation. With the Turkish window remaining open for an extra day beyond Scotland’s own deadline, there was a brief window in which the saga could still have rumbled on into the Friday, but ultimately no bid arrived that satisfied Rangers’ demands, and Raskin remained on the books at Ibrox.

McInnes himself struck a conciliatory tone throughout, praising Raskin’s professionalism amid the noise. “Nico’s been first-class since he came back from the World Cup, he’s been good as good as gold, he’s trained brilliantly,” the manager said as the speculation reached its peak, a pointed contrast to the treatment Raskin received under Martin twelve months earlier, when transfer speculation was used as a reason to freeze him out. Under McInnes, at least publicly, there was no suggestion that Raskin’s attitude had been anything other than professional, even as his agents worked behind the scenes to engineer and

The collapse of the move did not go unremarked upon back in Belgium, where former international Philippe Albert used the fallout to launch a pointed critique of both Raskin’s situation and Rangers’ standing in the European game. “Nicolas Raskin doesn’t belong in Scotland,” Albert said in the days after the transfer window closed. “In recent years, he has proven he is a cut above the rest. He’s Rangers’ best player. 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. In his head, Raskin should be somewhere other than Rangers.”

It is a blunt assessment, and one that captures the broader sentiment that had built up around Raskin’s situation throughout the summer: a Belgium international, fresh off arguably the standout individual campaign of his career on the biggest stage in the sport, playing his club football in a country where his side had been dumped out of both the Europa League and Conference League qualifiers, without a fresh trophy to show for their outlay and facing renewed questions over the manager’s own job security. From that vantage point, Albert’s argument that Raskin’s ambitions had simply outgrown Ibrox is not an unreasonable one, even if Raskin’s own public comments have consistently steered well clear of any suggestion that Rangers as a club are somehow beneath him.

Raskin’s own response to the noise, in fact, leaned in the opposite direction. Rather than using the failed move as a platform to agitate for a fresh departure in January, he chose instead to frame his continued presence at Ibrox in largely positive terms. “Ultimately, I’m not in a position where I absolutely have to leave,” he said. “Rangers is a good club; I’m playing regularly, we have a great squad this year, and we’re achieving good things.” It is a notably different tone to Albert’s, and it suggests that whatever frustration Raskin feels at the collapsed move, he has little interest in becoming a public source of unrest around the club in the way his situation risked becoming twelve months earlier under Martin.

Raskin’s continued presence in Glasgow is, in the short term at least, unambiguously good news for Derek McInnes. The Belgian has established himself as arguably the most reliable and technically gifted midfielder on the club’s books, and his continued availability gives McInnes a genuine, World Cup-tested performer to build his engine room around, alongside newer arrivals such as Dan Neil and Cammy Devlin, both of whom were signed in the same window that so nearly saw Raskin depart in the opposite direction. Losing a player of Raskin’s calibre for anything below Rangers’ stated valuation would have represented a considerable outlay to replace, particularly with the club already having spent heavily this summer on the likes of Kevin Kelsy, Ivor Pandur and Badredine Bouanani as part of a wider squad rebuild.

There is also a competitive dimension to Raskin staying that works, at least in the short term, in Rangers’ favour. With the club having been eliminated in the qualifying rounds of both the Europa League and the Conference League this season, following exits to Jagiellonia and Jablonec, Raskin will have no European stage on which to further showcase himself to potential suitors before the January transfer window opens. That absence of a continental shop window could work to dampen the intensity of the interest he attracts in the winter, even with Derek McInnes having already gone out of his way to describe the midfielder as “terrific” in public. A player who spends an entire season playing solely domestic football, however impressively, is simply less visible to the kind of clubs who were monitoring him during the World Cup than one who is turning out on a Thursday or Wednesday night against continental opposition.

That dynamic cuts both ways, however. Besiktas themselves are not going away quietly. Reports out of Turkey in the aftermath of the collapsed deadline-day move suggested the Istanbul club were already planning a return to the negotiating table in January, with their sporting management understood to view Raskin as their priority midfield target for the winter window, alongside a fallback option in Nottingham Forest’s Ibrahim Sangaré. Besiktas are also due to face Celtic in the Europa League league phase on November 5, a fixture that will only serve as an unwelcome reminder to Rangers supporters of how close their club’s best player came to lining up for the visitors that night.

Rangers’ contractual position remains their trump card. Having already triggered a one-year extension option to push Raskin’s deal out to 2028, the club are under no obligation to sell at a discount, and with no European involvement to sap his energy over the coming months domestically, there is a reasonable argument that a settled, focused Raskin represents exactly the kind of on-field asset McInnes needs as Rangers try to build sustained momentum in the Premiership and the Premier Sports Cup. The frustration of a collapsed move is real, and Raskin has been honest enough not to pretend otherwise, but neither the player nor the club appear to have any appetite for allowing that frustration to curdle into the kind of saga that defined his situation twelve

Raskin’s own comments point toward patience rather than any immediate campaign for a fresh exit. “But I want to keep doing my best now, and then we’ll see in the next transfer windows,” he said, a line that leaves the door firmly open for both January and, perhaps more realistically given the state of his contract and Rangers’ valuation, next summer. A repeat World Cup-style showcase is obviously not available to him in the coming months, but a strong body of domestic form, allied to continued involvement with Belgium during the international breaks, would keep his value ticking over even without a European platform.

For Rangers, the calculus is simple in the short term and considerably more complicated further down the line. In the immediate future, retaining one of their most talented and versatile midfielders, on a contract that runs for the best part of two more years, at a moment when the club is still trying to establish some stability under McInnes following a rocky start to the season, is close to an unambiguous positive. The longer-term picture, though, is one in which the club will eventually have to reconcile Raskin’s evident ambition and market value with their own need to keep hold of their best performers if they are to build anything resembling sustained progress on the pitch.

Philippe Albert’s assessment that Raskin belongs somewhere bigger than Ibrox will not be universally welcomed by Rangers supporters, but it reflects a broader truth about the modern game: a World Cup breakout at 25 does not happen twice, and clubs the size of Rangers know that keeping hold of a player who has just proven himself on that stage becomes progressively harder with every passing window. For now, though, Raskin remains a Rangers player, by his own admission not entirely by choice, but with no obvious bitterness attached to that outcome either. “That is football,” as he himself put it, “and it is not a big deal.” Whether that remains true come January, when Besiktas are expected to return with a fresh approach and Rangers’ own campaign will have taken further shape one way or the other, is a question that will define the next chapter of one of the most eventful transfer sagas of the Ibrox summer.