Rangers Star Could Still Be On The Move Despite Transfer Market Closure As Derek McInnes’ ‘Sigh Of Relief’ Put On Hold

For Derek McInnes, the closing of the Scottish transfer window was supposed to mark the end of a genuinely exhausting few months and the beginning of something calmer — a chance to finally focus purely on results rather than incomings, outgoings, agents and speculation. “We all took a huge sigh of relief when the window closed yesterday and we get on with the job in hand,” the Rangers boss said, reflecting on a summer he described in strikingly blunt terms. “It feels like I’ve been to war this window, to be honest. It feels like the longest window I’ve ever known. There’s always so much to consider.” It’s the kind of quote that tells you everything about how draining the last few months have been inside Ibrox, and on the surface, McInnes has every right to feel like the hardest part is finally behind him.

Except it isn’t, not quite. While the Scottish market has shut its doors, other European leagues are still trading, and that means at least one significant Rangers asset remains in genuine limbo. Belgian midfielder Nicolas Raskin, the subject of a rejected loan-and-permanent offer from Turkish side Beşiktaş, will not have his immediate future fully resolved until the Turkish transfer window itself closes at 10pm BST — hours after Scotland’s own deadline has passed. McInnes’ sigh of relief, in other words, has to wait just a little longer before it can be a genuine exhale

To understand why McInnes reached for language as dramatic as “war” to describe this transfer window, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the scale of what Rangers actually did across the summer. By the time the Scottish deadline passed, the Ibrox club had completed fourteen new signings — an extraordinary volume of incoming business for any club, let alone one competing at the top of Scottish football and trying to build any kind of squad cohesion heading into a season. Kevin Kelsy’s £9.5m arrival from Portland Timbers and Badredine Bouanani’s loan move from Stuttgart were the two most eye-catching deals, both completed in the dying hours before the deadline, but they were merely the headline additions on top of a squad rebuild that had been running at full tilt for weeks.

That kind of turnover doesn’t happen without disruption. McInnes has been open about the fact that the club never quite got everything it wanted from the window, telling reporters: “We’ve managed to get a lot of what we were after but I think it’s fair to say we never got everything we were looking for from the window. There’s no manager out there that would probably get everything they wanted.” It’s a refreshingly honest admission from a manager who has just overseen the club’s second-most expensive signing in its history — proof that even a summer of significant spending doesn’t necessarily translate into every box being ticked.

Some of that incompleteness stemmed from areas of the pitch McInnes would have liked to strengthen further but couldn’t. According to reporting around the deep dive into Rangers’ business, in a perfect world the manager would have added a left-sided centre-back and another midfielder before the window shut, needs that simply went unaddressed as the club’s focus and resources were funnelled instead into fixing the attacking crisis created by Youssef Chermiti’s serious ACL injury against Hibernian. That single injury effectively reshaped the entire summer’s priorities, forcing Rangers to spend big and spend late on Kelsy as a direct replacement, with knock-on effects rippling through the rest of the squad-building process.

While the incoming business at Ibrox understandably grabbed most of the headlines, the outgoing side of the ledger has been just as active, and in some ways just as important to how the squad will actually function this season. Rangers have been working throughout the closing days of the window to move on a group of players who simply don’t fit into McInnes’ plans, with John Souttar, Ross McCausland, Clinton Nsiala, Lyall Cameron and Bojan Miovski all either departing or expected to depart before the various windows across Europe finally close.

Souttar’s situation was one of the more curious sagas of the window. The Scotland international centre-back has been frozen out under McInnes for some time now, and the manager confirmed as far back as midweek that Souttar would be allowed to leave this summer to find regular first-team football elsewhere, with reported interest from clubs including Leicester City, Sheffield United and Swansea City in England, as well as options in America. Despite that, the defender was still on Rangers’ books as the Scottish deadline passed, with his future only likely to be resolved once the English window — which runs slightly longer than Scotland’s — eventually shuts. Clinton Nsiala, another centre-back surplus to requirements, finds himself in a similar bracket, while Lyall Cameron looked set to complete a loan move to Dundee United, a switch made slightly more spicy by the fact that Cameron began his career at Dundee, Dundee United’s fierce city rivals.

Bojan Miovski’s situation encapsulates just how quickly fortunes can change for a player once a club’s priorities shift elsewhere. The North Macedonian striker arrived from Girona as recently as August 2025 in a deal that was reported to be worth up to £4.2m, but he has managed just two substitute appearances under McInnes this season, neither of them in the Scottish Premiership, and has been left out of the matchday squad entirely for Rangers’ last two league fixtures. Even with Chermiti sidelined for a considerable period, Miovski simply hasn’t figured in McInnes’ thinking, and once Kelsy’s arrival became a formality, Rangers made clear they were willing to sanction Miovski’s exit — provided any offer covered more than the fee they originally paid for him. Reported interest from Eredivisie giants Feyenoord added a touch of intrigue to that particular subplot, underlining that even a player frozen out domestically can still hold genuine value elsewhere in Europe. Connor Barron, by contrast, represents one departure that didn’t materialise: the former Aberdeen midfielder turned down a proposed loan move to German second-tier side Hannover 96, choosing instead to stay and fight for his place in McInnes’ squad.

All of which brings us to the one genuinely live issue hanging over Rangers as the domestic window shuts: Nicolas Raskin. The Belgian midfielder, whose combative, technically excellent performances have made him one of the most coveted names to emerge from Ibrox in recent seasons, has been strongly linked with a move to Beşiktaş throughout the closing days of the window, with the Turkish club tabling both loan and permanent proposals that Rangers rejected as insufficient. Because the Turkish transfer market doesn’t close until 10pm BST — several hours after Scotland’s own deadline — Raskin’s situation technically remains open even though the rest of Rangers’ domestic business has been wrapped up.

McInnes has walked a careful line throughout this saga, praising Raskin’s professionalism and attitude amid the speculation while also being candid about the reality of modern football economics. “He’s such a good boy and yes, he’s getting interest because he’s a good player, but a lot of these are hypotheticals,” McInnes said before the situation reached its final stages. “If something comes in that the club need to consider, then obviously that has an impact on me and Nico in terms of where we’re at. But he’s a good player. I want to work with good players.” That’s about as clear a signal as a manager can give without directly commenting on an ongoing negotiation: Rangers aren’t actively trying to push Raskin out, but if the numbers work for the club, a departure remains entirely possible even at this late stage.

Encouragingly for Rangers supporters, the most recent evidence points toward Raskin staying put rather than completing a late move. He played the full ninety minutes in Rangers’ 2-1 midweek victory over Falkirk, a run-out that suggests the club is planning around him rather than treating him as a player on his way out the door. McInnes has been unequivocal about how valuable Raskin remains to his plans if the Beşiktaş approach ultimately comes to nothing: “I’ve no doubt that if the window closes and Nico is still a Rangers player, then he’ll give brilliant service as he’s done previously.” Given how instrumental Raskin has looked in patches for Rangers over recent seasons, that’s a significant player to have hanging in the balance even in the window’s dying embers, and it’s easy to see why McInnes’ sense of relief at the Scottish deadline passing comes with an obvious caveat attached.

It’s also worth noting the wider context of departures from Rangers’ midfield engine room already completed earlier in the window. Ivorian midfielder Mohamed Diomande was sold to fellow Süper Lig side FK Corum earlier in the summer, a deal that shows Rangers have already shown a willingness to do business with Turkish clubs when the price is right — which makes the prospect of Raskin following a similar path, even at the eleventh hour, feel more plausible than it otherwise might.

Looking at Rangers’ rebuilt squad as a whole, the picture that emerges is one shaped almost entirely around solving the crisis created by Chermiti’s injury, with knock-on consequences rippling through nearly every other position. Kelsy and new captain Lawrence Shankland look set to compete for the central striker role, with McInnes potentially tempted to deploy the pair together given the attacking talent at his disposal, while Ryan Naderi and Miovski — for as long as he remains at the club — provide the backup options until Chermiti eventually returns to fitness. In the wide areas, McInnes has built a genuinely strong pair of options on the left, with £8.5m signing Kim, who arrived from Girona, and a rejuvenated Djeidi Gassama both making promising starts to the campaign, with Kim’s versatility allowing him to drop in just off a central striker when required. Rangers youngster Findlay Curtis has also impressed enough in the early weeks of the season to push for a place ahead of some of the club’s more high-profile wide options, a reminder that not every solution to Rangers’ attacking questions this year has come from the transfer market.

Taking the departures into account — Souttar, McCausland, Nsiala and Cameron all effectively out of first-team calculations, plus the uncertainty still surrounding Miovski and Raskin — McInnes is working with a squad of roughly 24 players for the season ahead, a workable if not overly generous group for a club expected to compete on multiple fronts domestically after their early European exit.

For all the chaos of the window itself, McInnes has been keen to stress that the disruption hasn’t derailed the mood inside his squad — if anything, he believes the shared experience of navigating such an unusually long and demanding transfer period has brought his players closer together. “The dressing room, over the last couple of weeks in particular, has been so strong and so together,” he explained. “It actually feels like a football dressing room, and the humour and the togetherness and how we work has felt far more like what I would expect my dressing rooms to look like, to behave like.” Given that Rangers have bounced back from a difficult European exit with back-to-back Scottish Premiership victories, there’s tangible evidence on the pitch to back up that assessment, even if the process of getting there has clearly taken its toll on the manager himself.

McInnes was also candid about the kind of culture he’s trying to build at Ibrox amid all the speculation surrounding his squad, making clear that he has little patience for players whose heads are constantly turned by the prospect of the next move. “At Rangers, I don’t want to work with players who just see what’s next and what’s next after this, always maybe eagerly eyeing up other opportunities,” he said. “I want people who want to be here, who want to hang about the club for a period of time and want to be successful here. This club can provide so much opportunity and so many good moments for a player, manager and the like. I just want us to commit to being here and put all our focus on the club.” Whether or not that message lands with Raskin over the final hours of speculation surrounding his future remains to be seen, but it’s a clear statement of intent about the kind of squad culture McInnes wants to build as he moves into calmer waters — assuming, of course, those waters actually arrive once the Turkish market finally shuts its doors tonight.

For now, Rangers supporters are left in the slightly odd position of celebrating the closure of their own domestic transfer window while still watching the clock tick down on a deal in a country several hundred miles away that could yet reshape their midfield. If Beşiktaş come back with an improved offer before the Turkish deadline passes and Rangers decide the numbers finally make sense, Raskin could yet depart despite having already played a full ninety minutes for the club this week. If no such offer materialises, McInnes gets to keep hold of a player he clearly rates highly, and his sigh of relief at the end of an exhausting window can finally be a complete one rather than one held partly in reserve.

Either way, the broader lesson of this summer for Rangers is a familiar one dressed up in fresh circumstances: modern transfer windows rarely offer the tidy, single-deadline resolution that fans and managers alike crave. Different leagues close on different dates, agents work every possible angle right up until the wire, and even a club that believes its business is done can find itself waiting anxiously on developments in a market it has no direct control over. McInnes has earned his moment of relief after what he’s rightly called the longest window of his managerial career. He just has to get through a few more hours before he can be completely sure it’s actually arrived.