Rangers Set to Beat Wolves as Cozier-Duberry Move Nears Announcement Wolves have been left trailing in the race for Amario Cozier-Duberry, with Rangers understood to be closing in on a deal that would see the Brighton winger arrive at Ibrox before the window shuts. Football Insider reports that Rangers are advancing on agreeing terms in the coming days, having already seen two offers knocked back by the Seagulls, first at £7million and then an improved £7.5million, before edging closer to a valuation both clubs can finally work with. A fresh offer is understood to be on the table as Derek McInnes pushes to get the deal over the line, and while nothing has been signed, sealed and confirmed just yet, all the signs point toward an announcement landing sooner rather than later. For a Rangers support that has watched this summer’s rebuild touch almost every area of the pitch, the pursuit of Cozier-Duberry represents something slightly different: a swoop for a young, home-grown English talent who has spent the past two seasons out on loan sharpening his game in England’s second and third tiers, rather than another established performer being lifted straight out of a rival’s first team.
The broad strokes of his story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the modern academy pathway through English football. Amario Oswald Gerardo Cozier-Duberry was born in Islington and grew up in Tottenham, rejected by a string of London clubs on trial as a boy before finding a home at Chettle Court Rangers, where he worked his way from the under-11s to the under-15s. A standout run at a youth tournament in Enfield caught Arsenal’s eye, and the Gunners handed him a ten-week trial he duly accepted, kickstarting five years in their academy system that would take him all the way to the fringes of the first team. He made his competitive debut for Arsenal’s under-21s at just sixteen in the EFL Trophy against Swindon Town, scored twice more in the same competition the following season, and helped the club reach the 2023 FA Youth Cup final. His breakout campaign came in 2023/24, when he managed thirteen goals and five assists in twenty-four appearances for Arsenal’s under-21 side, form that was good enough to earn him a place in first-team matchday squads against Sevilla in the Champions League and Brentford in the League Cup, even if senior minutes never quite materialised at the Emirates.
Rather than fight for a breakthrough that looked increasingly unlikely in a squad stacked with attacking talent, Cozier-Duberry made the move to Brighton in the summer of 2024 under then head coach Fabian Hurzeler, a club with a well-worn reputation for developing exactly this profile of player and selling them on for significant profit further down the line. It was a sensible fit on paper, and Brighton wasted little time sending him out to get the senior football his development required, first at Blackburn Rovers for the 2024/25 season and then at Bolton Wanderers for the campaign just gone. The loan at Ewood Park brought twenty-three appearances in all competitions and his first senior goal, a strike in a 2-0 win over Luton Town in December 2024, though his progress there was disrupted by an ankle injury that kept him out for around six weeks in the autumn. He returned to full fitness in time to head out again the following summer, this time to Bolton, where technical director David Weir spoke of wanting to give him a genuine chance to play regular senior football at a good level after his campaign at Blackburn had been interrupted.
That decision to send him to Bolton looks, in hindsight, like exactly the kind of loan move clubs dream about when they talk of player development plans. Cozier-Duberry was excellent in League One last season, finishing the campaign with figures in the region of eight goals and ten assists across just over 2,600 minutes of league football, numbers that mark him out as one of the more productive attacking wide players outside the Championship and above last season. His underlying data across right wing tells the same story: strong output relative to his positional peers in the division for both assists and overall match rating, built on the kind of eye-catching pace, directness and willingness to take opponents on that first got him noticed as a schoolboy in Enfield. He is left-footed, which allows him to cut in from the right and either shoot or thread passes into the box, and at 5ft 7in he is a classic modern inverted winger in build as well as style, all close control and quick feet rather than physical dominance. Watching him at Bolton, it is not hard to see why McInnes and his recruitment staff at Ibrox have identified him as precisely the kind of forward-thinking, ball-carrying wide option that has been missing from this Rangers squad in the early weeks of the new season.
That gap has been obvious for a while now. McInnes has been candid in recent press conferences about the areas of the pitch still requiring reinforcement, making clear that while the two full-back positions have been strengthened considerably since he took charge, the top end of the pitch remains a work in progress. He has spoken about wanting a winger capable of playing off either flank, someone who can add the kind of invention and unpredictability that turns tight games in Rangers’ favour, and has stressed that his recruitment team are working specifically rather than simply chasing any option that becomes available late in the window. Youssef Chermiti’s injury has only added urgency to that search, robbing Rangers of one of their attacking focal points at exactly the point in the season when goals and service into the box matter most, with qualifying ties and the start of the Premiership campaign already underway. Rangers scored five goals in their most recent outing and showed plenty of attacking threat in patches, but the sense around Ibrox has consistently been that the difference between a talented forward line and a genuinely dangerous one lies in exactly the sort of direct, take-on wide threat that Cozier-Duberry offers.
The competition angle matters here too, because this has not been a straightforward one-club chase. Wolves’ interest in Cozier-Duberry only intensified after Rangers’ first bid of £7million was turned down, with reports suggesting the Midlands club moved to establish their own interest as Brighton held out for a fee closer to their valuation. That Rangers have been able to push on regardless, tabling a second offer of £7.5million and now advancing toward an agreement that Football Insider describes as edging closer to Brighton’s asking price, speaks to a genuine determination from Ibrox to get this one over the line rather than allow a direct Premier League rival to hijack the deal in the closing stages of the window. Beating an English top-flight club to a highly-rated young English winger is not something Rangers manage every summer, and it says something about the scale of ambition McInnes has tried to instil since replacing Danny Röhl back in June that Ibrox has been prepared to go back in with an improved bid rather than walk away and look elsewhere once the initial offer was knocked back.
There is also context worth adding from Rangers’ wider summer business, because the Cozier-Duberry pursuit has not happened in isolation. This has been an extensive rebuild under McInnes, with Lawrence Shankland arriving from Hearts, Dan Neil signed on a free from Sunderland, Ross McCrorie brought back from Aberdeen, and further additions across defence and midfield in Ben Godfrey, Ivor Pandur and Vanja Dragojevic, all reshaping the spine of the squad ahead of a testing European and domestic campaign. Kosta Nedeljkovic has since arrived on loan from Aston Villa to add further competition at full-back, an area McInnes explicitly flagged as much improved compared to a few weeks ago. Outgoings have shaped the budget throughout, with John Souttar expected to leave and Nicolas Raskin having attracted bids the club have so far rejected as his situation with Fenerbahce and others continues to develop. Against that backdrop, a move for Cozier-Duberry represents something close to the final significant piece of business in what has already been one of the busier and more wide-ranging windows in recent Rangers history, addressing the one area of the pitch that has remained conspicuously short of depth and invention even after everything else that has come through the door.
It is also worth being honest about what Rangers would be getting, and what they would not. Cozier-Duberry has, at the time of writing, never made a senior first-team appearance for Brighton itself. Everything he has shown at senior level has come during loan spells in the Championship and League One, which means there remains a natural question mark over how quickly his game translates to Scottish Premiership level, let alone the physicality and tactical demands of European qualifying football against sides like Jagiellonia Białystok that Rangers have already faced this summer. That said, the trajectory of his loan performances, each year an improvement on the last, with a clear step up in end product between his time at Blackburn and his time at Bolton, is exactly the kind of development curve clubs look for when assessing whether a young attacking player is ready to be trusted with regular senior minutes at a higher level. Brighton’s willingness to let him go for a fee in the £7-8million range, rather than sending him out on yet another loan, also suggests the Seagulls themselves see him as closer to the finished product than a player still requiring another year of seasoning in the English pyramid. Selling clubs rarely cash in on players they still believe are destined for their own first team, and Brighton’s track record of developing and moving on precisely this profile of young talent for significant fees adds weight to the idea that this is a player they are comfortable letting go now rather than holding onto for a rainy day.
There is also the matter of what a Cozier-Duberry arrival would do for squad balance more broadly. Rangers have not been shy about pursuing attacking reinforcements elsewhere this window, with reported interest in the PSV winger Couhaib Driouech collapsing amid a disputed medical, and links to various other wide options across Europe throughout the summer. Landing Cozier-Duberry would go a long way to solving that specific problem in one move, giving McInnes a genuine like-for-like alternative to whoever else is occupying the right flank, and crucially one who is young enough, at 21, to be developed further within the club rather than needing to hit the ground running as the finished article from day one. That youth cuts both ways, of course. There will be an adjustment period, and expecting an instant hero from a player yet to appear for his parent club at Premier League level would be setting the bar unrealistically high in year one. But Rangers have shown throughout this window that they are building with an eye on the medium term as much as the immediate one, and a 21-year-old England youth international with genuine end product in the English pyramid fits that pattern far more comfortably than another short-term fix.
What happens next largely depends on how quickly Brighton can be brought round to Rangers’ latest offer. Football Insider’s reporting suggests the two clubs are not far apart now, with the improved bid closing the gap toward the Seagulls’ valuation, and sources close to the deal describing Rangers as advancing on an agreement in the coming days rather than weeks. Personal terms have not been reported as a sticking point at any stage of this saga, which usually suggests the player himself is keen on the move once the two boardrooms settle on a fee, and a young winger looking to kickstart regular senior football at a club challenging domestically and competing in Europe is an attractive proposition regardless of league. If the deal does complete as expected, Cozier-Duberry would become one of the more forward-looking additions of Rangers’ summer, a genuine wide attacking talent signed not simply to plug an immediate gap but to grow into a key contributor over the coming seasons, all while Rangers get to enjoy the modest but real satisfaction of beating an English Premier League club to his signature in the process. For a fanbase that has sat through a rebuild touching almost every blade of grass at Ibrox this summer, confirmation of this one, whenever it lands, is likely to be one of the more warmly received
