The Ibrox Cull: Which Rangers Players Are Actually Facing the Exit Door This Summer?
For every headline generated by Rangers’ pursuit of Vanja Dragojevic or Jens Hjerto-Dahl this summer, there has been a quieter, less glamorous conversation happening in parallel at Ibrox: who is actually going to be moved on to make room for it all. Derek McInnes inherited a squad that finished last season in third place, a position the club’s hierarchy regard as entirely unacceptable given the resources at Ibrox, and the early signs of his summer rebuild suggest he intends to treat that finish as licence for a genuine clearout rather than a fine-tuning exercise.
The clearest picture yet of who might be packing their bags came via the Rangers Review’s regular morning briefing, in which contributors Derek Clark and Stevie Clifford worked through the club’s current state of play — from the closed-doors draw with Kaizer Chiefs through to the futures of several first-team players whose positions at the club now look precarious.
No player better illustrates the scale of the rebuild McInnes is undertaking than Danilo. Signed from Feyenoord in 2023 for a fee in the region of £6 million, the Brazilian forward arrived with a track record built across spells at Ajax and FC Twente and was expected to give Rangers a genuine goal threat from the striker’s role. Instead, his time in Glasgow has been defined by inconsistency, injury interruptions, and a steady slide down the pecking order behind Youssef Chermiti, Bojan Miovski and, more recently, summer signing Lawrence Shankland.
The clearest evidence of how far his stock has fallen came earlier this year, when Rangers sent him out on loan to Eredivisie side NEC Nijmegen in an arrangement that included an option to buy worth around £4 million. It should have represented a clean way to recoup a portion of the original outlay. Instead, Danilo managed just one goal in twelve appearances during his half-season in the Netherlands — scoring only once, in a match against Feyenoord, while starting just a single league fixture and coming off the bench on ten separate occasions. NEC ultimately opted against triggering their purchase option, instead moving to sign free agent Kaj Sierhuis, and Danilo was sent back to Ibrox with two years still left on his contract.
That failed exit route has left Rangers facing an awkward asset problem, one compounded by several other loan deals — including Jose Cifuentes’ spell in Toronto and Clinton Nsiala’s stint at Westerlo — that similarly failed to convert into permanent sales, at an estimated cost of several million pounds to the club’s summer transfer budget. Stevie Clifford’s assessment of the situation on the Rangers Review briefing captured the frustration among many supporters: acknowledging that Danilo retains a natural eye for goal and remains a capable finisher, but questioning whether he has retained the mobility that once made him an effective Premiership forward. With sixteen goals and eleven assists across 76 appearances for the club since his arrival, Danilo’s overall record is far from a disaster, but it has never matched the level his transfer fee implied, and interest from clubs in Greece, Turkey and Ukraine’s Dynamo Kyiv over recent months suggests his next move, whenever it materialises, is likely to be for a fraction of what Rangers originally paid.
If Danilo’s likely exit fits a familiar pattern of an expensive signing failing to deliver, John Souttar’s situation is a more surprising case. The 29-year-old centre-back agreed a one-year contract extension as recently as February, a decision that appeared to confirm his role as a senior, trusted figure in the Ibrox defence heading into the new campaign. Just months later, he finds himself omitted entirely from the club’s pre-season training camp in Spain, a decision widely read as confirmation that his four-year Rangers career is now drawing to a close.
Souttar’s decline in playing time became increasingly pronounced as last season progressed, and while he retained a place in Steve Clarke’s Scotland squad for this summer’s World Cup, he did not play a single minute at the tournament — a further sign of how far his standing has slipped, even at international level. Clifford admitted to being genuinely surprised by the development given the timing of his contract renewal only a few months earlier, but the broader consensus among those covering the club closely is that McInnes has already made his decision, with interest from clubs in England reportedly being lined up to take Souttar off Rangers’ hands. His departure would also, conveniently, help free up both squad space and budget for the centre-back reinforcement the club is actively pursuing.
Beyond Danilo and Souttar, the briefing highlighted a wider group of players whose positions at Ibrox appear far from secure. Manny Fernandez, who featured in the second half of the friendly against Kaizer Chiefs, was specifically flagged by Derek Clark as a player whose Rangers future is now genuinely in question, with McInnes still to determine whether he sees the young forward as part of his plans for the season ahead.
Elsewhere, Clifford speculated openly about the futures of Lyall Cameron, Nedim Bajrami and Thelo Aasgaard, three players who offered varying degrees of promise last season but who now find themselves squeezed by the volume of incoming midfield and attacking talent McInnes is targeting. Cameron in particular has been strongly linked with a permanent transfer in the coming days, while Bajrami — who came closest to adding to Rangers’ scoreline against Kaizer Chiefs, seeing an effort cannon back off the post after coming on at half-time — remains a more ambiguous case, with McInnes yet to signal clearly whether he sees a role for the Albanian international within his rebuilt squad.
The broader theme running through all of these individual situations is the same: after a third-place finish that fell well short of Ibrox’s own standards, McInnes and the club’s recruitment staff evidently believe wholesale change, rather than incremental adjustment, is required. Clark and Clifford’s discussion repeatedly returned to the idea of the squad needing “fresh voices” — new characters and different profiles rather than simply better versions of what was already there.
The flip side of this clearout is, of course, the incoming business it is designed to fund and facilitate. According to the Rangers Review briefing, the club’s most pressing recruitment priorities beyond the ongoing midfield pursuits of Dragojevic and Hjerto-Dahl are now a right-sided winger and a left-sided central defender — positions Clifford suggested are directly linked to the expected departures of Souttar and others from the back line, and to the club’s broader desire to add more variety and unpredictability to their attacking play.
That search for defensive reinforcement sits alongside a striker market that has generated its own share of headlines this week, even if indirectly related to Rangers’ first-team plans. Robbie Ure, who came through the Ibrox academy before moving on to spells at Anderlecht and now Swedish top-flight side IK Sirius, has emerged as one of the form strikers in Europe, sitting nine points clear at the top of the Allsvenskan table after twelve games and averaging almost a goal a game to sit as the division’s outright top scorer. Serie A side Lecce recently had a £3.3 million bid, including a 30 per cent sell-on clause, rejected by Sirius, who reportedly believe they can command at least double that figure for a player who still has three years remaining on his contract. Ure’s situation is being watched closely at Ibrox given his boyhood connection to the club, even if a return to Glasgow is not currently being actively pursued.
Amid the churn of incoming and outgoing first-team players, one of the more encouraging threads from the Rangers Review briefing concerned the club’s academy pipeline. Derek Clark revealed that contract negotiations with young goalkeeper Rydnn Maguire are expected to accelerate in the coming weeks — a vote of confidence from the new coaching regime in a player who has already featured prominently in pre-season, starting the closed-doors draw with Kaizer Chiefs and travelling with the senior squad to Spain alongside fellow development players Pauk Nsio, Zander Hutton and Calum Adamson.
Maguire’s situation also intersects neatly with Allan McGregor’s return to the club as lead goalkeeping coach, a topic the briefing turned to in its closing stretch. Clifford was unreserved in his enthusiasm for the appointment, describing himself as “delighted” to see McGregor back at the club and predicting he will be “great to deal with” in his new role. Given McGregor’s status as the most capped goalkeeper in Rangers’ history, with more than 500 appearances across two spells at Ibrox, the expectation among those close to the club is that his presence will accelerate the development of the current goalkeeping group — Maguire included — considerably faster than would otherwise be possible.
Taken together, the picture that emerges from Ibrox this week is one of a football club mid-transformation rather than simply mid-transfer-window. Six confirmed signings have already arrived. At least two more significant additions — a midfielder from continental Europe and defensive or attacking reinforcement domestically or abroad — are still being actively pursued. And running alongside all of that incoming activity is a first-team squad being quietly but firmly pruned, with Danilo and Souttar the most advanced departure cases, and Fernandez, Cameron, Bajrami and Aasgaard all facing genuine uncertainty over whether they have a role to play under McInnes.
Pre-season itself has, by most accounts, gone reasonably well. Clifford’s own assessment — that the string of matches against Dunfermline, Raith Rovers and Kaizer Chiefs has been broadly satisfactory — reflects a cautious optimism among those following the club closely, tempered by the recognition that behind-closed-doors friendlies against lower-key opposition tell only part of the story. The sterner tests against Saint-Etienne and West Ham at Ibrox later this month, followed by the Premiership curtain-raiser away to Dundee United on 31 July, will offer a far clearer sense of whether McInnes’s simultaneous project of addition and subtraction has actually produced a squad capable of closing the gap on Celtic.
What is already clear is the scale of ambition behind the operation. Derek McInnes did not arrive at Ibrox to make cosmetic changes to a squad that finished third. Between the confirmed arrivals, the ongoing pursuits of Dragojevic and Hjerto-Dahl, the search for a right-sided winger and left-sided centre-back, and the list of first-team players whose futures now hang in the balance, this is shaping up to be one of the most extensive squad rebuilds Rangers have undertaken in years — and it is still, by most reckonings, only about two-thirds complete.
