Two former Hearts stars could make deadline day transfers as ex Jambo pushed towards Rangers exit

Deadline day always has a way of dragging old names back into the headlines, and this Tuesday is no different for Hearts supporters, who find themselves watching two separate storylines unfold hundreds of miles apart, both involving players who once wore maroon at Tynecastle Park. One is a forgotten forward scrapping for regular football in England’s third tier. The other is a Scotland international centre-back whose career took him from Gorgie to Ibrox and who now finds himself squeezed out of Derek McInnes’s plans at Rangers, weighing up whether his next move takes him south of the border or across the Atlantic altogether. Neither situation is likely to dominate back pages outside Scotland, but for a Hearts fanbase that watches every departed player’s career with one eye, even from a distance, both are stories worth following closely as the English transfer window slams shut at eleven o’clock tonight.

Start with Stephen Humphrys, a name that will bring a smile to plenty of Hearts supporters who remember one moment in particular rather than a body of work. The forward arrived at Tynecastle on loan from Wigan Athletic back in 2022, spending a season in maroon before that loan spell wound down and he eventually left the Wigan Athletic setup permanently in 2024. In total Humphrys made twenty-five appearances for Hearts, a modest return in terms of minutes on the pitch, but he left an indelible mark on the club’s highlight reel with a goal that Jambos of a certain vintage will still bring up unprompted: a strike from inside his own half against Dundee United at Tynecastle, the kind of moment that gets replayed on social media every time a similar effort goes in anywhere else in world football. It is the sort of goal that outlives a player’s actual output at a club, the connective tissue that keeps a loan forward’s name alive in supporters’ memories years after he has moved on to bigger or smaller things elsewhere.

Humphrys’s career since leaving Hearts has taken him back into the English pyramid, and he currently finds himself at Bradford City in League One, one level below the Championship in the English football ladder. It is there, at Valley Parade, that his immediate future is being decided in the final hours of the summer window south of the border, which closes at eleven o’clock tonight. According to transfer journalist Alan Nixon, Wigan Athletic are preparing a late move to bring their old forward back to the Brick Community Stadium, with the Latics said to be actively searching for a goalscorer to bolster their options as the window shuts. Nixon’s reporting suggests Wigan have already made an approach to Bradford for Humphrys, framing it as exactly the sort of value-driven, market-savvy deal that tends to get done in the chaotic final hours of a deadline day, when clubs with specific gaps in their squad start making calls they might not have considered a fortnight earlier. For Wigan, re-signing a forward who already knows the club, the changing room and the level, having spent time there before his Hearts loan, represents low-risk business at a stage of the window when time for due diligence has effectively run out. For Humphrys himself, a return to a club where he has already proven he can contribute, rather than starting from scratch somewhere entirely new, would represent a sensible next step in a career that has bounced between clubs at League One level in recent years without ever quite cementing itself at one address for long.

It is a reminder, too, of how differently a single loan spell can be remembered depending on which side of the transaction you are standing on. To Wigan, Humphrys was a player they sent out to gain experience and game time in Scotland before assessing whether he had a long-term future back at the club. To Hearts supporters, he is remembered far more fondly than his appearance count might suggest, purely on the strength of one outrageous piece of individual quality that turned a routine home fixture against Dundee United into a moment worth replaying for years afterwards. Football memory rarely works in strict proportion to minutes played, and Humphrys is as good an example as any of a player whose Tynecastle legacy was built in a matter of seconds rather than accumulated across a full season.

The second name generating deadline day headlines involving Hearts’ old boys is a far more significant one in terms of profile, history and the size of the decision now facing him. John Souttar spent six years on the books at Tynecastle Park, arriving from Dundee United back in 2016 and going on to make over one hundred and sixty appearances for the club across that spell, becoming one of the more recognisable figures in Hearts’ backline during a period that included relegation to the Championship, promotion back to the top flight, and a return to form that eventually earned him a pre-contract move to Rangers in the summer of 2022. It was, by any reading, a career-defining chapter at Hearts: Souttar overcame a series of serious Achilles injuries that threatened to derail him altogether in his mid-twenties, fought his way back into the first team, was named in the PFA Scotland Team of the Year during a third-placed finish for Hearts, and left Gorgie as a genuinely well-regarded, experienced centre-back rather than a peripheral squad name making a lateral move.

At Rangers, Souttar’s career has followed a similarly eventful path. He has made over one hundred and twenty appearances for the Ibrox club since his 2022 move, won a League Cup winners’ medal in the 2023/24 season, been capped more than twenty times for Scotland at senior level, and as recently as February this year signed a new contract at Ibrox running through to May 2027, with the option of a further year attached, a deal he put pen to paper on amid a tense title race that saw Rangers sitting just points off top spot. At the time, then-manager Danny Röhl spoke about the importance of keeping the club’s leaders and maintaining a strong Scottish presence in the Ibrox squad, framing Souttar’s new deal as central to the club’s football planning going forward. It is worth dwelling on that context, because it underlines just how quickly circumstances can change in modern football. A player can go from being publicly held up as a leader worth building around in February to finding himself surplus to a new manager’s plans by the following September, and that is precisely the situation Souttar now finds himself navigating.

The change, in Souttar’s case, has coincided with the managerial upheaval at Ibrox that has defined Rangers’ last twelve months. Derek McInnes, who took over as Rangers head coach this summer after previously managing Souttar’s old club Hearts, has been limited in the minutes he has afforded the defender since his arrival, a pointed detail given that McInnes knows Souttar’s game intimately from their shared time together in Gorgie. That familiarity has evidently not translated into first-team opportunities under the new regime, and reports in the Daily Record now suggest Souttar’s Rangers future is genuinely in doubt as deadline day plays out, with interest from clubs south of the border cited as a live possibility if a deal can be struck before the English window shuts tonight. There is also, notably, a fallback option being discussed: Major League Soccer, whose transfer window opens later in the year than its English and Scottish counterparts, giving Souttar and his representatives the luxury of not needing to force through a move in the next few hours purely because an artificial deadline demands it. For a thirty-year-old Scotland international with a European pedigree, genuine Premiership and Ibrox experience, and a body of work that speaks for itself, MLS represents a credible, well-paid next chapter rather than a consolation prize, and it takes some of the pressure off any deal in England needing to be rushed through in the closing hours of Tuesday night.

Derek McInnes, for his part, has been candid about the balancing act Rangers are working through as the window draws to a close, choosing his words carefully but not shying away from confirming that departures remain a live conversation inside Ibrox. Speaking about the club’s transfer business, McInnes confirmed Rangers are “still working hard” to get one further incoming signing over the line before the deadline, while acknowledging that things may “well develop over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours” on the outgoing side of the ledger, a carefully worded admission that Souttar’s situation, among others, remains fluid right up until the wire. McInnes was keen to stress that this kind of last-minute business is simply the nature of the modern transfer window rather than anything unique to Rangers’ circumstances this summer, pointing out that “most clubs” are working the phones in the final couple of days trying to complete business they need, whether that is bringing players in or moving players on who no longer fit the plan. It is a pragmatic, unemotional way of framing what is, for a player like Souttar, a genuinely significant career juncture: from Rangers’ perspective, this is just one strand of a busy final forty-eight hours of trading; from the player’s own point of view, it is a decision about where the next chapter of his career, and quite possibly the last major transfer of a career already spanning Dundee United, Hearts and Rangers, will be written.

There is something worth pausing on in the sheer contrast between where Souttar’s career stood in February and where it stands now. Signing a contract extension through to 2027, with Röhl publicly framing him as part of the long-term core of the squad, is about as strong a vote of confidence as a defender can receive from a manager. Six months on, under an entirely different head coach with his own ideas about how he wants his backline to look and play, that same player finds himself searching for regular football elsewhere. It is not a story unique to Souttar or to Rangers, of course; managerial change at the top of any club routinely reshuffles who is considered first-choice and who is not, regardless of what was true, or promised, under the previous regime. But there is a particular poignancy to a Hearts old boy potentially having his Ibrox future ended, in effect, by another Hearts old boy now sitting in the Rangers dugout. McInnes managed Souttar’s former club to within two points of the Premiership title only last season, and the pair will know each other’s games intimately from that period even without having worked directly together at Tynecastle. That McInnes has still opted to limit Souttar’s minutes since walking into Ibrox tells its own story about the demands and specifications of the new manager’s system, whatever mutual respect might exist between the two men from their shared Hearts connection.

For Hearts supporters watching from the outside, there is an obvious layer of interest in seeing where two of their former players end up before the clock strikes eleven tonight, but there is also a broader pattern worth noting in how frequently Tynecastle continues to function as a genuine production line and staging post for players who go on to have substantial careers elsewhere in British football. Souttar’s journey from Dundee United academy graduate to Hearts stalwart to Rangers title challenger and Scotland international is exactly the kind of career arc that speaks well of the football being developed and honed at Tynecastle Park, even when, as in this case, the next step in that career potentially takes a player away from Scotland altogether. Humphrys’s path is more modest in scale, a loan spell rather than a permanent chapter, but it too reflects the churn of modern football, where clubs like Hearts routinely take in loan players from English clubs, extract a season’s worth of value, memorable moments included, and then watch those players move on to write the next stage of their careers somewhere else entirely, in Humphrys’s case potentially back to the very club that sent him to Edinburgh in the first place.

What happens in the next few hours will settle both situations, at least for the time being. Wigan’s interest in Humphrys is described as a genuine late approach by a reporter with a strong track record in exactly this kind of lower-league deadline day story, the sort of deal that either gets tied up quickly in the final hours or quietly falls away if the numbers or the timing do not line up between the two English clubs involved. Souttar’s situation carries a longer tail regardless of what happens tonight, given the MLS option remaining open well beyond the closure of the English window this evening, meaning Rangers, Souttar and any interested clubs down south have a genuine deadline to work to in the coming hours, but not necessarily the final word on where his career goes next if nothing gets done before eleven o’clock. Either way, both stories offer a reminder of just how far-reaching a football club’s alumni network becomes once players move on, with two men who once called Tynecastle home now occupying very different corners of British football’s transfer market on the same frantic deadline day, one hoping to rediscover a level he has already proven himself at, the other quietly assessing whether his next chapter is written in England or several thousand miles further west across the Atlantic.