Worth More Than Raskin: Why The New Bassey Is Becoming Rangers’ Most Valuable Asset

There’s a particular kind of Rangers transfer story that Ibrox supporters have grown to love over the past few years, the one where a player arrives from a lower-league club for pocket change and quietly transforms into one of the most sought-after assets in the entire squad. Calvin Bassey remains the gold standard for that template, plucked from Leicester City’s academy for a bargain fee before exploding into a Europa League final performer and departing for a club record £19.6million just two years later. Everyone at Ibrox has been chasing that lightning-in-a-bottle recruitment story ever since, and in Emmanuel Fernandez, it looks increasingly like Rangers may have found it again, to the point where a serious case can now be made that the Nigerian centre-back has overtaken even Nicolas Raskin as the most valuable player in the entire squad.

That’s a genuinely striking claim to make, given where Raskin sits in the club’s recent history. Since arriving from Standard Liege for a modest £1.5million fee back in January 2023, Raskin has established himself as one of the most reliable and influential figures in the middle of the park for successive Rangers managers, racking up double-digit goal and assist numbers across well over a hundred appearances in all competitions. He’s been described by respected pundits as the team’s best player during spells of the current campaign and last, was included in the PFA Team of the Year, and as recently as earlier this year carried the single highest market valuation of any player in the Rangers squad, sitting north of £10million according to Transfermarkt at the time. If you’d asked most Rangers supporters six months ago to name the club’s most valuable asset, Raskin’s name would have come up almost automatically, and few would have argued.

Fernandez’s rise has been a different kind of story entirely, and in some ways a more remarkable one given where he started. He arrived at Ibrox from Peterborough United for a fee reported in various places between roughly £2.9million and £3.5million, a defender who had shown promise in England’s lower divisions without the kind of eye-catching reputation that typically accompanies a marquee defensive signing. His early months in Scotland did little to change that picture either. Under Russell Martin’s brief tenure, Fernandez started just one of the club’s opening eight Scottish Premiership matches, failing even to make the squad or get off the bench in the other seven, a start to life at Ibrox that looked far closer to an expensive misstep than the foundation of a breakout campaign

Everything changed with the managerial shift that followed. Once Rangers moved to bring in a new head coach and reshape the defensive setup, Fernandez was given the run of games his early performances hadn’t earned him under the previous regime, and he seized the opportunity in emphatic fashion. He quickly became a fixture in the side, starting the overwhelming majority of Premiership matches, and his performance data throughout that stretch, contributing at both ends of the pitch with a level of consistency that eventually saw him nominated for and voted the club’s own Player of the Season, only underlined just how significant his emergence had become. This wasn’t a case of a talented player finally getting minutes and doing reasonably well with them, it was a case of a squad player transforming almost overnight into one of the first names on the team sheet.

The market has responded to that transformation about as emphatically as football recruitment analysis ever does. Fernandez’s valuation has been reported by multiple outlets to have climbed by well over a thousand per cent from the modest fee Rangers originally paid for him, a rise that outlets tracking his numbers have described in almost disbelieving terms given how unheralded his arrival at the club originally was. Various market-value trackers have him sitting anywhere from around £7.8million through to figures in the £9million range depending on the source and the date of the snapshot, and that’s before factoring in the more recent suggestions circulating from inside the game that his true value could now be considerably higher again, with some estimates floating figures north of £20million given the level of interest he’s reportedly attracting from clubs well beyond Scotland, including sides in Serie A. For context, that would put him not merely level with Raskin’s own valuation but potentially some distance clear of it.

It’s worth pausing on where that interest is reportedly coming from, because it speaks directly to how far Fernandez’s reputation has travelled in a relatively short space of time. Reports have linked him with interest from Atalanta, a club with a well-established recent history of identifying and developing defensive talent that goes on to command significant transfer fees elsewhere in Europe. That kind of interest from a club with that particular recruitment profile tends to carry real weight in the football world, since Atalanta’s scouting department isn’t in the business of casually monitoring players who don’t fit a very specific, high standards. When a club with that reputation starts showing up in transfer speculation around a player, it’s usually a signal that the wider market has genuinely started to take notice, not just domestic pundits looking for a nice narrative around a breakout Scottish Premiership performer.

There’s also a symbolic dimension to Fernandez’s rise that goes beyond pure market numbers, and it’s here that the Bassey comparison really earns its place. Bassey’s defining quality at Rangers wasn’t just that he was good, plenty of good players pass through Ibrox without generating anything like his eventual profile, it was the specific shape of his trajectory: bargain fee, initial slow burn, sudden and dramatic improvement, followed by a rapid and lucrative departure that banked the club a record fee and validated an entire recruitment philosophy built around signing underappreciated young talent and developing it in-house. Fernandez’s story has followed almost exactly that same arc so far, right down to the underwhelming start under one manager giving way to a dramatic upswing once circumstances and opportunity aligned in his favour. Rangers’ recruitment strategy under recent regimes has been explicitly built around finding the next version of that story, identifying players like Hamza Igamane and others who arrived for modest fees with the specific hope of developing and eventually selling them on for significant profit, and Fernandez looks, at this moment, like the most compelling active example of that model working exactly as intended.

None of this is to diminish what Raskin continues to offer the team, and any honest assessment of Rangers’ current squad has to acknowledge that the Belgian midfielder remains an enormously important player in his own right. His numbers across his time at the club, contributing regularly at both ends of the pitch from central midfield, are the kind that most Scottish Premiership sides would build their entire team around, and there’s a reasonable argument that his overall footballing importance to how Rangers actually play, dictating tempo, contributing goals and assists, and providing senior leadership in the middle of the park, remains at least the equal of what Fernandez offers from centre-back. Market valuation and footballing importance don’t always move in perfect lockstep, and it would be an oversimplification to suggest Fernandez has simply become the “better” player just because his valuation trajectory has been steeper of late.

But market value specifically, which is what the “most valuable player” framing is actually measuring, tends to respond disproportionately to exactly the kind of story Fernandez represents right now: a player still relatively early in his development curve, already performing at a level that’s attracting interest from major European clubs, and carrying the kind of age profile, still only in his mid-twenties, that suggests significant resale potential well beyond his current output. Raskin, while still a similarly young player himself, has already had his major breakout moment and been thoroughly scouted by the rest of European football for a couple of seasons now, meaning his valuation, while still substantial, reflects a more fully priced-in assessment of what he currently offers rather than the kind of rapid upward re-rating that comes with a genuinely fresh breakout story. Fernandez, by contrast, is still very much in the phase where each strong individual display and each fresh transfer rumour from a bigger club adds another layer to a valuation that was, barely eighteen months ago, a fraction of what it’s being talked about as today.

There’s also a broader context worth considering around position and scarcity that plays in Fernandez’s favour when it comes to pure valuation logic. Central defenders with his specific physical profile, genuinely dominant in the air, comfortable carrying the ball out from the back, and increasingly composed in possession under pressure, are consistently among the most sought-after and expensive positions to recruit for across Europe’s major leagues, precisely because genuinely elite defensive talent tends to be scarcer and slower to develop than attacking or even central midfield ability. Central midfielders with Raskin’s profile, while valuable, exist in slightly greater relative supply across the continent’s leagues, which can create a natural ceiling on how aggressively their valuations climb compared to a defender who ticks every box a top-level recruitment department is looking for. That scarcity dynamic is part of why defensive breakout stories like Bassey’s, and now potentially Fernandez’s, tend to generate such outsized valuation jumps once the wider market properly catches on.

For Rangers as a club, having two assets of this calibre and value simultaneously in the same squad is an enviable position to be in, even if it inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about how sustainable that situation actually is. Clubs of Rangers’ financial scale in the Scottish game have rarely been able to hold onto multiple genuinely elite, highly-valued players simultaneously for very long once interest from bigger leagues reaches a certain threshold, and reports already circulating suggest Rangers themselves are open to accepting substantial bids for both players if the right offers materialise, recognising the reality that eventually one or both will likely depart for fees that reshape the club’s transfer strategy for years to come, in much the same way Bassey’s sale did back in 2022. Whether that’s Fernandez heading to Serie A or the Premier League, or Raskin finally making the step up to a bigger league that’s been circling him for a couple of seasons now, the smart money says Rangers will look to maximise value on at least one of these two before too much longer.

There’s a legitimate question, too, about whether debating which of the two is technically “more valuable” misses a slightly bigger point about what this pairing represents for Rangers more broadly. Having built, developed, and substantially increased the value of both a central defender and a central midfielder from relatively modest initial outlays speaks to a genuinely well-functioning recruitment and coaching pipeline at Ibrox right now, one that’s managed to replicate the Bassey blueprint not once but potentially twice within the space of a few seasons. That’s a far more valuable long-term asset for the club than either individual player’s specific valuation figure at any single point in time, because it suggests a repeatable model rather than a one-off stroke of recruitment luck.

Still, for the purposes of settling the specific argument at hand, the trajectory currently favours Fernandez. A player who started the season fighting for regular game time and looked, by some fairly brutal early-career metrics, like an expensive gamble that hadn’t yet paid off, has in the time since become arguably the single most talked-about defensive asset in the entire Scottish Premiership, drawing interest from clubs several tiers above the level Rangers themselves compete at, and seeing his market valuation climb at a rate that dwarfs even Raskin’s own steady, sustained rise over the past three years. Whether Transfermarkt or any other single valuation source has formally updated its figures to reflect that shift at the exact moment of writing is almost beside the point. The direction of travel is unmistakable, and if Fernandez continues performing at his current level while interest from Serie A and elsewhere keeps building, it won’t be long before the numbers on paper catch up entirely with what’s already become the more compelling story out of Ibrox: not Raskin, the proven and reliable performer, but Fernandez, the new Bassey, rapidly becoming Rangers’ single most valuable footballing asset