The desperate state of finances at Ibrox has been highlighted by a character assassination on Sam Lammers carried out by Keith Jackson.
The crime? Refusing to take a 66% pay cut while his employers pocked a fee of £2.5m for the player dubbed the Dutch Laudrup.
There is a very simple and obvious solution to this, one that virtually every club has faced upto in recent years when last season’s star signing turns out to be just another dud.
You pay off their contract, take the hit and try to recruit better in future.
Every club in the EPL has a Lammers or two at the club, several Celtic players are sitting tight on long term contracts that won’t be matched anywhere else. That’s life. Micky Beale got the sack, Mark Lawwell is exploring fresh opportunities.
Plunging in as subtly as John Lundstram into a 50-50, Jackson informs Daily Record readers:
Sam Lammers may have priced himself out of a transfer back to Holland this summer after demanding three times more than Utrecht’s highest paid player.
Record Sport understands the Ereveridise outfit were prepared to match Rangers’ asking price of around £2.7 million for the 27 -year-old, on the back of a highly successful loan move during the second half of last season.
But any prospect of a permanent deal has collapsed after Lammers made it clear he is not prepared to accept less in wages than he’s raking in on his current bumper Ibrox contract – which still has three more years left to run.
Sources in the Netherlands believe Lammers is holding out for a package worth around 1.5m euros per year. But Utrecht’s top line is understood to be around the 500,000 euros mark, which has forced the club to look elsewhere in the hunt for a new goal scorer.
Last week they shelled out a fee of around £1.4m to buy 21-year-old striker Noah Ohio from Belgian side Standard Liege and that signing effectively killed off any chance of a move for Lammers being revisited.
Yes, that is what happens in the big bad world, clubs shop in the markets that they can afford.
A year ago the Dutch Laudrup was being saluted as the man to smash Celtic after the despair of the season 22/23 season.
It is an act of wishful thinking to claim that a transfer fee was agreed between the clubs only for the deal to stall over wages. No club discusses a transfer fee without knowing roughly what is required in terms of wages, there is a world of a difference between 500,000 euros a year and 1.5m euros.
Former team-mates and coaches were quoted to recall some incredible moments that Lammers had produced in the past, how he would flourish under the brilliant coaching of Beale playing just in front of the dynamic midfield combo of Nicky Raskin and Todd Cantwell. Clips of goals scored in training sessions were loving shared with the Record’s army of readers.
Gushingly on 26 July 2023 the Record reported:
Lewis Ferguson admits he was impressed by Rangers new boy Sam Lammers when he faced him in Italy last season and reckons fellow Serie A recruit will “bring something different to Rangers”.
The Scotland midfielder knows got a close up of Dutchman Lammers when his Bologna side came up against Sampdoria, where the frontman was on loan from Atalanta. The striker netted his first goal for the Light Blues in last week’s pre-season friendly defeat to Newcastle United.
Ex Aberdeen star Ferguson, 23, gave an insight into what Rangers supporters can expect and the reason Michael Beale swooped to sign the 26-year-old for around £3 million. Ferguson told the Scottish Sun: “I played against Lammers when he was with Sampdoria and he is a really technical player. I watched the Newcastle game where he scored his first goal and you could see how good he was. He picks up nice areas behind the striker and he is someone who will create chances. He is the type of player who will suit how Rangers want to play, especially when they are trying to break teams down.”
The warning signs were there with Lammers, before signing his dream four year contract at Ibrox Atalanta had loaned him out to Eintracht Frankfurt, Empoli and Sampdoria in the 18 months prior to signing his four year Ibrox contract.
Half a dozen decent matches at Ibrox has turned free transfer Super Jack Butland into a £40m asset, no-one will be pressurising the former Crystal Palace reserve into taking a 66% wage cut.
It is incredible that Jackson has felt compelled to hit out at a worker sticking to his contract rather than take a 66% pay cut since he no longer fits in with the new management of a football team. This isn’t Lammers problem.
If the Reach Group decided to send out a memo to the star reporters at the Record that they were to help out by taking 66% pay cuts to write elsewhere it is likely that Jackson would among the first to be up in arms, manning the barricades.
A redundancy payment might sweeten things up, just as handing Lammers the bulk of the £2.7m transfer fee coming in from Utrecht might assist negotiations in ditching the Dutch Laudrup.
As well as Lammers there are a number of players at Ibrox in a similar position which explains why no-one was sold in January or so far in the summer window.
Tom Lawrence has a year left on his contract that he has no hope of getting anywhere else. Cyriel Dessers, Kieran Dowell and Jose Cifuentes were signed alongside Lammers last summer with no one else pre[ared to match their current contracts never mind shell out a transfer fee for Ibrox flops.
Meanwhile with the Saudi Pro League transfer window open there is still no sign of a mega-bucks deal for James Tavernier coming in from Al Ettifaq.
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