Are the Ibrox side trying to emulate Celtic’s success by signing Japanese and South Korean players? They’re five years late to that party…

Yesterday, the Ibrox side agreed a fee with Girona for a 20 year old South Korean winger.

His name is Kim Min-su, and he’s expected to undergo a medical imminently.

The fee is being reported as €10 million, which is around £8.5m in real money.

According to the Scottish Sun, the thing is as good as done.

Here’s what the report had to say:

RANGERS have AGREED a fee with Girona for wing wonderkid Kim Min-su – and he’s expected to undergo a medical imminently.

That’s according to media in Spain, who expect the Korean to make his way to Glasgow soon.

That will make him their twelfth signing of the summer.

Twelve.

And they’re still light in more than one position, but we’ll come back to that.

Because it wasn’t the number that caught my eye this time.

It was where he’s from.

A South Korean winger.

Now, where have we seen that one before?

The Ibrox recruitment department have finally worked out what Celtic were up to in the summer of 2021

Only five years on, mind you.

Ange Postecoglou arrived at Celtic Park with a contacts book full of J-League numbers, and he used every one of them.

Kyogo Furuhashi, Reo Hatate, Daizen Maeda, Yosuke Ideguchi, Tomoki Iwata and Yuki Kobayashi all came through the door inside about eighteen months.

Then Oh Hyeon-gyu and Yang Hyun-jun arrived from South Korea.

Some of them were roaring successes.

Some of them barely played.

But the model worked, and it worked for one very specific reason.

We were shopping in a market that nobody else in Britain could be bothered looking at.

Cheap, technically excellent, professional to a fault – and available for a fraction of what the same player costs you out of Belgium or Portugal.

That’s the bit they’ve noticed.

The bit they haven’t noticed is that it stopped being a secret about four years ago.

Half of Europe is scouting Japan and South Korea now, so the very thing that made Celtic’s model work has already been priced out of it

You don’t get a Kyogo for £4.6m in 2026.

You get a bidding war and an agent with opinions.

We know that fine, because we’re the ones paying the new prices now.

The market they think they’ve discovered is the same market that has Celtic haggling over every deal we’ve tried to do this summer.

So they’ve turned up to the party five years late, and they’ve turned up holding £8.5m for a boy who has made three senior appearances for the club they’re buying him from.

Three.

Calling this lad a Girona player is technically true, and just about the most flattering thing anybody could say about him

Because that’s how it’s being sold to us.

The Ibrox side are signing a La Liga winger from Girona.

Sounds like business, doesn’t it?

But three senior appearances is the sum total of it.

He spent last season out on loan at Andorra in the Segunda Division, where he played 40 games and scored 6 goals.

Six in 40, in the Spanish second tier.

That’s the return that has them booking a medical and clearing £8.5m out of the door.

Now, I’m not going to write the boy off before he’s kicked a ball in Glasgow.

He’s 20, and 20 year olds improve.

The Spanish media are calling him the second coming of Lee Kang-in, and who knows?

Maybe he’ll turn out to be exactly that.

Stranger things have happened, and I’d rather judge him on what I see than on what a scouting report says.

But make no mistake, £8.5m is being handed over for a projection here, not for a player.

And it’s being handed over by a club who are already out of the Europa League proper – and whose manager is being asked about his future every other week.

Twelve signings in one window isn’t a recruitment strategy, it’s a game of transfer bingo played with somebody else’s money

Look at how they even arrived at this one.

They had Couhaib Driouech all but signed and sat him in the stand at Ibrox for the Jablonec game, only for the whole thing to collapse inside 24 hours over an alleged medical issue.

Then they went to Brighton for Amario Cozier-Duberry and had a £7m bid knocked back.

And now, a fortnight later, it’s a 20 year old off Girona’s bench by way of the Spanish second tier.

Is there a single person at Ibrox who could tell you what that squad is meant to look like by Monday night?

Anybody at all?

Because from out here it looks like they’ve been reacting to whoever knocks them back next.

That’s not a plan.

That’s a man working his way down a list with the window closing.

Meanwhile, over at Celtic, it’s four in, and every one of them for a position we actually needed filled.

Quality over quantity, as I’ve said more than once this summer.

Twelve against four.

We’ll see which one of those is still standing in May.

Because here’s the thing about copying somebody’s homework five years after they handed it in.

The teacher has already marked it.

And they still managed to get the answer wrong…

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