Robbie Ure: The One That Got Away for Rangers

Robbie Ure was supposed to be one of those names you half-remember from a cup tie, a flicker of promise that never quite caught light at Ibrox.

Instead, at 22, he’s sitting on 15 goals in 15 games for IK Sirius, with Sevilla ready to put close to £8m on the table for a player Rangers once allowed to walk out the door for nothing.

That’s not just a sore one for Rangers. It’s a case study in everything Scottish football keeps saying it wants to fix, but rarely does.

The one that got away

Ure’s Rangers story barely fills a paragraph.

An 18-year-old debut in August 2022, a goal in a League Cup tie against Queen of the South. Then a minute off the bench against St Mirren in November. Another minute against Hibs in May. That was it. Two slivers of Premiership football, six months apart, for a teenager desperate to play.

Rangers, struggling on multiple fronts at the time, still didn’t see room for him. They went big instead. Around £6m on Danilo, with wages taking the total outlay towards £10m. Another £3.5m on Sam Lammers, again north of £4m once salary is factored in. Heavy investment, light returns.

For Ure, the pathway at Ibrox looked blocked, then bricked up. He left. First to Anderlecht in Belgium. Then to Sweden, to Sirius, where he has grown, toughened, and started scoring at a rate that makes recruitment departments sit up.

Fifteen goals in 15 games. Ten in his last six. On Sunday, as Rangers were losing 2-1 at home to Hibs, word emerged that Sevilla want him. A multi-million pound move to one of Spain’s most storied clubs for a forward who cost Rangers nothing to lose.

You can imagine the mood in Govan when that dropped. You can also imagine the quiet satisfaction at Hampden, where the Scottish FA are trying yet again to persuade clubs that trusting their own kids might actually be good business.

‘Made In Scotland?’ – and sold elsewhere

Next month in St Andrews, SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and chief football officer Craig Mulholland will stand in front of the owners and CEOs of Scotland’s senior clubs and deliver a presentation titled “Made In Scotland?”.

Strip away the branding and it’s essentially a plea: stop blocking the route from academy to first team. Give young Scottish players a chance to prove they belong.

If they were inclined to twist the knife – and they won’t, for diplomatic reasons – Maxwell and Mulholland could simply put Ure’s face on a big screen. Here’s what you could have had. Here’s what you let go.

Trust your youth, save yourself one fortune in transfer fees, then make another by selling a developed player at his peak. That’s the logic. It’s not complicated.

Reality always is. Ure at 18 wasn’t Ure at 22. He may not have looked like a future Sevilla striker when he was nicking minutes at the end of games. There is hindsight at play. Rangers are not uniquely guilty here either.

Celtic barely used Ben Doak – now Gannon-Doak – before losing him to England. Another multi-million pound talent slipping away. Another reminder that Scotland’s biggest clubs talk about pathways, then watch the best of their own disappear down someone else’s.

Numbers that don’t lie

You don’t need data to know Scottish football has a youth problem. But the data hammers it home.

Across the opening two rounds of this Premiership season, only 31% of the players who saw action were Scottish. Just 5% were Scots aged 21 or under. Forty-six different nationalities appeared.

The most striking example? Dundee United, who have used just one Scottish player – Dylan Tait – in their first two games.

Ask any chairman, chief executive or manager if they want academy graduates in their first team and you’ll hear the same answer. Of course they do. They’re passionate about it. They care deeply about developing their own.

Then come the caveats. The pressures. The risks. The reasons why, on a Saturday, so many of them don’t.

There are nuances. Dundee United will point to the investment in their youth system and then to Kai Hutchison, a gifted 16-year-old who left for Everton. They’re not alone.

Celtic have seen Dara Jikiemi go to Liverpool and Daniel Cummings to West Ham. Rangers have lost Cameron Scott to Burnley and Chris Eadie to Sheffield United. Hearts have watched Boyd Fraser join Nottingham Forest and Keir McMeekin head to Manchester City. Hibs can list Ben Vickery at City and Josh Landers at West Ham.

Those names barely scratch the surface. Dozens of young Scots have gone south in the post-Brexit era. Bigger money is part of it. But it’s not the whole story.

When players and parents look at the landscape at home, they don’t see a clear path to first-team football. They see benches. They see loan moves. They see imported squad-fillers.

Blocked pathways and borrowed time

The poster boys for academy faith at Scotland’s biggest clubs are thin on the ground.

Too often, pathways are clogged by journeymen from overseas, players with questionable CVs and limited upside. What does a talented teenager think when another short-term fix walks through the door?

Stay and stagnate? Or leave and hope?

Maxwell and Mulholland know they’re not walking into a room of romantics at St Andrews. They’re walking into a room of investors. People who have put in their own money and raised more from others. People whose first and last responsibility is to their club’s bottom line.

Appeals to national pride, to the idea of feeding more talent into the Scotland team in five, 10, 15 years, will only go so far. The pitch has to be hard-nosed: this is how you win more games, make more money, and build more value by playing your own.

Plenty of clubs down the divisions already live this way, giving young players real chances and reaping the benefits. Others will continue to scour every corner of the globe if they believe the answer lies in a 27-year-old from the other side of the world with a highlight reel and a free transfer.

They’re entitled to that view. Their obligation is to their own backyard.

So if you’re going to ask them to hand more minutes to kids, you’d better arrive with your strongest argument, not a vague appeal to the greater good.

Reports, warnings, and deaf ears

The SFA has been here before.

In August 2024, it published the Transition report – 114 pages of global player data, case studies and interviews, put together by then chief football officer Andy Gould and head of men’s elite football strategy Chris Docherty.

It challenged the old dogma that “kids win you nothing”. It showed, with hard evidence, that clubs across Europe are building competitive teams and huge transfer income by trusting academy players, playing them early, then selling them well.

It laid out, starkly, how few minutes Scottish academy players get compared with peers in other successful leagues and nations. The message was blunt: giving more game time to young Scots is not a charity project. It’s sound football and financial logic.

Some recommendations stuck. The central message – be bold – did not.

By October 2025, there was another report. This one ran to 133 pages, again authored by Gould and Docherty, again full of strong ideas and clear thinking.

Both men have since left Hampden. You don’t need to be a mind reader to suspect they grew tired of banging their heads against the same walls.

Now comes another push, another attempt to jolt the biggest decision-makers into changing habits that have become ingrained.

Next month, as Maxwell and Mulholland speak, the famous Road Hole bunker on the Old Course will sit just outside the window, a place of golfing nightmares.

Escaping from that sand on the 17th suddenly looks like the easy up-and-down.

The real question is whether Scotland’s clubs are finally ready to climb out of their own trap – or whether the next Robbie Ure will simply pack his bags, score his goals somewhere else, and send another uncomfortable headline back home.