While money isn’t exactly tight at Rangers, spending £6.5m on Ryan Kent and £3.5m on Filip Helander this summer, the club does sometime rely on trials to find new talent when other big clubs around Europe constantly use their money.
It’s a cheap way of finding potential useful squad members, and regular trials seem to be held in Scotland where clubs can evaluate prospective signings.
That’s how Newcastle found Ludwig Francillette, beating Steven Gerrard’s side to the French signing, and, back in May, Rangers also hosted Yanis Bensaber.
The name won’t mean much to fans, even if he did score in the friendly he took part in, but because of him being tied elsewhere, everyone simply moved on.
He told Le Dauphiné Libéré: “In the end, it didn’t get done. I was still under contract at Lille. It was complicated”.
After that, his deal with the Ligue 1 side ran out, and instead of heading to Rangers, who clearly had some interest in him, he has now signed for FC Annecy in National 2.
While he hasn’t managed to break through properly in the world of football, he still has time on his side, and he will be hoping to regain the promise people once saw in him when he was capped five times for France’s U16 national team back in 2015.
