When the opportunity emerged to bring in a player who had fallen out of favour at Rangers during the January transfer window, there was to be no messing around.
Frans van Seumeren wanted a forward to fill the gap created by the departure of last season’s Golden Boot winner during the previous summer. A Golden Boot winner who himself had been linked with a move to the blue side of Glasgow before ending up in Spain.
And once it became apparent that Rangers were open to offers for a man who had set the Glasgow giants back a cool £3 million a few months earlier – a fee he would struggle to justify – FC Utrecht were in no mood to let such an opportunity pass them by.
Rangers man is thriving out on loan
“Take (Sam) Lammers. And I more or less pushed through to get Lammers,” Van Seumeren tells De Beslissers podcast, personally involving himself in the deal which eventually brought the former PSV Eindhoven forward back to the Netherlands on a short-term loan deal.
“At one point, Jordy (Zuidam, technical director) and Ron (Jans, head coach) did a really good job and approached him. And, in the end, it was clear that Lammers wanted to come.”
Remarkably, Lammers has more goals in just ten games for Utrecht than he has managed in any of his previous seasons since that fine spell at Heerenveen in 2018/19. A man reborn and playing with the swagger which earned him that £8 million move to Atalanta all those years ago, Lammers has six goals and assists for his new employers already. Almost double the amount he accumulated during a highly-disappointing first half of the campaign at Rangers.
Lammers is proving to be a ‘fantastic’ addition to a side with European aspirations. And while some have wondered whether a sudden return to form could pave the way for a fresh start at Rangers next season, reports indicate that Philippe Clement’s side are still planning to cut their losses.
Ibrox exit looks likely for Sam Lammers this summer
Whether Utrecht can afford the sort of fee Rangers want remains to be seen. Van Seumeren, however, was willing to shift the needle a little to ensure that Lammers would arrive on an initial rental basis, and it is tempting to wonder if he’ll be tempted to do something similar in the summer.
“A rent (loan fee) had to be paid, but it was not in the budget. So then you have to figure it out,” the long-serving president adds. “At that moment, I put a little pressure on it. (It was) logical, because I saw that we were short of a striker.
“You don’t want to be relegated. You don’t want to get yourself into that misery, because then they’ll hang me from the (Utrecht) cathedral! So then I thought, let’s get Lammers.”
Now eighth and closer to the Champions League places than the relegation spots, Van Seumeren rolled the dice on Lammers and it appears his number has come up.
