The European glamour nights are back for Rangers this week and it’s a true clash of the titans as the Scottish Premiership leaders meet the top dogs from Portugal in Lisbon. It’s tough going for any Scottish team in Europe as even the second tier of UEFA competition is littered with financial powerhouses who might as well be playing a different sport when it comes to the transfer market. The last 16 boasts Liverpool, Bayer Leverkusen and AS Roma, giants of the game and financial powerhouses with squads more expensively assembled than Scottish hopefuls can even dream of.
Yet with Benfica it is a slightly different story. In straight transfer fees, their current squad runs up a bill of nearly £135m, dwarfing the £37m that has been spent putting together the Rangers squad and suggesting that, on paper at least, it should be a mismatch. But Benfica are famously one of the most self-sustainable big clubs on the planet – they raked in a transfer profit of £139m last season after the sales of Darwin Nunez to Liverpool and Enzo Fernandez to Chelsea. That’s given them the financial weight to spend a little in rebuilding their team and this summer with the big-money arrivals of Orkun Kokcu and Arthur Cabral. They’ve spent close to £100m since the summer, but even that is effectively breaking even, with Goncalo Ramos’ imminent permanent move to PSG set to bring in more cash and take their net spend for 2023/24 to virtually zero.Rangers meanwhile have had to shop around for value. Mohamed Diomande looks a good buy at £4.5m while Cyriel Dessers is starting to deliver on the similar fee that was splashed out on him in the summer. Here is a look at how the two squads stack up.
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