Robbie Ure: From Rangers' Hope to a Star in Sweden

Robbie Ure was supposed to be the future at Ibrox. For Rangers, he’s fast becoming the past they’d rather not think about.

He was 18 when he first pulled on the shirt in anger, a League Cup tie against Queen of the South in August 2022. One start, one goal. The kind of debut that usually lights up a pathway. Instead, it marked the high point.

After that came scraps. A minute off the bench against St Mirren in November. Another minute against Hibs in May. Two Premiership appearances, two minutes of football, six months apart. For a teenager desperate to play, it was starvation disguised as opportunity.

Rangers, under pressure and short of answers across the pitch, chose not to look inwards. In Ure’s position they spent heavily: £6m on Danilo, a package that has already swelled towards £10m with wages, and £3.5m on Sam Lammers, north of £4m all told. The door to the first team did not so much close on Ure as get bolted shut.

So he walked away. First to Anderlecht in Belgium, then on to IK Sirius in Sweden. Out of sight, it seemed. Certainly out of mind in Glasgow.

Not anymore.

At Sirius, Ure has grown up and grown into his game. He’s 22 now, on a blistering run of 15 goals in 15 matches, 10 of them in his last six outings. On Sunday, as Rangers were losing 2-1 at home to Hibs, word filtered through that Sevilla want him – and are ready to pay close to £8m for the privilege.

The timing could hardly have been more brutal. Ibrox watched another disjointed home defeat. Then came the story of the academy striker they let leave for nothing, now being lined up for a multi-million pound move to one of Spain’s grand old clubs.

It is exactly the kind of tale that will quietly delight the Scottish FA’s number-crunchers as they prepare for next month’s “critically important” forum with the owners and chief executives of the country’s senior clubs in St Andrews. The event is titled “Made In Scotland?” – the question mark doing a lot of heavy lifting.

SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and his chief football officer, Craig Mulholland, will front the presentation. At heart, it is a plea: stop blocking the road. Look at your pathways. Give young Scottish players a proper crack at the first team.

If they wanted to ram the point home – and diplomatic instinct says they won’t – they could stick Robbie Ure’s face on the opening slide. Trust your youth, the argument goes, and you might save yourself one fortune in transfer fees and wages, then make another when you eventually sell them on.

Football reality is messier than that, of course. Ure might not have been ready then. Players develop at different speeds. There is hindsight in all of this, and hindsight is always unforgiving. Yet the sting for Rangers is real, just as Celtic felt it when they barely used a teenage Ben Doak, now Gannon-Doak, before watching him head to England and blossom into another multi-million pound export.

The Ure story is a sharp anecdote, but the numbers behind it are even more damning.

Across the first two rounds of this Premiership season, only 31% of the players who saw any game time were Scottish. Just 5% were Scots aged 21 or under. Forty-six different nationalities have already featured.

Then there’s Dundee United, the most striking example of all: in their first two league matches, they have used a single Scottish player – Dylan Tait.

Ask chairmen, CEOs and managers whether they want local talent in their starting XIs and the answer is always the same. Of course they do. They’ll talk about identity, community, the pride of seeing one of their own make it. Then comes the caveat. Then come the reasons, some valid, some less convincing, for why it rarely happens.

There are complications. Dundee United will point to the money they’ve ploughed into youth development and the frustration of watching their brightest 16-year-old, Kai Hutchison, head to Everton. He is one of dozens of Scottish teenagers who have gone south in the post-Brexit landscape.

Celtic can list Dara Jikiemi (Liverpool) and Daniel Cummings (West Ham). Rangers will mention Cameron Scott (Burnley) and Chris Eadie (Sheffield United). Hearts have lost Boyd Fraser (Nottingham Forest) and Keir McMeekin (Man City). Hibs can add Ben Vickery (Man City) and Josh Landers (West Ham) to the roll call.

Those are just some of the names. The tip of a very large iceberg.

Money matters. Bigger contracts and bigger promises always will. But to blame it all on greed is too easy. These youngsters, and the parents advising them, are also looking at the pathway in front of them. Or rather, the lack of one.

They see first-team squads padded out with short-term imports, many with modest CVs and little resale value. They see the door to the senior side blocked not by world-beaters, but by journeymen. Stay and stagnate, or leave and hope – that is the choice too many of them face.

For Maxwell and Mulholland, the task at St Andrews is clear and daunting. They’ll have a room full of powerbrokers, but will they have a room full of believers?

Appealing to patriotism and the long-term health of the national team won’t be enough. Every owner in that room is ultimately answerable to one thing: their own club’s success. If that success is built on homegrown players, so much the better. Many clubs lower down the ladder already live that reality and proudly so. But if the bigger beasts think scouring every corner of the globe gives them a better chance of staying in the black and in the division, that’s the path they’ll take.

So the pitch has to be hard-headed, not soft-focus. If you’re asking Scotland’s biggest clubs to give more minutes to kids, you need to prove that doing so makes football and financial sense now, not just in 10 or 15 years’ time.

The SFA has tried to do exactly that before.

In August 2024, it published the Transition report, a 114-page study led by then chief football officer Andy Gould and head of men’s elite football strategy Chris Docherty. It was exhaustive. Global player data, case studies, interviews. It challenged the old dogma that “you win nothing with kids” and laid out, in stark figures, how much money European clubs have made by trusting, playing and then selling their academy graduates.

The report set out how few minutes Scottish academy players were getting compared with their peers in other successful leagues and nations. It argued that more game time for young Scots was not just good for the national team, but good for the clubs’ balance sheets and league performance.

It was bold, detailed and persuasive. It did not, by and large, change much.

Some recommendations made it through. The central message – be brave, back your own – did not.

A second report followed in October 2025, this time running to 133 pages, again authored by Gould and Docherty. Another strong piece of work. More ideas, more evidence, more examples of how youth can underpin a club’s model.

Both men have since left Hampden. Too many collisions with too many brick walls, you suspect.

Now comes another attempt to shift the culture. Another summit. Another room full of sceptical faces to win over.

Outside that room next month, just beyond the windows of the St Andrews venue, sits the famous Road Hole bunker on the 17th at the Old Course – a place where dreams have gone to die for generations of golfers. Holing out from that sand will feel straightforward compared with what Maxwell and Mulholland are trying to do.

They need to convince Scotland’s biggest clubs that the next Robbie Ure should be scoring goals for them, not for someone else – and that the real gamble is not playing him at all.