As regular readers of Ibrox Noise will know, recently we compiled a piece about the potential Rangers future of Alex Lowry.

Currently at Motherwell on loan from Wycombe, the former Rangers playmaker is doing a little bit better in life, and he is one who maybe could return to Rangers in the future if the stars were to align.

However, this got Ibrox Noise thinking.

We offered a photo in that particular article regarding a classic Rangers match in which we beat Celtic, featuring Leon King, Lowry himself, Scott Arfield and one Amad Diallo.

Eagle eyed punters will have spotted this photo (see above). Of course we all now know that Diallo is a significant player for English giants Manchester United. Even if they are not in a good place at the moment.

This got us thinking: what other players have Rangers had in the past five, maybe ten years, who have then gone on to become either superstars or great players in their own right away from Ibrox?

Ibrox Noise takes you through a list that we can compile of such players who either underperformed or were here too young, but then subsequently became great players in the future, at present.

Here we go.

Amad Diallo

We begin with Diallo himself.

Amad Diallo came to Rangers on loan from Manchester United. They had signed him from Atalanta for £20M at a young age, with an appearance clause adding a further £20M, so he was technically a £40M player.

But he hadn’t yet broken through at Old Trafford. In fact, he hadn’t come close to it yet.

Rangers got him on loan and he did rather struggle. He did not do badly, but he was a young boy in a pressure cooker of a situation, and it has to be said that Diallo did not thrive in the early stages.

We could see his talent, but Rangers fans became very harsh very quickly on the Ivory Coast player.

It is a long memory to recall that February Old Firm under Giovanni van Bronckhorst, when Borna Barišić had to keep the boy calm and console him at the start of the match at Parkhead against Celtic, when Diallo looked clearly very nervous, never having experienced anything like this before.

Of course, his loan expired at Rangers and most fans at Ibrox were quite happy to see the boy go.

Ibrox Noise admitted that overall his loan probably could have gone better. But we knew there was a talent there and we’d always liked him.

Of course, today Diallo is a big, big star in England.

He’s now valued at £50M, and at the same time he’s definitely gone from strength to strength and is now an utter regular for the biggest team in England.

They might not be the best team in England these days, but they’re certainly the biggest, and he’s had a huge role to play with them in recent times.

We say well done to him.

Malik Tillman

Now we come on to Malik Tillman.

Tillman is another who came to Rangers at a young age on loan.

He did not do badly, but infamously went missing in the biggest matches, particularly the Old Firm clashes.

But he did show up in the gigantic Champions League playoff against PSV Eindhoven. His assist set up Antonio Čolak for the goal that took Rangers into the Champions League proper. In hindsight that probably wasn’t the best idea.

Nevertheless, Tillman didn’t remain at Rangers.

He wasn’t happy at Rangers, and his mother indeed, who Ibrox Noise spoke to, very much wanted him back in Germany with her.

Ideally, he wanted to play for Bayern Munich, which was of course the club he was on loan at Rangers from.

However, in the end he left Bayern and initially ended up at PSV Eindhoven. Then he got his switch back to Germany with Leverkusen where he is today and is now widely regarded as a truly world class player.

He is not quite into the £100M region (Around £25M). But he’s certainly a boy who’s hit the big time. He is now a big time player in the German Bundesliga and Champions League. Tillman very much became the player that his talent suggested he possibly could.

He was a regular for America at the World Cup. And he is now a top player and a really big asset to his team.

Umar Sadiq

Umar Sadiq, a truly lampooned player when he came to Rangers, simply because Steven Gerrard couldn’t manage the boy.

He would subsequently enjoy success at some big clubs, especially in Serbia, where he shone significantly with Partizan Belgrade.

His goal rate was absolutely without question. He had originally come to Rangers on loan from Roma with a view to shining as a big, strong target man.

Unfortunately, Gerrard could not handle the boy.

He couldn’t handle either his personality or his play style, and as a result Umar Sadiq completely flopped at Rangers and was unfairly lambasted and lampooned by most Rangers fans.

Of course, as we all then know, he moved on to Spain’s second division, where he shone for Almería.

He shone significantly for that team, so much so that Rangers fans couldn’t quite believe this could be the same player.

There was more mockery that the standard of the Spanish second division must be really poor rather than anything else.

But the reality is Gerrard just mismanaged him badly.

Today he’s a La Liga player.

He plays for Valencia, even if they are struggling this season, and he was at one point regarded as potentially being a £50M player.

We don’t think he quite reached that level. But he is definitely a very good striker. He’s a much, much better player than his diabolical time at Rangers under Gerrard showed him as being.

He’s doing well these days.

Calvin Bassey

Some might wonder at Big Shirley, but Bassey, having had a nightmare following his original transfer to Ajax, made it good at Fulham in the Premier League.

He was not fantastic at Rangers, but clearly a massively strong boy with pace is an asset to any defence. While he was hugely error-prone, he coined Rangers in around £22M.

He’s worth £30M now at Fulham and has 100 appearances at that level. World class? Hard to say the boy isn’t now. He certainly evolved from the defender who let his man go v Frankfurt and played a role in Rangers not winning that trophy.

Fabio Silva

This is a huge one.

Fabio Silva, of course, came to Rangers on loan from Wolverhampton Wanderers.

This had been a bizarre signing in many senses because Nuno Espírito Santo of the Molineux giants had decided to invest £35M in the Portuguese star, who hadn’t even featured properly for Porto’s first team.

He didn’t shine at all when it came to English football and came on loan to Rangers in a bid to improve his career.

What we saw was an extremely underwhelming player who had moments where he showed glimpses of some talent, but curiously enough only truly shone for Rangers in two matches.

One match at Parkhead, in which his hard work and graft were above almost any other player in the side, and even more bizarrely, if not poetically, against his old rival Benfica in the Europa League for Rangers.

These were the only two matches in which he looked like something more akin to the price that the English side had paid for him.

Today, of course, he is now a Borussia Dortmund player.

He is now with a gigantic club in Germany and is now a big star.

He’s growing and he is improving, and he is a player who has definitely gone from strength to strength.

Another one who sank at a young age at Rangers, give or take. But then, over time has flourished at bigger clubs in a bigger league.

We have to say, we couldn’t really stand him. We didn’t really like Fabio Silva, but we have to say he’s done better than expected.

Fair enough.

Yan Diomande

Now this one is a little bit of a stretch because he was never technically a Rangers player.

But as a youth prospect, he very much infamously/famously had a trial at Rangers against Monaco.

He played with the youth sides in Govan at the time.

This was one distinct reason why Ibrox Noise was not disappointed to see David McCallum leave. Simply because it had been under his watch that he had let a superstar like Yan Diomande slip away.

Yan Diomande, of course, is currently a Real Madrid superstar. Without any doubt, he is by far the biggest current player to have plied his trade at Rangers for any period of time. To have then gone on to become a £120M player in the future is mildly depressing for Rangers.

And he’s still only 19.

The Ivorian international is one of the absolute top prospects in the world today. He is very much on course to becoming a world superstar in the future, potentially the very near future.

He probably wouldn’t have realised that potential had he stayed at Rangers. But we’re talking about one of the biggest examples of a player slipping through Rangers’ grasp. It was due to pure incompetence on the part of McCallum and indeed others that we can ever recall.

We can’t include the old near misses like Messi and Ronaldo. Rangers did try to sign them, but just couldn’t quite manage to do so.

Those were just not to be.

But this boy was on trial for Rangers and apparently our club supremos didn’t think he was good enough.

It’s definitely good to know that we had such good guys at the club who could tell a player when they saw one, right?

Would Ibrox Noise like any of these guys back now? Well Shirley is a hugely evolved player, and Yan Diomande wouldn’t be half bad either.

But hey, at least we’ve got Manny Fernandez and Djeidi Gassama, right…?