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Former Rangers starlet Lewis Macleod has opened up on the pressure of being a £1 million player.
Macleod switched Ibrox for Brentford in 2015 as he joined the English club with the Gers still in the Championship after their 2012 financial difficulties.
Besides the price tag hanging over his head, the midfielder’s time at the West London club became a “nightmare” after injuries dogged his time with the Bees as Macleod admits he’d have liked to have stayed with the Light Blues.
Spells at Wigan Atheltic and Plymouth Argyle would follow, but the 27-year-old now finds himself without a club as he tries to rehabilitate and get his fitness levels up again.
Lifting the lid on his departure from Ibrox for the now-Premier League side, Macleod told Open Goal: “I would have liked to have stayed, but there wasn’t really any talk of it.
“Rangers never said: ‘We want you to stay’.
“At that point as well, there was loads of talk of Rangers struggling for money. I was only 19 or 20 so didn’t really know what was going on.
“Rangers were in the Scottish Championship at the time so an English Championship team were paying £1 million for a second-tier player in Scotland. It doesn’t really happen much.
“I felt a lot of pressure going down there because they’d been in the lower leagues a lot of the time and that was their first year in the Championship. They never spent that amount of money on players.
“They spent that on me and I was going down actually injured. It was tough getting back fit and then it was just a nightmare for 18 months.
“My first day, I went into the training ground, but it was a Friday night game so I’d never met any of the players. The physio told me to come to the game and he’d introduce me.
“I turned up about 15 minutes before kick-off and nobody knows who I am. So I went into the physio room and Jonathan Douglas is lying on the bench with his face down.
“The physio introduced me and he asked: ‘Are you the boy from Rangers?’
“I said: ‘Aye, how you doing mate?’.
“He didn’t say a word to me, just turned, went face down again and ignored me!”
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