Set up to fail

Football perhaps unsurprisingly has been a sport where money has dictated the outcome of leagues and competitions for decades. Tables generally trend from the richest clubs at the top, down to those with the least financial clout at the bottom. I don’t think anyone reading this will be hugely surprised or shocked by this particular revelation, but there are exceptions.

In England for example we are seeing the likes of Brighton and Brentford punching well above their financial standing in the richest league in the world. In the past this was achieved by Southampton for a period of time. And the key aspect to their success?

Recruitment and strategy.

You can have all the money in the world but if you spend it poorly then you end up, well, you end up like Chelsea Football Club. Over £1bn has been spent on transfer fees alone since Todd Boehly rolled into town and yet in the calendar year to 2023 they have fewer points than Bournemouth, Wolves and Nottingham Forrest amongst many others.

So why is this relevant?

Well, at Rangers we again find ourselves in a bit of a mess with the team being booed more often than the opposition and a manager being sacked even earlier than his predecessor, following a horrendous result at home to Aberdeen on Saturday.

There has been intense scrutiny and criticism of Michael Beale and his management team, so I won’t add to the post-mortem that will be filling blogs and pods everywhere at present.

However what I will say is this, even although Beale was undoubtedly part of the problem, our issues go deeper than the man wearing the suit in the dugout.

Chelsea may have been chosen as my extreme example, however if you want to see a club spending money poorly then we need look no further than Govan. We’ve had a European final, two club record player sales, Champions League income and managerial compensation – all in a very short space of time – and yet where have we gone on the pitch?

The answer is undoubtedly backwards.

Any manager at Rangers in recent years has in my opinion been set up to fail, certainly post-55, and I don’t say that lightly. Ross Wilson carried the can for our lack of success during his tenure, which saw far more misses than hits, in terms of transfer incomings & we then found ourselves allowing the manager – usually now the head coach at most clubs (and that’s an important distinction) – to run through his phonebook and find players he once knew from various academies.

It’s a losing strategy.

Financially we have operated with an enormous disadvantage to our city rivals over the last decade. When Gerrard arrived at Ibrox Celtic’s wage bill was nearly twice the size of our turnover and suddenly David Murray’s infamous quote about ‘every fiver’ could be reversed. However with European football and commercial growth we narrowed that gap but it has again reappeared due to two issues: (1) firstly we didn’t retain the league and (2) our player trading hasn’t matched theirs.

Number 2 is the key element though as it makes number 1 more likely on an ongoing basis. If you sign the right players and sell them at the right time you have more money to rinse and repeat and keep the ball rolling.

Well right now our ball is burst.

The sales of Calvin Bassey and Nathan Patterson should have kickstarted the supposed fourth-pillar of our club model. Instead we’ve spent the money so poorly we’ve stagnated and become lumbered with an expensive squad with no obvious sellable assets. Sure we can scrape together a few million here and there, like we did in the summer, but we don’t have a ‘Jota’ sitting in the squad waiting to be sold for £20m.

Back to recruitment. Gone are the days when old-fashioned scouting and reliable agents were the entire extent of a football club’s player identification. Scouts as you would expect of course still exist and are certainly more than necessary. The clubs that are truly successful in their approach are the ones successfully harnessing information and data better than the rest to supplement what they already have in place, in terms of a scouting network.

Brentford rose from League One to an established Premier League outfit under the ownership of Matthew Benham. Benham’s background is in sports betting and using data and analysis to predict the outcome of matches better than the bookies and since that data-led approach was brought into the football club it’s difficult to argue with the end result.

Players such as Said Benrahma, Ollie Watkins and Neil Maupay were signed for a combined £10m and then sold for around £75m within a few years. This shows not only the importance of identifying undervalued talent but also having the confidence and assurance to sell them at the right time and reinvest those funds successfully, which they have undoubtedly done. Our inability to do that at Rangers in recent years has been one of the key lessons we must learn from as we seek to improve.

See Morelos and Kent as prime examples.

Brighton too have allowed data and information to shape their decisions. Owner Tony Bloom’s company Starlizard provides information on potential signings all over the world which are then analysed and scouted within the club. It’s why they were able to identify Kaoru Mitoma from Japan, Moises Caicdedo from Ecuador and Alexis MacAllister from Argentina. Unlike other clubs, Brighton’s scouts don’t scout by region, they scout by position. It’s that sort of innovation and differentiation that has meant they can compete with far richer clubs despite their record fee still standing at only £30m in a league where that’s loose change down the back of the couch.

Now we at Rangers probably can’t throw £3m per year at a data analytics company like Brighton do or have a database of 85,000 players like Brentford, however it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be utilising more modern techniques and approaches, if we want to really improve an area that has not only underperformed but it has absolutely hamstrung us in recent years.

Instead we allowed a rookie manager to lead our recruitment and at any club that wants to be thought of as modern and forward-thinking, that just doesn’t make sense. In fact it’s a step back from where we were previously.

It was perhaps understandable back in the days where Mark Warburton and Frank McParland worked from their contact book and brought players to the club as we rebuilt from the bottom.

But we’ve moved on since then and the setup at the club should really reflect that. We’ve improved so may elements at the club in the last 7/8 years and yet the football department, the one that really matters, remains one of the most underperforming.

We shouldn’t of course compare ourselves with English Premier League clubs where £110m is guaranteed for being the worst team in the league, but if we want to benchmark then just look across the city. Sure they’ve had their flops (every club does) but would I trade their transfer record for ours? In an absolute heartbeat.

The worrying thing is that our newly appointed CEO, James Bisgrove, isn’t even sure if the board want a Director of Football or not. He said as much in a recent interview.

In the absence of that who has the football experience to guide and shape the strategy at Rangers? Is it John Park, the head scout? Was it Michael Beale, the manager? Is it Bisgrove himself who has never occupied such a role? I’d genuinely love to know.

The departure of Michael Beale only emphasizes the point. He was allowed to bring in his own men which has understandably resulted in some short termism and blunders.

We spent £3.5m on 28-year-old Cyriel Dessers, the same again on Sam Lammers and brought back 35-year-old Leon Balogun, a player who a fresh pair of eyes would not even have considered.

Now that the manager has been relieved of his duties, where is the succession planning in terms of targets, transfers and squad building?

To return to Brighton, they lost a great manager in Graham Potter, brought in Roberto De Zerbi and the transition was seamless.

We’re ripping everything up every 12 months.

Davie Weir, technical Director at the Seagulls and of course formerly of Rangers back when we actually won titles, spoke about always wanting to be a couple of transfer windows ahead in the sense that you’re bringing in players who are allowed to settle and be integrated into the team.

Billy Gilmour was signed, barely featured for six months as he learned and adapted to the manager’s system and is now an integral part of a team that’s the envy of many in England. Instead at Rangers, we’ve been firefighting for far too long and the net result was a desperately poor summer rebuild and a defence that’s barely changed for 5 years.

If the idea is that we’re saving money by not having a Director of Football then I’d be very willing to question that logic.

£1m spent correctly at the top of the club could be worth tens of millions further down if it means adopting the right strategy, signing the right players and delivering success. If it’s that we just don’t need one then I’d love to know what we’re doing at Ibrox that other top European clubs with their sporting directors are missing out on.

Because the evidence isn’t out on the pitch.

The good news is that the club have confirmed that they are changing the scouting setup at Ibrox towards a data-led approach with video analysis also aiding player identification. Quite how far we are behind other comparable European clubs outside the top 5 leagues I’m not sure but the right decision now is better than never.

I just hope we invest enough into the process to allow it the best chance to succeed and have the right people in place to really make it a strength at our club. We’ve underinvested in key areas in the past and the results are as you would expect.

The next step for me has to be some sort of sporting director.

As outlined above we have no real football experience at the top level of the club, something that was highlighted by Graeme Souness. There is nobody to oversee a strategy that isn’t ripped up every few years and restarted when the manager changes, which right now is happening all too often.

The negative experience with Ross Wilson for me shouldn’t mean we abandon the process or declare that role null and void.

Instead it’s about identifying the right individual and accepting that sometimes that means paying serious money for them. Investing money is all well and good but when you’re wasting it with a scattergun approach then it defeats the purpose.

Rangers are an established European club, we are an institution. We have reached a major European final and featured in the Champions League. We need to act like a club of that stature and not one that’s still in the doldrums of Scottish football.

James Bisgrove as CEO has a huge responsibility to drive this club forward and take it to another level. Settling for the status quo will simply yield the same predictable and depressing outcomes.

Ibrox right now is toxic.

There is a disconnect between the support and this team that will spread very quickly to those in the boardroom as it did previously. They cannot turn back time and change the summer however they can start the process of properly equipping our club for success and ensuring the same mistakes are not repeated again and again.

Failure to do so doesn’t bare thinking about.

I can just about accept the remainder of this season being patched up and held together by an interim appointment if it truly meant that the board have opened their eyes and accepted that we need help.

We need a vision and a strategy that can carry from manager to manager and an approach that isn’t parochial or outdated.

I don’t think it’s enough anymore to say that our ethos is ‘just win’ because in reality delivering that without some overarching approach just isn’t possible or sustainable. I think we’ve amply demonstrated that in recent years.

If the chairman truly wants us to be ‘best in class’ then we need a set-up that reflects that.

Not something that resembles the mess we have saw recently.