As Rangers fans face up to the familiar feeling of despondency and disappointment at the end of another league campaign there are some alarming facts that lay bare the underlying reasons for our dismay.
Season 23/24 saw our lowest points total since 2018/19 – Steven Gerrard’s first season – which, in itself, would be saddening but which is heightened by the key difference that we’re now spending significantly more money to be quite this bad.
In 2018/19 the club wage bill was £23.0m as the club sought to grow its revenue base with European participation and commercial improvement. That wage bill now stands somewhere in the region of £42.7m based on the 22/23 accounts for last season which are the most up to date numbers available.
That’s an 85% increase.
A similar story can be noted with transfers. The club’s financial statements note the squad ‘cost’ as of 30 June 2023 at £39.9m vs the lowly comparable of £25.2m in 2018/19. In the summer gone past we know that we spent a whopping £21.0m on incoming players, gross, and so this disparity will likely increase once the 23/24 figures are published.
Even factoring in player sales, we know via the accounts that in the current season we spent £13m net between transfers and the pay-off of Michael Beale and his staff. So the expenses just keep rising upwards.
Football globally follows a very basic rule – the more money you have to spend, the greater your chance of success. Of course it’s no guarantee as we look at outliers like Leicester City’s miracle or the current positions of Manchester United and Chelsea, but the overarching trend is that bigger budgets give you a increased *chance* of winning.
Sadly for us, we’re bucking the trend.
Since our league victory in 2020/21 we have seen a diminishing return on our investment in the playing squad. Wages have risen, transfer spend has been enormous and yet the return on the pitch has deteriorated.
It all comes back to recruitment and poor decisions piled upon poor decisions.
Ross Wilson will rightly take criticism and ultimately paid the price for his performance as Director of Football at Rangers. While there were some gems – Calvin Bassey for example – our big money targets have largely been a disaster. Gio’s first and only summer saw big fees paid for Ben Davies, Rabbi Matondo and Ridvan Yilmaz.
A year later, in the absence of a replacement for Wilson, we forked out on Sam Lammers, Cyriel Dessers & Co which resulted in probably our poorest squad of players for 5 years but at the highest cost.
It can’t continue.
In my humble opinion we are now very much back in a project as we rebuild. We have a stronger financial base from which to do this compared to 2018/19 however the canvass is less bare with a high wage burden and outstanding transfer fee instalments due, putting a strain on cash flow.
Nils Koppen is the man charged with revamping our recruitment and identifying the players and player profiles needed to reverse the recent downward trend. In my view he has to balance the short-term necessity for improvement with putting the right foundations in place for a more mid-term view for player-trading.
I think the loan of Cortes and the summer signing of Diomande perhaps hint at the kind of profiles we may be targeting. Like any club in football these won’t all be hits but if we start to get more right than wrong, which hasn’t been the case, then the direction of travel naturally improves.
I’ve said this now for many years, our board and executive team have no issues in raising money, the problem they have is spending it well.
So as we take stock of the diminishing returns we’ve received for our outlay, we need to hope that Koppen & Clement are the right men to take us forward and, more pertinently, will be afforded the tools to do so.
Another huge summer lies ahead for Rangers Football Club and we need a level of transfer success we haven’t witnessed in quite a number of years.
The fans will do their part, it’s now up to those within the club to hold up their end of the bargain and get it right.
Four Lads Had A Dream 