Rebuild. Fail. Repeat. The cycle must end

Espanyolification.

While the phrase has not yet become universally synonymous with the current position of Rangers Football Club it’s difficult to argue that it is not at least slightly applicable as we meekly hand over yet another title to our rivals across the city.

The term, for those unaware, is reference to the secondary club in the city of Barcelona – RCD Espanyol. They are a club who sit very much in the shadow of their wealthier and more successful neighbours and who hold but a few modest honours to their name.

While the gulf is of course hyperbolized in the use of the phrase here in Glasgow, the sentiment of it remains depressingly pertinent. Rangers are no longer a club synonymous with success, and for a child of the 90s and the hubris and arrogance that carried into the 21^st century, that’s not an easy thing to accept.

The club that set the standards not just in Scotland but beyond our waters under the immortal Bill Struth is a stranger to the modern-day version that it has become. The sleeping giant that was awoken by Souness and Holmes or which was driven to relentless, history-matching dominance by Walter Smith is not remotely related to Rangers 2024. (Hold the new club jokes, please)

We are a club reminiscent of pre-Klopp Liverpool- a support singing songs of glories past, pretending that the successes of past decades were more recent than is accurate in reality and trying to carry ourselves as the club and the team that we once were.

But reality is about to bite.

The post-2012 journey back up the rungs of Scottish football was always going to provide Celtic with a free run at league titles and trophies. That bit, at least, we can accept as being an inevitable consequence of our financial collapse. But we’ve allowed that free run to bleed into many more years than we could have ever envisaged, so much so that this season our record trophy-haul has been matched after losing the Scottish Cup Final.

Furthermore the league title advantage that we have held and paraded proudly to the world for so long will soon be under threat as it can be equaled next season if we don’t perform some sort of miraculous turnaround that sees us top of the pile come next May. And that, I’m afraid, is a deeply sad indictment of those owning and running the football club. Why? Because we already did the hard part.

From the part-time fourth-tier, albeit with bumps along the way, Rangers returned to being the premier team in the country. And we didn’t just sneak it, we absolutely strolled it. The Gerrard project and the patience he was afforded paid off as we secured our fifty-fifth league title in a dominant, invincible league season. But for the players, and maybe even the club itself, it was treated as the end of a story, not just the beginning.

The crime wasn’t just losing the next league title, it’s sliding to a point where we don’t know where our next one is coming from.

In the aftermath of being crowned champions it was clear that Gerrard wasn’t backed in the way he wanted. I defended the board who had pumped in £26m to absorb the covid-losses and add to a squad at a time when revenue streams were depleted, believing that the well had run dry and that no more could be done.

However given the additional funds required and provided since, largely due to their own incompetence, I’m not as surefooted as I once was in defending that particular tightening of the purse-strings. Easy to say when it’s not your own money, I suppose.  

Had we found the funds to strengthen and refresh our squad, the timeline of recent years may have looked unrecognizable. The potential Champions League financial swing may have gone in the opposite direction, the confidence and belief of retaining our title could have strengthened our resolve and destroyed theirs.

But even if that wasn’t the case, what’s happened since remains utterly indefensible.

Our club has won a league, reached a European final, qualified for the Champions League, made two club-record player sales and yet has regressed so horrifically that our current squad is no better than that of 2018-19 despite costing tens of millions of pounds more.

It’s an absolute clusterfuck, the making of which surely lies in the Blue Room.

I’ve said it before but the board and executive team have no problem bringing in money. The commercial arm of the club has grown significantly.

MyGers, hospitality and kit sales have brought in more money year-on-year and so the issue isn’t so much raising enough cash, it’s knowing how to spend it.

The Ross Wilson era, as we know, failed and he alongside the likes of Park and Robertson carried the can. Gio’s January window was not aided by the incomings of Diallo and Ramsey. His summer window saw regression with big-money signings like Davies, Matondo and Yilmaz having no impact on the team. But even so, rather than going out and hiring the right candidate for the job, the board decided no replacement was required.

Michael Beale, an inexperienced manager, was given the keys to and freedom of the kingdom. Go out, sign who you want and spend what you want. That was the approach. James Bisgrove confirmed that the board were ‘delighted’ with the additions of Lammers, Dessers & Co and that in fact he wasn’t sure if we indeed even required a Director of Football.

Those comments aged like milk in the sun.

Everything, in keeping with modern Rangers, has been reactionary. Oh actually we do need a Director of Football (Recruitment) and oh we also need a new manager within a year, again. So with two appalling summer windows accompanied by two managerial sackings we are now in a position where it’s not just Phillipe Clement who needs a magic wand, it’s Nils Koppen too.

We have the poorest squad we’ve had in 5 years and yet, embarrassingly, we need to spend millions just to stand still. Diomande’s transfer still has to be realized in the summer and then we face up to replacing or signing the likes of Abdallah Sima just to keep the squad as it currently stands.

If the alarm bells aren’t ringing yet, they should be, because there’s no real money with which to achieve that.

We’ll spend the summer trying to rake together a few small to moderate sales of players not good enough to play in Scotland and pull that together as a the transfer budget. Or failing that we’ll lose by far our best player, Jack Butland, to a larger bid. Yay.

But as much as I’ve drawn attention to the immediate concerns re titles and trophy records, the club can’t continue being as short-term. We need to turn our focus to bringing in players who we can develop, improve and sell. We need to fix areas of the team that need attention, not just continue to kick those cans as far down the road as we can legitimately get away with. And we need to learn that some players need to be moved on, not rewarded with bumper contracts.

I’m pleased that we have a Director of Football Recruitment in the door who can hopefully take charge of that strategy and we have a manager who understands that the player trading model is a requirement, particularly in Scotland. But the problem is we’re starting from such a low base that both have at least one hand tied behind their backs.

We are back in the early Gerrard era of a rebuild. This is now a project again and one that almost certainly cannot be completed in one summer. But the problem is the patience that was afforded back then has long since worn out, as witnessed by the toxic atmospheres earlier this season. Fans are rightly pissed off that we have slid so far from a position of relative strength, that actions or inactions from the board have dragged our club back in time and allowed the dominance once associated with our proud institution to be the new hallmark of our rivals.

The fans I think will need to display more patience than those running the club have earned. We cannot keep sacking managers, shuffling the deckchairs and hoping one season it’ll just click and we’ll sneak a title. We need to build continuously like we did under Gerrard and not allow bumps along the way to derail the overall direction of travel.

And it all starts in the summer, again.

If you’d asked most fans a couple of months ago whether Clement was the man for the job, I think a 95% majority would have resoundingly said ‘yes’ however even the manager who got more out of these players than we could have envisaged in October is now wounded by association with this squad and is a Scottish Cup defeat away from serious reputational damage going into next season. But, the board simply must back him. They must allow him and Koppen to shape this squad and bring in the players required to move forward for the first time in almost three years.

Let’s be clear, Rangers are not Espanyol, however we are currently a club where an occasional title or trophy is the best we can hope for.

We vacated our position at the top of the pyramid far too quickly and easily and are now looking across the city at their silverware, their cash reserves and their 90s-style hubris and wondering quite how we allowed this to happen. And that’s on the board and that’s on the investors that sat on their hands believing these guys were doing a good job as our club slid further and further away from success.

We might not be Espanyol, but the near-Espanyolification of this club will be their legacy if they cannot atone for the sorry state they’ve left Rangers Football Club in. No amount of fancy projects or buildings can make up for leaving us as the second club in our own city.

Over to you, dear custodians. We deserve better.