Koppen – A premature promotion?

Opinion – Koppen A premature promotion? By Andy McKellar

Rangers Football Club yesterday confirmed the appointment of Nils Koppen as Technical Director in the latest executive team shake-up following the many departures and seemingly ongoing game of musical chairs that has been taking place within the Blue Room.

This is in effect a promotion for Koppen which will see his role widened from his position as Director of Football Recruitment to also overseeing ‘the Academy, medical, performance, operations, analysis, and everything in-between’.

Before we get to Koppen himself I think it is important to acknowledge what this means for the club structure and the direction of travel because what we are seeing here is basically a return to the Director of Football model which existed under Mark Allen and Ross Wilson before we stepped away from it, wounded by experience, in 2023.

In simple terms this model is one adopted by most major European clubs and indeed almost all English Premier League clubs and has been for more than a decade. So around 18 months ago when we had our mini-internal regime change with Douglas Park stepping down and John Bennett stepping up, quite why they thought that with no adequate football experience themselves that they knew better than the wider football fraternity really does beggar belief. And the proof has been in the pudding.

Put simply our decision to empower a rookie manager with little oversight or accountability has cost our club millions of pounds and is part of the reason that we are now reverting to a structure that James Bisgrove previously stated that we were not sure that we needed. And so after wasted years and many millions we are returning to a set-up that no sensible board lacking in football knowledge themselves would have abandoned in the first place.

And so to Nils Koppen. Firstly despite never having held a role quite as high as Head of Recruitment his previous experience probably qualified him for the role he was originally appointed to at Rangers, even if it speaks to a wider issue of always seeking to appoint people upwards rather than hiring people who have already done the job before. But while he may have been a prima facie suitable appointment within recruitment, we have surely yet to determine whether or not he has actually been a success?

As things stand there will be many fans looking at our recruitment and position of the squad and struggling to be impressed. We have fairly large outlays tied up in the likes of Diomande and Cortes and have wasted money on the likes of Fabio Silva (loan) and perhaps Robin Propper if we are judging him early. The squad seems bereft of sellable assets although some bargains have been found in the shape of Barron and Jefte who have carried on the trend of our cheaper signings generally being our more successful ones.

On the other side of the recruitment coin there is also the outgoing column to consider with the club’s most recent financial statements seeming to declare that we received only £810k for Todd Cantwell, Sam Lammers, Connor Goldson, Robbie McCrorie and Scott Wright combined. Definitely one to query at the AGM. While these were not his signings, it is within his remit to ensure value for departing players and on that front, well, the figures speak for themselves.

So while the jury is still very much out on Koppen within the support, if not within the club, it does seem so typically Rangers for that to be rewarded with an early promotion and, in truth, a far wider and more powerful role in which he has no prior experience.

Within a functioning footballing structure and at a club where key positions are headed up by experienced and qualified personnel this might be less of an issue however we are a club who has continually overpromoted or sought to appoint people to roles which they have never done previously.

As an example we recently had a chairman in John Bennett who had never run a football club before, a CEO in James Bisgrove who had never being a CEO, an Academy Director in Zeb Jacobs who had never run an Academy, a head of football operations in Creag Robertson whose previous experience had been within the academy and then Nils Koppen himself who was also promoted to a more senior role than he had previously held. Now, of course people perform well and get promoted both in general business and in football but for it to be the case in every key position across the football club seems like too much of a coincidence.

Why are we incapable of hiring experienced, qualified people to fulfil roles which are fundamental to the performance of the football club? This is an issue that goes back as far as Stewart Robertson in 2015 but at least then you could make the excuse that we were in the lower leagues and very much in a stabilisation and rebuilding phase. Now? It’s just negligence.

Even if we revisit the seemingly cursed CEO search, the club were intent on appointing the vice-chairman of St Mirren which means, miraculously, that after conducting a thorough and professional recruitment process the best guy just happened to be known to us and work only a few miles down the road? What are the odds?!  

Jim Gillespie, who also runs a very successful charity although with less than half the turnover of Rangers, would of course reject us and remove himself from the process and throw the entire thing up in the air but if that was our first-choice, what does it say about the ambitions of the investor group or board members responsible?

We are a football club who have recently reached a European final and played in the Champions League on the back of winning a league title and yet we continually appear to want to punch downwards when it comes to appointing board members or executives. Is it totally outlandish for a club such as ours to go and pay the going rate for someone who has being involved in a decent-sized football club before?

I’ve long said, money spent well at the top of the football club can be worth tenfold at the bottom. For the salary of a reserve full-back we could appoint a proper CEO to oversee the day-to-day running of the club and, if done well, could be worth tens of millions in even a short space of time. And if you think that’s hyperbole simply go and look at the money we have spent and wasted in recent years, not just on the park but off of it.

Koppen may well be an impressive individual and he certainly communicates well – but so did James Bisgrove and Michael Beale – and I sincerely hope this appointment bucks the recent trend at Ibrox because god only knows we need something to work out right now. But at present the reaction is largely negative because we have little evidence on which to have faith.

Like Clement’s new contract this promotion speaks to a wider issue at the club and to a pattern of premature reward for success which has not yet been delivered. And if it’s a case of taking these actions to prevent resignations then that again feeds into the shambles that has been our club over recent years where regression has been the overall direction of travel.

A prominent investor – although not a board member himself – not that long ago told us in an interview that certain individuals were doing a great job and that the club was doing well, right before those individuals were sacked and moved on and it’s that acceptance of mediocrity or that inability to strive to be the best version of Rangers we can be that has typified the post-Gerrard era.

Standards are being set aside or lowered to fit those currently in position and I mean from shareholders to board members to the manager. Nobody at our club is driving standards or being even moderately ambitious.

At the upcoming AGM on 5^th December there should be serious questions asked of the board but also of the wider investor group. Do they have the appetite for this? Are they the best people to take us forward? Will they learn from their mistakes and appoint qualified people to run our club?

If we aren’t further away from a league title than we were in 2018 then we aren’t a million miles off it and that’s the saddest indictment of those who have been running the club in recent years. The fact that much of the ire has been directed at players or managers really has been fortunate in the extreme for those sitting in the directors’ box. But continual failure means there is no longer any room to hide as banners have started emerging in the stands.

But it won’t be banners that worry them most, it’ll be when swathes of empty blue seats start to appear because people simply cannot be arsed anymore. It’s a depressing thought, but one which has been delivered by the current custodians whose legacy will be turning our club into the Borussia Dortmund of Glasgow unless things change and change quickly.

Put simply: We deserve better.