it's no hard Harry... http://www.scotsman.com/sport/footb...raham-wallace-must-shake-up-rangers-1-3270114 Charles Green may have *exited Ibrox but the club still reverberates to the sound of his old cronies feeding at the trough. Yesterday we learned the identity of the person who sold 2.2 million shares in Rangers International Football Club plc – Richard Hughes of Zeus Capital, one of Green’s chums right from the start and a former commercial director of the club. You know that old stock exchange warning about how a share price rises and falls? Well, that doesn’t really apply to the likes of Hughes or anybody else who bought into the club at 1p a share. When you’re in the door at 1p then there’s really no way you can lose. The Rangers share price has tanked with a devastating speed leaving those who bought at the top end in a hole to the tune of God knows how much, but the only relevance of a share price collapse to Hughes is that his profit is not as large as he thought it might be. He sold up and walked away with a return of more than half a million pounds. Another one who has done very nicely out of Rangers, thanks to Green and chums. The steaming mess that is Rangers’ financial plight has now been dumped on to the desk of Graham Wallace, the Rangers chief executive. As an outsider, Wallace must be incredulous at the freewheeling ways of his predecessors, not just the way they sanctioned a first-team wage bill of £7.8m while in the Third Division (contributing to a financial picture so bleak that it made the eyes water) but also the apparent inability of some to accept that things needed to change profoundly. One of these characters was Walter Smith, a man who brought huge glory to Ibrox when he was manager but whose attitude to the finances, during and after his stint as chairman, belonged to the distant past when Rangers thought they had money, when in actual fact all they had was credit and mountains of debt, most of which they torched. At the risk of dredging up events of the past (the recent past, albeit), it’s worth recalling what Smith said in the wake of the Rangers accounts being published last autumn. Commenting on an operating loss of £14.3m including payments to Green of more than £930,000 with £825,000 going to Ally McCoist and more than £400,000 going to finance director Brian Stockbridge on top of that first team wage bill of £7.8m, Smith almost shrugged. He said: “People come out and say ‘Ah, it’s not necessary for them to have those players in that division’. But it’s not just the division that matters at Rangers, it’s the fact that you have 45,000 people coming to watch something on a football pitch…they are still losing money. But when you make a decision to be involved at Rangers, there is no common sense to it. The financial bit of Rangers Football Club and common sense don’t often go *together.” Why not? What makes Rangers so different that financial common sense has no place at Ibrox? Smith’s analysis was plucked from the David Murray era; freakonomics born of hubris. No common sense? He’s right, there hasn’t been. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be or that there can’t be. There must be. It’s just as well that Wallace has arrived and seems determined to cut costs. Somebody had to shake the club out of its economic time warp and bring certain people to their senses. It is estimated that Rangers are losing about £1m a month and that come April they will have just £1m in the bank. Around that point they will be going to the supporters looking for season ticket money for 2014-15, a support that they are continuing to refuse to engage with despite their lofty talk at the agm last month of some new spirit of openness. There hasn’t been any contact, unless you count a letter from a lawyer acting on behalf of some board members to a fans’ group. The upshot of the communiqué was that the Sons of Struth supporters’ lobby felt they had no option but to shut down their Facebook page. Somebody should be talking to the fans. Wallace, you can forgive, because he has so many other things to be doing, most notably speaking with McCoist about cost-cutting. The questions are obvious but the solutions are less straightforward. According to their website, Rangers have 56 full professionals or professional youth players on their books. According to Celtic’s website, they have now got 50, including their newest recruit Stefan Johansen. Wallace will, no doubt, be asking about this. “Why are there so many players here? How many are worth what we’re paying them? How many can we lose?” Why are there so many? That’s one for McCoist. In the summer he signed Steve Simonsen as his reserve goalkeeper. Simonsen is a fine goalie and proved as much at Dundee last season, but Rangers didn’t need him then and they don’t need him now. They have Cammy Bell and they also have Scott Gallacher, a 24-year-old who has been at the club since 2006 and who has played only a handful of games. For the less than arduous task of *sitting on the Rangers bench and, very, very *occasionally, covering for Bell in matches, why not go with Gallacher and save yourself the expense of *Simonsen? We don’t know how much Simonsen is being paid – more than Gallacher for sure – but whatever it is, it’s money for old rope given that his sum total of minutes played since joining Rangers stands at zero. It’s easy to envisage Wallace going through the Rangers squad and continually asking a simple question. Steve Simonsen – why? Emilson Cribari – why? Dean Shiels – why? David Templeton – why? Richard Foster – why? Steven Smith – why? Ian Black, on those wages, why? All of these, and others, are on more money than they could expect to get elsewhere and won’t be in any great hurry to leave. So, for now, Rangers are stuck with them because they can’t afford to make them redundant. This is the legacy of the club’s scattergun accumulation of players they didn’t particularly need to meet the challenge they were faced with. Namely, the Third Division last season and League 1 this season. Wallace is having to deal with the consequences of such financial waste. He is surrounded by “money men” at the club – Stockbridge, Ken Olverman, Andrew Dickson and the accountancy firm Active Corporate – but he has gone outside Ibrox for a financial advisor in the shape of Philip Nash. On one level that looks like more waste. On another, given the state of the club, you can understand why he’s looking for fresh thinking on the fiscal front. The incumbents have not exactly *covered themselves in glory. For years, Rangers celebrated men – Murray et al – who spent vast amounts of money and improved the team. The guy they should be celebrating now is the one who calls a halt to the financial waste and makes the club face its reality, even if his actions run the risk of putting him in conflict with his manager. There will be bleating, but only by those who are mired in the past. Those who truly conform to that much-abused description of “having the best interests of the club at heart” would say bring on the cost-cutting to stave off disaster. In trying to move on from the damage of the past, Wallace knows what the club needs to do. But it promises to be a tough and lonely journey for him.
When you read a fairly succinct article like that, it's hard not to feel sympathy for, at the very least, the few fans who did try to support the club and have ended up having their money used by vultures like Green, and paid out to fat idiots like McCoist. Regardless of being a legend, scoring loads of goals, not "walking away" and offering up an assortment of quotable lines, he is still, without a doubt, a complete and utter moron of a manager. A clusterfuck of astronomic proportions. I like a laugh and, as is natural, when Rangers were alive/around/challenging (delete where applicable) I ****ing hated them, but when you step aside and read something like that, it's staggering to think about what's happened in the past 2-3 years.
Not really. I'm not the sharpest tool in the box but I thought it was pretty obvious what was going to happen to Rangers for a long time. I was convinced they were ****ed since 2005. I was only surprised they lasted as long as they did tbh. I do remember commenting that they'd start a new club and never get caught out like Rangers did. So when they allowed charlatans to set up and run their club I asked over on their board whether they envisaged any trouble selling shares (on the premise that it was ducking obvious what was going to happen). I was told an emphatic "No"..... So I can't feel sorry for anyone who loses out investing in that company. It was blindingly obvious what was going to happen. And for all the bluster, I suspect they all knew it too and there aren't too many small investors coming from the support.
Fair play, but regardless there will still be some folk out there genuinely upset when Rangers die (again), you know, normal fans who may not have had the cash or who did try to help in an honest way. If it was Celtic, i'd be gutted, so regardless of whether it's deserved or was obviously going to happen or if the 7 posters on the Huns' board gave a **** or not, i'll still feel a degree of sadness for the ****s that just love their club for the football
Of course no one - other than those I actually know in the real world who I said it to at the time - believes that I said when murray floated a new share issue that nosedived, leading to him then borrowing more money via his company to then buy said shares they would be entering an unsustainable capital leverage scenario, more commonly referred to as being ****ed. What was funny at the time was watching traynor, young et al all lap up his financial wizardry without one question as to the reality of the situation.
Aye all those "Kerryfail Accountants" are now chartered with an exclusive client list. Dumb ****s thought Murray was Scrooge McDuck with a vault full of gold coins
Rangers weren't killed they were the footballing equivalent of an emo teenager jumping in front of the express train
Would they have sympathy for us ?? Would they fck .They lay their bed let them lie in it . Let their fans, who do the bjk , torbett , sing their bigotted songs and blame everybody else for Rangers desmise suffer .No sympathy from me .
I think I got caught up on when you mentioned support for the club, I was talking financial investors rather than bums on seats. But again, My sympathy is limited. They had a massive opportunity to grow their club on their own terms but they all passed it up and frogmarched up to the turnstiles with the pied piper of Yorkshire making them tea and cake as they queued. They presented it as a show of strength, or defiance or something like that.
I have some close friends that are Rangers fans. They're good guys, who love football, and have hated what's gone on. Most of them aren't in brilliant jobs or have extra cash to throw at the club. Other than actually going to games to show their support, they've had to stand by and for several years watch their club go down the drain. In a way, it's the same for me: I don't get to many games due to work, living abroad, family commitments, life commitments like a house, whatever the ****. But once you're down to the bare bones of it and aren't mired in the politics, the schadenfreude, the backwards history of a lot of it, I support a team because 1) It's in my family, 2) I love Celtic, and 3) For the football. So IF it had happened to Celtic, i'd have been devastated, and i'd have hoped that fellow fans, who are in it for the basic point of it all, the football, would have a level of empathy with me, but it's each to their own at the end of the day. And Harry, shut up FFS, you take your weans to the boozer instead of school...but aye, they sung nasty songs so you must be right .
Well, under the new ghost-in-the-machine rules you've recently established you literally can not ever die, as long as some **** calls themselves Rangers the spirit of the mythical Rangers 'club' entity can float over there and pick up where it left off
