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Ah, yeah I see that now looking at other stuff. FWIW, Thelwell as Sporting Director needs to be given the chance to implement his own footprint on the job he's been given to do. And again, just my opinion - I don't think Koppen was worth keeping, he effectively in his previous job with PSV was a scout that worked under an SD. Didn't merit being a head of recruitment/technical director in his own right, especially after such an abysmal season, the points gap to that lot isn't even worth discussing again. Nice fresh clean start.

Fraser Murray out next please. No more Ridvans, Matondo’s or Davies. Worst window ever.

Had a few brandy and cokes last night. No excuse but...

Dan Purdy from Everton. We’ve also been linked to their youth academy director who is leaving. Dont think copying Everton’s recruitment or youth policy will lead to good results. And if Thirwel doesn’t work out we don’t just need to sack him but his two pals also.

The bit I emboldened...who's the DOFs mate we're getting in to replace him?

It's not just Andy Newport reporting it to be fair, sounds legit.

Hopefully true and reach agreement especially Propper.

Koppen to leave and Daniel Purdy tipped to takeover. Looks like it wasn't just a coincidence that Purdy left Everton a week or so back (as I posted 😃).

Ridvan in talks with Besikdas and Propper with FC Twente according to local sources on twitter.

With regards to?

It's Andy bloody Newport saying it, I will believe when the club announce it.

I'm disappointed with this. Although, having a Recruitment Director is somewhat stepping on the toes of the DoF.

What do you mean?

4-3-3* Although, he may have been employing Chelsea's American style? Another reason why Martin is the right man for the job.

Shame. Feel he has made mistakes, but had some successes with one had tied behind his back. Not sure getting in the DOF’s mates to replace him is the best idea. Not a fan of the old pals act..

Cheat mode enabled

Aye, which nullified the whole independent criteria. Agreed to a judge-led public inquiry, but they'd be the ones picking the judge and marking the homework 🤔

Didn't the Scottish Government want to appoint the "independent" judge to run this investigation?

Well, he must be reading my mail.....

David Healey can be removed from the list, he is in talks with Dundee.

Russell Martin next Rangers manager pitch on formations, transfers and keepers as 49ers hear his blue sky vision The 39-year-old will hold talks with Ibrox chiefs this week but his words show he's not only an idealist Being sacked in the world of football has become a rite of passage for managers, it's the laws of an ever-evolving jungle where predators lurk both on the pitch and in the boardroom. But tigerish bosses' across the globe cannot give up on the pursuit they crave despite the risks involved. And when it comes time to bare their teeth after being let go it's often a case of self-preservation and failing to recognise their fatal flaws. If Russell Martin flops at his next destination then it won't be due to self awareness, that's for sure. The 39-year-old – in a pair of recent interviews on Sky Sports – has shown both a searing honesty and an ability to self-diagnose his weaknesses during Southampton's nightmare Premier League season. The former Rangers defender is set for further talks with Ibrox takeover chiefs this week and those of a 49ers persuasion know what he can do when he gave Leeds a sore one in the Premier League playoff. Martin is an open book and these are his methods. Record Sport looks at what could be on the agenda when he meets the new regime. Flexibility/changing system Martin beamed with pride over his call to switch it up with the Saints and condemn Paraag Marathe and Gretar Steinsson's men to a second season in the Championship last summer. He said: "We had 45 games playing 4-3-3 pretty much and we played Leeds in the last game of the season so we changed it to a back five for the play-offs, much to the dismay of many people. "We agreed it was the best way to go and thankfully it was. I'm really proud, it was one of the best days of my life. "I did it as a player, I'm really fortunate and then to do it as a manager at the top, it was incredible. I have memories from there that I'm so grateful for and it was brilliant." Transfer lessons learned Southampton were panned for their recruitment upon their ill-fated return to the Premier League and rather than running from it, the former Scotland international knows mistakes were made and will ensure they don't happen at his next destination. Martin explained: "Definitely, I think so. I think we looked at a lot of things in the summer and we lost Jason Wilcox towards the end of last season to Manchester United. "He played a big part in bringing me into a club really clear on the profile of the players and then we lost him. There were a lot of people, myself included, doing our transfers, doing a Premier League transfer window for the first time. "And there were things we really wanted and couldn't quite get for various reasons so it became difficult. So I think recruitment in the Premier League is so important and also the athleticism is so, so important. "Even if we wanted to play in the way that we wanted to play to try and dominate the ball, I would prioritise a touch more athleticism if we did it all over again." Passing is for 'Keeps Martin, once again showing more nous than the idealist rep he wears as a badge of honour, knows the era of the sweeper keeper won't be forever but while it is, you better make sure you have a No.1 who is good with his feet. He said: "If you want to build up and dominate the ball it has to be the goalkeepers. Football is cyclical. Things come back around again. "Man for man is becoming really prevalent and teams are getting a lot of success from it but it's difficult, so you have to use the goalkeeper. "When you are playing against a team who are man for man, someone presses the goalkeeper and someone needs to arrive, find the spare man and run off the back of them. "Once you break that line against a team who are man to man, it's very open but it's the most difficult bit. It takes a lot of courage from the goalkeeper to invite pressure. "Rambo [Aaron Ramsdale] was such a big signing for us because I knew he had the courage and the conviction to do it but he ended up playing eight games for us and broke his finger at Wolves. "That was a big loss for us and we had to change and tweak the team again. We can work on that all the time and we did. "The guys had big courage, and we had a lot of evidence of it, but it didn't come to enough. The evidence wasn't strong enough for them to keep believing. "My biggest challenge was to convince them that they could regularly do this in the Premier League." On what Martinball will look like next time Again, Martin was so far removed from the world of banal responses, as he offered solutions to how his style will evolve. He said: "If I look back now at the start of the season in the summer I would have put way more onus on fouling quickly, being more horrible out of position. "We were pressing a lot, but more detail with that about making contact earlier. I was really happy with the way we defended in the low block at times and suffered a bit. "But my thing is always let's try and dominate the ball but there are going to be times when we have to suffer so I think a bit more athleticism in the team."

TL:DR The Scottish Government is accused of stalling a promised inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of individuals in the Rangers fraud case, despite £61M in public costs and criminal complaints dating back nine years. Critics call it a cover-up, citing inaction, lack of accountability, and fears key evidence and figures will disappear before any real investigation begins.

He's transfer crazy, He's transfer mad, And the transfer windae's robbed him O' the wee bit sense he had. And it wid tak' a dizen Yahoos Tae estimate the dough That thae Yanks hiv brought to Ibrox Fur tae make that wasteland grow. JONATHAN NORTHCROFT Fans beware: Half your club’s transfers will fail Former Liverpool stats guru Ian Graham’s research – and success at Anfield – suggests wheeler-dealer approach does not work and less is more when it comes to buying talent Füllkrug, Riccardo Calafiori and João Félix have all failed to live up to their billing Jonathan Northcroft Saturday May 31 2025, 8.20pm, The Sunday Times Fans beware: Half your club’s transfers will fail The Grand Hyatt, Hong Kong, July 2007. Portsmouth were staying there while contesting the Premier League Asia Trophy and Harry Redknapp did his press briefing by the rooftop swimming pool. His theme was Portsmouth’s urgent need for reinforcements. Said Harry, with utmost solemnity: “We’re down to the bare bones, you see.” It was hard not to look over his shoulder to the pool, where glistening footballers lounged in the sun. Fulham were also at the hotel and their squad formed a modest grouping. Whereas Portsmouth’s took up a whole side of the pool, and was almost spilling into the water. Those bare bones still had a few million pounds of flesh on them, it seemed. Redknapp always springs to mind this time of year. A transfer window opens on Sunday and so many appear to share his view that you can just never do enough splurging on new players. Liverpool fans are rightly salivating about Florian Wirtz; their club is close to one of the great signing coups of our age. But, on social media, a certain type fantasises about Wirtz just being for starters. They can’t wait to absolutely rip up the team that has just won the league. A similar strain of Manchester United fan — judging by our reader comments — would be keen to see Bruno Fernandes complete a move to Al-Hilal because it would give their club funds for a spree. Ignoring that Fernandes has just won United’s player of the year award for a record fourth time, and United are as good at deal-making as Jack in the fairytale when he swapped his mother’s cow for some beans. It’s going to be a “big summer” for everyone, if you believe all the threads and blogs saying that your team has to spend big. Yet as a club owner said: “Winning the transfer window seems to rarely convert to actual winning, huh?” Maybe I’m old school, I’ve never thought the contest was in the market — it’s on the pitch. Whoever a club buys, whatever it spends, it will still rest on the same fundamentals that make organisations successful — or dysfunctional. These include the management, culture, strategy, connection with customers, investment in the future, ability to develop people. See the decline of United, 2013-25. Beyond that there are simply limits to what recruitment can do. Bad news for the transfer nerds but, historically, signing players is an unreliable route to transformation. Transfers have the success rate of Rasmus Hojlund’s shooting. According to transfermarkt.com, Premier League clubs made 370 signings in 2024-25, at a gross cost of €2.8billion (about £2.4billion), averaging at almost €143million (£120.5million) per club. So, what proportion of those new arrivals went on to play even half of the minutes available to them in the competition? The answer is 12.7 per cent (47 players). How many played in more than 70 per cent of available minutes? A jaw-droppingly meagre 6.7 per cent (25 players). That’s one in 15. Of course, a proportion of signings are not intended as immediate first-team regulars. Some are young players (though our figures, taken from transfermarkt, which include loans, are for first-team squad recruits not youth signings). Some are back-up players and some are players acquired for trading. However, it remains an extraordinary thought that only one transfer in 15 might end up with the player becoming important to the first XI. And this in an age of sporting directors, big recruitment structures and data. Some proclaimed West Ham United as “winners” of the 2024 summer transfer period. Certainly, their unctuous technical director at the time, Tim Steidten, seemed to think so. He took the unusual step of giving the kind of pre-match TV interview normally reserved for managers before West Ham played Chelsea in September. “The summer was really busy, as expected, but at the end we have great players,” Steidten crowed on TNT. Of course West Ham lost the game (heavily) and by February Steidten was fired amid a hail of “good riddance” posts from fans. But what were they posting while he was conducting his £121million trolley dash of ten signings the previous July and August? Things like “insane business!” (when Jean-Clair Todibo arrived from Nice) and “this puts West Ham in the top three discussion for next season” (when Luis Guilherme arrived from Palmeiras) and “the striker we’ve been waiting for for ten years” (after Niclas Füllkrug — remarkably on a deal that will see him past his 35th birthday — rolled in from Borussia Dortmund). . The question of why so few transfers work is examined in How to Win the Premier League, Ian Graham’s exceptional insider account of the data revolution in football. As Liverpool’s director of research from 2012, Graham worked hand-in-hand with Michael Edwards to turn the club from the Premier League’s least to probably most successful recruiters. He now consults for a range of clubs through his sports advisory, Ludonautics. In the chapter entitled “Zebra farmers: why transfers fail”, Graham takes all transfers to Premier League clubs of €10million or more from the start of the competition in 1992 to January 2021 and suggests they could be considered “successful” if the player started at least 50 per cent of their club’s league games in the two seasons after joining. The minimum €10million fee was chosen to weed out players signed as reserves or with long-term development in mind. Graham discovered 46 per cent of €10million-plus players failed to start half or more of their team’s matches and only 54 per cent succeeded. Hojlund’s shooting accuracy since leaving Copenhagen as a teenager, incidentally, is 52 per cent. Graham recently did a similar analysis looking at the top 100 transfers coming into the “big five” leagues each season and found something similar, with more than 50 per cent of transfers “failing” and no improvement in recent seasons. Why is it so hard to get transfers right? His chapter title alludes to it. The American historian and scientist Jared Diamond wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning book on why some civilisations conquer others, called Guns, Germs and Steel. He considers why so few (14 of 148) animal species that have the potential to be farmed have actually been farmed. Zebras seem a particular puzzle, given their similarity to horses and desirable hides. They tick every box except one — “safe for farming”. Unfortunately, zebras tend to kick, bite and kill anyone who attempts to domesticate them. Graham applies the idea to footballers. For a signing to work, numerous boxes must be ticked like “avoids injury” and “is played in the right position” and “fits the style of play” and “has the right personality”. If there are six such boxes and a signing ticks 70 per cent of each one, the chance of them succeeding is 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent, which equals 12 per cent. If the signing ticks 92 per cent of each box their “success chance” is still just 51 per cent. By applying rigour, using data and working with a brilliant sporting director (Edwards) and a manager (Jürgen Klopp) who was happy with a committee approach to transfers, Graham helped Liverpool to raise its success rate (using his “50 per cent rule”) from 41 per cent (the Premier League’s worst) to 68 per cent, making signings including Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and Virgil van Dijk. But there were still “failures” such as Naby Keita, who was beset by injuries, and Lazar Markovic, considered Europe’s hottest prospect when he joined from Benfica for £20 million but who Edwards had reservations about, having viewed him on video and thought him not quite as good as per the scouting reports. The Markovic debacle led Edwards to introduce an extra layer of video analysis to the recruitment process and helped shape the Liverpool view that they should only buy a player if all departments and stakeholders in recruitment are aligned. Redknapp’s love of transfers worked for him. That summer in 2007 he did get reinforcements, adding Glen Johnson and Papa Bouba Diop (on deadline day, of course) to the seven signings he had already made prior to Hong Kong, and Pompey finished the season by winning the FA Cup. But Harry was Harry. Transfer-mania doesn’t work for many and it is telling Edwards, now Liverpool’s chief executive of football, who worked for Redknapp, chose not to follow Redknapp’s path. And the same is true of Richard Hughes, Liverpool’s present sporting director and Redknapp’s former player. Both — Hughes especially — were criticised when Liverpool made only two signings last summer but their approach took into account that Hughes was new to the club, and there was a new head coach, Arne Slot, and that it was better to thoroughly assess the squad and market before making moves. Another Edwards maxim is “you can’t spend the money twice” and Liverpool are now benefitting from the strategic approach by having retained the resources to bid £109million for Wirtz, and in how well Hughes and Edwards have plotted that move. Liverpool were champions despite signing the fewest players last season and before their 2019-20 title-winning season signed only a youngster (Sepp van den Berg) and two reserve goalkeepers (Adrian and Andy Lonergan). Tottenham Hotspur reached the 2018-19 Champions League final in a season they made no signings at all and Chelsea had a rebirth under Frank Lampard during a period under a transfer embargo. Ranking the Premier League teams by number of players acquired in 2024-25 in ascending order is interesting: the table bears some similarities to the actual league table. The two teams making the fewest transfers (Liverpool then Arsenal) were also first and second in the actual table and the two teams making the most (Southampton then Ipswich Town) finished 19th and 20th. The “net spend” table is also instructive, with ten of the 11 most parsimonious teams enjoying seasons their supporters would class as successful. None of this is to say transfers are bad. They’re undeniably exciting and the right ones are, indeed, transformative but the truth is that “less is more”. Graham calculates the maximum number of starters to sign is, historically, three per season. He also thinks a 70 per cent success rate for transfers is about the maximum a club could reach. That says it all. Even with best practice, roughly a third of transfers will fail. But perhaps it is not so surprising. There are a range of studies that suggest, in any workplace, only about 50 per cent of hires will be successful. It’s just that the loafer in the office who talked up their CV to get a job can hide behind their computer in a way you cannot on a Premier League pitch. So, enjoy the transfer window but view all the bids and pursuits as escapism, retail therapy. The reality is your club needs a lot more than shopping to be transformed. Look at the most expensive deals last summer and note the calamities such as João Félix and ponder that it’s not until you get to No14 on the list — Elliot Anderson — that you see a transfer you can say, unequivocally, was a success.

Interesting timing for a front pager; the 'story' is not exactly fresh, nor does it contain anything new. Has Rangers reported something significant and positive in the last couple of days?