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The issue with Wilson is the size of the squad and the permanently injured players we have. There's always an element of luck with these things but when you have so many problems, it starts to look less like luck and more like poor recruitment. Hopefully we can get someone better into the role.

It's one thing to criticise a man while he's still in the job but I can't see the point of gloating after he leaves. Surely the right thing to do is politely to thank him for his service to Rangers and move on.

https://gersnet.co.uk/index.php/news/ca-category-blog/236-ross-wilson-director-of-failure-or-the-fall-guy

Agree with your example, but nothing like that was done. Looking at Alfie and kent for example, people are getting their knickers in a twist for them leaving for free. While it's not ideal, Gerrard didn't want to sell them 2 summers ago, and it's doubtful they would have agreed to leave last summer anyway...and presumably Gio wanted them to stay. I'm not sure when people think Wilson should have put his foot down and tried to sell them. Nothing that was done was totally outrageous without the benefit of hindsight.

As long as three years? We salute your optimisticability.

Isn't that what's always happened in football? There's always someone who tells the manager if a player can be signed or not and if the club has accepted a bid for a player. The manager isn't always going to like that, but that's the reality of it. I suppose it used to be a director or CEO, today it's a combination of CEO and DoF. With managers rarely lasting more than a few seasons these days it makes sense that someone else takes responsibility for recruitment. Indeed even calling them managers is disingenuous, their job is coaching the first team, whoever is in it.

Agreed. Gerrard apparently insisted that the 55 squad was left intact but yet Wilson is receiving the criticism for the fallout from that. Presumably Gio had a similar say last summer on the likes of Kent and Morelos. Do many of our fans really want our manager being overruled by a DoF? It seems so.

That's all it will ever be ... hope. The next DoF will likely face the same challenges in terms of financial pressures, management changes, player disappointment, etc. (who knew Tamundo would suddenly turn into a deer in the headlights?). Wilson came to us with a decent reputation and got a fair bit of praise along the way for some of his achievements. We'll probably never know why some of our signings and squad management went so wrong but I doubt it's all down to Wilson alone. Whoever we appoint in his place will inevitably be a genius if we win the title and a useless clown if we don't.

It's cool. @Rousseausays we'll flip Tillman for £10m in January.

That’s the quickest deal he’s ever done.

The more King speaks, the less relevant he becomes. I wish he'd just go away now, he's quite embarrassing.

Id take Overmars from Antwerp, he was sacked from Ajax for sexting women but traditionally shaggers have done well for us so why not.

Does the result last weekend open the door for some changes. Will Goldson be back? I think we need to give Hagi a confidence boost by starting him and ditto for Yilmaz. What do you think McGregor Tavernier - Souttar - Davies - Yilmaz Raskin - Jack Sakala - Cantwell - Hagi Colak

I'd take that, but maybe throw in McCrorie if he's fit.

He's worth it for THAT goal alone!!!!

My worry is this...you are always gonna find another guy who wants to try. If Rangers were handin out paper apps to fill this empty slot there would be a line to Partick. However, given our budget (small), our market (pathetically small), and our support (rabid, often illogical, often caustic), can we find a GOOD guy, no, a uniquely good guy? A transformational guy? I contend the club won't...so chances are..in three years we are gonna be right back here pissin and moanin. Because the overriding factors will not change. Rangers support don't want a director, they want a messiah...because in the end...only Jesus could fulfil all of our desires. Some shit never changes. In the end Wilson was a victim of his choices, and his conditions. I think NF, lookin in from the outside could see that a man attempting to work in a madhouse, is almost always doomed to failure.

Find it a bit mental how many people are saying scrap the DoF position or asking if we even need it. Even seen people ask if Celtic have one as if that makes a blind bit of difference. The manager sorting contracts, scouting players and overseeing the medical n youth departments is the kind of thing done in non-league football, a few steps down into non-league as well. Trust the process, if this didn't work then any of the teams that are serious in Europe or their country's top league wouldn't have one. Case in point being Liverpool who were derided under their previous DoF Damien Comoli (butchered that probs) because they had a transfer comitee. He left and a couple of seasons down the line they're ucl champions with the same principles and structure except under Michael Edwards.

Benfica are proof that if the priority is selling talent, glory will always be tomorrow’s dream Portuguese side’s hopes of European success were all but ended on Tuesday night and Owen Slot says that pattern is unlikely to change any time soon Owen Slot Chief Sports Writer, Lisbon Wednesday April 12 2023, 5.00pm, The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/benfica-are-proof-that-if-the-priority-is-selling-talent-glory-will-always-be-tomorrows-dream-wvsh5qhq2 Tuesday night in Lisbon and in front of us is both a football match and a question that threatens the game’s establishment: can the best football factory in the world build the best team in Europe? This is Benfica, at home against Inter Milan. Benfica are in the chancers’ half of the Champions League draw and Inter are probably the quarter-final opposition they would have picked if they could. So Benfica fans are feeling, not unreasonably, that they could be the first Portuguese team in the final since José Mourinho’s Porto won it in 2004. The player in whom I am most interested is Antonio Silva. He is the centre back playing with an uncanny maturity for a 19-year-old. He takes the ball forward and distributes with a striking authority. This time last year, he was in the Benfica team that won the Uefa Youth League (for under-19s), a team that thrashed Barcelona and Bayern Munich en route to the final. He got a chance in the senior side at the start of this season and has stayed there ever since. So it is reasonable to expect the big European vultures to come for him in a shopping spree soon; if not this summer then within another year. Out of the door before him will be Gonçalo Ramos, the 21-year-old best known for supplanting Cristiano Ronaldo in the Portugal team at the World Cup and then scoring a hat-trick against Switzerland. Just this very morning, reports from Germany suggest that Bayern have a €100 million fund to buy a new striker and that Ramos is on the shortlist. Of course, Ramos and Silva will be following Enzo Fernández, who left for Chelsea in January for £106.8 million. And to the question — can Benfica build the best team in Europe? — we had a sort of an answer in the other Champions League game on Tuesday night because Manchester City are heavily Benfica-produced. Ederson, Rúben Dias and Bernardo Silva are all Benfica products, as is João Cancelo, though he is on loan at Bayern. It is not even a subjective observation that Benfica are the best factory in football. The International Centre for Football Studies in Neuchatel, Switzerland, recently ranked the youth academy graduates of clubs worldwide and estimated their transfer value. Benfica were top. Fifa’s annual Global Transfer Report put together a decade’s worth of analysis at the end of the 2020-21 season that showed Benfica as the world’s top club for transfer fees received, with Portugal’s two other talent laboratories, Sporting and Porto, in second and seventh. Collectively over that decade, Portuguese clubs made a transfer market profit of $2.96 billion. Portugal is the most extraordinary of sporting economies. How does a population of ten million people farm its talent so successfully? The answer is partly because no other sport poses the remotest challenge to football here. Plus scouting networks are rigorous. Plus there is considerable investment in facilities, education, pastoral care and coach education at the academies where the players are developed. There is something, too, in the fact that the big three clubs are so far ahead of the rest of the field. In the 88 years of the Primeira Liga, only twice has it been won by other clubs. Thus, while Premier League teams in England are eternally loathe to blood their youngsters, the opposite is true of Benfica, Porto and Sporting because they have a number of soft fixtures each year where there is a lower risk of defeat. And they need to play their starlets, too, to prepare them for the summer and winter sales. Portuguese clubs are also the world’s best wheeler dealers. Fifa’s Global Transfer Report last year showed that there were more transfers into Portuguese clubs than any other country in the world. Yet these, in the main, were young players bought cheap; that same report showed that the biggest transfer stream anywhere was from Brazil to Portugal; last year, 338 players followed that route. Yet bringing players in just means there are more to sell further down the line. Portuguese clubs again made the greatest profit in the transfer market last year: $405.1 million. And that was before Fernández went to Chelsea. At the other end of the scale was the $1.60 billion lost collectively by the clubs in England. With all that magnificent income, Benfica fans are therefore left wondering: why do we always have to keep selling? Can’t we keep Ramos and Silva and just briefly escape the cycle of build, sell, replenish, rebuild? Is the Fernández cash not enough? Yet they are resigned to the reality that the big income streams in other big football nations — TV and sponsorship rights plus ticket sales — are a comparative trickle here. They are resigned, also, to the lack of public accountability and the steady trickle of unresolved corruption scandals. Does player-sales income really all go back into the club and not its executives’ pockets? Again, this is the deal with being a fan here: the knowledge that you can never really know and will never really find out. So it is not uncommon to see the question being asked: what if it was different? More specifically: what would the Benfica team look like if we hadn’t had to sell? (Answer: pretty awesome). “Best of Benfica” teams regularly pop up online. Just for now, you wonder what it might have looked like had Dias been playing in a centre-back combination with Silva against Inter. Silva’s centre-back partner is usually Nicolás Otamendi, but he was injured and without him, Morato, the Brazilian, had to step up. That’s a 21-year-old replacement coming in next to a 19-year-old; hardly ideal for a big Champions League night. You wonder what it might have looked had Cancelo still been there, because Alexander Bah, Benfica’s first-choice right back, was injured and it would seem unlikely that Cancelo, for instance, would have allowed all that time and space for the cross which led to Inter taking the lead just after half-time. Yet that is the deal with Benfica, and all the Portuguese big three. They don’t have a lot of depth; when an Otamendi is injured, it is regarded as an opportunity for a Morato to get some more experience so that he too might one day be a trophy sale in Portugal’s thriving market place. These past few weeks, though, the feeling in Benfica had been that, even despite Fernández’s departure, they had a team that could compete, that it hasn’t been too whittled away by transfers out; that, with their favourable draw, maybe this year could be their year. And that is why Tuesday night was such a painful reality check. After Inter had gone 1-0 up, Benfica attempted to energise a comeback, but actually it was Inter who got stronger. The Italian side then stretched the lead with a penalty from Romelu Lukaku, and though that was a questionable decision, there was no doubt that it was Inter who were in control. In the fourth minute of stoppage time, Ramos was played in. This was Benfica’s best chance but his low, left-footed shot didn’t adequately test the goalkeeper. Ramos should have scored. He may have the chance to make amends in the return leg, though no one any longer thinks that this might be Benfica’s year. All we have proved is that if your football economy is so structured around selling your factory talent, your year will probably never come.

Sporting/Technical Directors, of whatever they like to be called, are just as dependent upon results as managers. There might be some additional KPIs where are relevant in terms of their wider remit, but unless the team is delivering on the pitch, there will always be questions asked of those making the key decisions.

I think the fence is the only honest place to be. Curate's egg comes to mind? I'd need a lot more insight before I'd condemn or acquit.

See ye later Mr Wilson

Now on to the next schlub who no one will appreciate either.

I wouldn't be unhappy to see him go BUT the timing isn't good. I would imagine we are well along the path of recruiting players for summer signings. I know that sounds contradictory but I don't know enough of what goes on behind the scenes or how much say he has in signings. I just feel we've made too many poor buys and need to do better.

I'm more than willing to concede that we've not had the success with our DoF that we want, but to think of ripping up the model is ludicrous to me; it'll set our club back years.

Football departments are too complex to be left to a manager. Every elite side in world football has one.

This is easy to do in hindsight but I remember reading bits and pieces from Southampton fans, and they were delighted he was leaving them to join us. Do we really even need a DoF? We never used to have any such position

Rangers had a poor weekend, we lost our second match this calendar year. Both losses have been by the odd goal to league leaders, Sellik. VAR played a part in our defeat, a wrestling match at the back post between Alfredo Morelos and Alistair Johnston saw the Columbian stab home for the opening goal. Referee, Kevin Clancy blew up for a foul after Johnston threw himself to the ground. It took VAR a dozen seconds to agree with the whistler's decision. Rangers were united for a change, the players, management team, Board and, supporters wanted an explanation? Subsequently, the Club penned a letter to the appropriate authority. According to Michael Stewart the above is NOT true. No, utilised social media to Tweet. : "Rangers level of entitlement is incredible. Writing letters wanting explanations and apologies for one perceived mistake. I must have missed the numerous other clubs letters this season. St J must have done it after their game at Ibrox". The overwhelming consensus of opinion among Michael's fellow pundits was the goal should have stood. Andy Walker and former Premiership Referee, Dermot Gallagher were adamant in that ra Sellik defender was lucky and attempted to con Clancy by diving forward. Michael reduces the incident to, "one perceived mistake". Michael's beat is coverage of Scottish football and he has missed the seven other Scottish Premiership clubs that have already sent letters to the authorities seeking clarification reference VAR. Michael's former employers, Sellik issued letters twice in one month, November. St Johnstone appealed Nicky Clark's red card, Motherwell had BBC Sportsound and Sportscene to themselves before putting pen to paper, ................... etc Remember, Michael has had to put pen to paper twice when apologising for outrageous remarks made about both Rangers and former PQ employee, Jim Traynor? It must be the, "Rangers level of entitlement is incredible" line that achieved Mick's state of tumescence. I suspect Sellik cracked the whip and Michael came to heel, he was told to support and reinforce Sutton, Hartson, Commons, ...... etc. Given the events of the last month, Sunday morning's imagery of Peter Murrell's £125,000 Motorhome leaving his 92 year old Maw's driveway on the back of a low loader, must have laid him lower than the vehicle's interior lavender backlighting. His sense of adventure being stymied is immediately corrected by aiming another kick at Rangers. Michael is well practised in his incredible level of entitlement.

So King was happy to sell his shares to C1872 a few months ago at 25p but turned down 40p? This party has £25m to buy shares from King for 14.2% of the club. The board are willing to issue shares at 25p, so if they had got new shares from the club they could have owned 18.5% of the club, which would be £25m better off, but this party would prefer to buy shares from King? 40p a share values the club at £177m. It's inherently loss making and has net assets of £41m so is the valuation of 40p realistic? King, of course, wishes to make this story public after an OF defeat.

So King thinks the shares are undervalued, yet knocks back an offer which he himself considers to be a fair value. Filed under the burgeoning folder titled "Dave King Bullshit"

Watched City last night in the hotel bar and I hope strikers up and down the country watched Haaland his movements when he hasn’t got the ball are a joy to watch he’s never still he drags his markers all over the place creating space for others an old head on young shoulders