THE RANGERS IMAGE PROBLEM - Leggat

[ian1964 10,416]

LIVERPOOL supporters must be looking on in horror at the court room battles and legal wrangles surrounding the ownership of the club they support.

 

However, in contrast to what Rangers fans have suffered, and continue to suffer regarding the sale of their club, the Scousers are getting an easy ride, with the Royal Bank of Scotland appearing to give the club greater support and understanding than seems to have been forthecoming for Rangers from Lloyds

 

Maybe that has got something to do with the fact there are plenty of folk out there who are lining up to try to buy the Anfield outfit. Just as there was no shortage of interested parties when Manchester City went on the market.

 

But, despite some big talking by some, which proved to be all hat and no cattle, and other shadowy and equally lacking in substance parties, nobody with the cash needed wants to buy Rangers.

 

Which begs the question...

 

WHY?

 

For at the moment, with debts of around �£25M and falling, and with the way the market stands, Rangers could be bought for a knockdown price.

 

Of course the revenue stream available to such as Liverpool, City, Aston Villa and the others in England, from massive Sky pay outs, plus megabucks via the Champions League, is not available to Rangers.

 

Though, and even given the fact they suffer the problem of being a big club in a small country, Rangers remain a club with a massive tradition and they could provide a terrific platform for anyone who wished to own a big football club.

 

Someone whose resources cannot compete with the Americans who are flooding into the market south of the border, or the others from various countries, but who, nevertheless, has substantial means. Indeed, right now Rangers represent a massive bargain. Almost a steal.

 

So again the question must be posed. Two years after Sir David Murray first made it known Rangers were up for grabs, still no serious and acceptable bid has been made....

 

WHY?

 

And the answer.......

 

Well, Rangers, whether they like it or not, have an image problem. A difficulty brought on by Murray's refusal to take on those whose actions suggest they have nothing else on their journalistic agenda than wishing to damage Rangers.

 

Nobody needs names spelled out here. Everybody knows who the leading light is... and who his wee handmaidens are.

 

Would that this campaigner against Rangers was so dilligent in his day-today duties for his ailing paper - at least it is in Scotland - once known as the Thunderer, and once upon a time highly regarded as a paper of record.

 

For instance, the day before Rangers played Manchester United, he was nowhere to be seen in the splendid Old Trafford, Europa Suite as the reporters from every other daily newspaper who had travelled south, sat down in what was a pre official UEFA press conference briefing to them from Walter Smith.

 

Is there nobody among the ranks of his superiors in London - where the Scottish sports operation is run from - who know what a mug he is making of them?

 

Or does the Scottish editor either not know, or not care? Or is he too busy lunching with Richard Holloway, a friend of both the editor and the anti Rangers sports writer?

 

This man has consistently attacked Rangers supporters for some of the songs he says he hears them singing, while he has with equal consistency, failed to hear any of the offensive songs belted out by the followers of any other club.

 

Now, not for a moment do I think all Rangers supporters are blameless for the plight their club is in, and I have the record of a column I wrote four years ago attacking them for getting the club into trouble over their singing of the "Billy Boys."

 

In it, I told them to stop it and coined the slogan - ***-RIP. It appeared in the newspaper I worked for at the time.

 

Maybe that was because it fell in with the ethos of that paper's owners, Trinity Mirror, whose flagship paper, the Daily Mirrior, once splashed with a TROOPS OUT! demand at the height of he IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland and in Northern Ireland.

 

Therefore, my credentials of being balanced and objective are clearly established. Not so the man from the Times.

 

Fortunately his influence wanes with every plunge in that paper's circulation in Scotland since he joined, just as the Herald's sales figures hit the skids when he was there.

 

However, the damage he has done to Rangers remains, and that is part of the problem - though not, as I have said, all of it - Murray is encountering as he tries to find a credible buyer.

 

Murray indeed is also part of the problem. During his period as chairman - and through the spell when he vacated the chair but remained the most influential figure in the boardroom - there were many inside Ibrox who wanted to pick a fight with those they saw as being fervently anti Rangers.

 

My information is Murray often sat in his Charlotte Square office and listened to their plans, gave them the go-ahead, only to call to cancel that green light before whoever it was he had spoken to, had reached the Maybury Roundabout.

 

You reap what you sow, the Bible tells us, and Murray, by failing to stop what appears as a systematic campaign aimed at the club he owns, now finds it hard to find the buyer he so wants to unearth.

 

Eventually though someone will come forward. Someone with shrewd enough business acumen to spot the nature of the bargain which is Rangers.

 

When that happens there are plenty of people within Ibrox who will be only too happy to point the new owner in the right direction when it comes to those who seem to harbour hatred for Rangers.

 

The Bible will be proved right in then end. It always is.

 

 

http://davidleggat-leggoland.blogspot.com/

[rbr 1,247]

Bang on the money yet again .

[Totti 0]

It's down to money and money alone. If there was money to be made in Scottish football there'd be no shortage in interested parties.

[maineflyer 0]

Again, the worth of this is that it is written independently and is now on the record. The pity is it isn't published in a daily newspaper.

[rbr 1,247]

Again, the worth of this is that it is written independently and is now on the record. The pity is it isn't published in a daily newspaper.

 

 

There isn't an editor in the land that would have the balls to print that , Scottish papers in truth shocker they said no no no

[maineflyer 0]

There isn't an editor in the land that would have the balls to print that , Scottish papers in truth shocker they said no no no

 

Absolutely right. Leggat is right though, you have to also lay a great deal of the blame for this at Murray's door. If he'd been less infatuated with is own public image, and done more for that of the club, we'd never have seen things slip so badly. With Murray in charge, the absurdity of the ego's at the RST, the smug complacency of the average supporter, the almost universal abandonment of the traditions that used to bind us, and society's growing obsession with socialist republicanism .... we couldn't have been afflicted with worse circumstances.

[Stimpy 0]

Can an outside investor (no Rangers ties) get a reasonable return from buying the club? Surely the business environment (micro and macro) we operate in doesn't give enough leeway for an investor to recoup and profit from Rangers.

 

Don't get wrong there's scope for improvement for Rangers but is that enough?

 

Personally I can only see either a very rich Rangers fan or a fan buyout happening.

 

I wrote this back in June. No great literature piece though:

Can't say I was surprised by David Murray's announcement that he has taken the club off the market. The club's been on the market for over three years and have not had any firm offer to date. Andrew Ellis whored himself to investors in an attempt to buy the club but, what right minded business man would fling cash at a football club playing in Scotland?

 

“What’s in it for me” is usually the first thought any investor has before ploughing millions of hard earned cash into any business. After various investment appraisals on the business, in this case Rangers, the investor can then see what’s in it for him!

 

Buying Rangers will reportedly cost over Ã?£30 million. The club has roughly a turnover of Ã?£60 million if it has competed in The Champions League. Take out all the expenditure and you’re looking at a profit of around Ã?£8 million.

 

Majority of the profit will then go back into the business to help sustainability. Rangers need to strengthen the squad each year to guarantee Champions League participation – so again, the rough figure of Ã?£8 million goes down again.

 

Sound easy? Not when the club operates in a 3rd rate league while trying to entice the best players to come and play for the club. And with Scotland’s coefficient rating slipping further down the rankings, it’ll be even harder to qualify for The Champions League, thus bringing income down again.

 

So how does Rangers compete on the level expected by all its fans? Easy! The fans could buy the club. Something all so simple yet uniting Rangers fans is like expecting a snowflake to survive in hell. There’s too much division and opinion from the support - no bad thing as it shows they care, but what if they were to see a properly drawn out plans explaining the benefits of fan ownership?

 

A lot is made of personalities within The Rangers Supporters Trust, which I can’t comment on as I don’t know them or ever saw them on TV or heard them on radio. Fans fear they’ll run the club but if you look at the numbers invested in The RST, they’d never be voted on to the board by the broader Rangers support even if they wanted to. Which, going by the disclaimer on The RST’s website it clearly states The RST is only there to facilitate fans co-opting to owning Rangers.

 

The fans buy Murray out and clear the debt – so who runs the daily operations of Rangers? Again this is easy – professional business men will run it to the agenda laid down by the owners. These potential CEO’s will be vetted in the most public way by fans and media alike. This process would hopefully see the cream rise to the top and Rangers and its new owners get the right man for the job! The process will also eliminate any cowboy fan who believes they’re the man for the job.

 

The actual process of buying the club is where it would complicate matters? What is the best way to approach it – do we as fans chip in an initial Ã?£300 and with 100,000 fans that would bring it up to Ã?£30 million? Those numbers can be easily be played about with that’ll suit the greatest number of fans and hopefully the right fans.

 

After the takeover is complete, what would the yearly subscription to the club be? Ã?£150 which gives every member not shareholder equal voting rights on all matters of the club’s running? Again these numbers can be tampered with to suit! Ã?£150 a year or less – it’d be up to the fans to decide. Even it were Ã?£75 a year from 100,000 members it would still see Ã?£7,500,000 come in on top the usual season ticket, gate receipt, sponsorship, corporate hospitality and sale of merchandise.

 

With the club being run within its means and no debt, the manager could have upwards of Ã?£10 million to spend every season. For a club operating in Scotland, that’s a very significant amount of money to invest in the team.

 

Moreover, you’d expect the club to get better sponsorship in and maybe set up its own TV rights! Lots of opportunities for a club with such a glorious past like ours.

 

There is however, another route. A very rich Rangers fan buys the club who doesn’t mind spending millions of his own cash to bankroll Rangers. Only Douglas Park and Dave King have been mentioned as suitors. One has never committed and the other has his own issues abroad that could see him lose his fortune and even find himself doing a custodial sentence.

 

It may be hard to swallow but Rangers to outside investors is not an attractive or sustainable option, unless the impossible happens and the club gets the coveted invite to The English Premiership. And that I’m afraid isn’t going to happen.

 

Of course, we could continue with the current business plan which translates into downsizing. As stated before, Scotland’s coefficient rating is slipping and the task of Champions league qualification will become tougher each year under the current schedule.

 

Whether you agree or not might just be the factor in how you see Rangers Football Club in years to come.

[bmck 117]

Murray strikes me as a shrewd, ballsy, 80s-style business man. A sort of likely lad for whom it all turned out. The carefully crafted sentiment of the day - in which Rangers are lumped in with all the things not to be liked, empire, conservatism, protestantism, established institutions etc - is not something he has the vision to see for what it is - fashion, and fashion created by those whose voice is loudest now in reaction to those whose voice was loudest before. He seems too keen to be liked, to be seen to be part of, current tastes in the Established Wisdom of what's good and what isn't, not realising that it lasts a day. Rangers will outlast all these fads and fashions. In his desire not to be seen as going against the temperament of the opinion-fosterers such as Spiers, to be one of those ones who know better than the dirty masses, he's alienated the very people he needs. Sooner or later he's going to realise, when fashion changes as it inevitably does, that it's not dirty to be protestant, unionist, etc it's going to be too late for him. Remember the Hamburg (I think it was) chairman saying he loved Rangers because they were a good protestant club? Imagine him saying that? Imagine him saying "If Richard Dawkins can say raising Catholic children is akin to child abuse, as an intellectual, but Rangers fans can't express a similar indignation, isn't that essentially just middle class moralism that picks and chooses the easiest targets?" If he'd said "The songs Rangers fans sing are not to my tastes, but the day we start making what people shout about at football matches a real societal problem we've lost the plot. What about the fat people who are hurt, or the blind people offended, when the ref gets abuse - is it any less offensive to people with weight issues or sight problems? If he'd made any attempt, rather than just fall like a shaking autumnal leaf, to the wind emitted by people like Spiers who are bereft of a single original thought, regardless of their position, we'd be able to remember the good times he brought more fondly. The thing that summed Murray up for me was reading a piece by Spiers talking about the signing of Klos. He'd been over for dinner and Murray was bragging that, even with it being 2am, he could get him on the phone. Spiers said "No chance" and Murray went on to do it. If he's willing to do things that are absurd as that to impress irrelevancies like Spiers I'm not suprised he's trying to fit in with the so-called cultured opinion of the narrow minded broadsheet media in this country. Even if he didn't believe in it all himself, even like I don't, the underlying truth that Rangers fans are no worse than any other fans in this country at least gives him enough ammo to at least step up to it as a challenge, something to be fought and overcome. I can't stand the guy. I honestly think he's spineless.

[Norris Cole 0]

Use paragraphs next time or you won't be getting thanked.

[bmck 117]

Use paragraphs next time or you won't be getting thanked.

 

I thought I was doing well having divided it into sentences rather than my paragraph length sentence punctuated by dashes and semi colon approach