Rangers facing good and bad times

It is a difficult time to be a Rangers fan up in Scotland at the moment. You would think that being ten points clear at the top of the SPL, in the final of the Co-operative Insurance Cup and still in the Scottish FA Cup would be pretty much a cause for celebration.

Problem

The problem at Rangers, as with so many other clubs at the moment, is financial. Whilst Celtic brought in eight new players in the January transfer window to try to make themselves more competitive Rangers were unable to add a single player.

Manager Walter Smith is well aware of the serious problems facing the club. After their cup semi-final win in the week he spoke to the BBC.

“It’s not time for it at the present moment. But everything will not be all right at the end of the season. It will only get worse. It doesn’t take away from the fact that we have a problem. I think you need to be blind to think we don’t have a problem that for a team of our standing we should not have and my concern is that that will continue. We are only left to do what we have to do on the pitch and try as hard as we can and we are doing that. For whatever faults we all have, from myself all the way down through the players, they don’t lack a desire to try as hard as they can to win the game and they are managing to do that. We are delighted to be in the final, but anybody who thinks it is going to get better in the summer is deluding themselves. Trebles are never easy to win, I know that myself through past experience. This spell that we’re having and the problems we have, if we do take injuries, it could ruin the season for us, but that’s in the background just now. We’re enjoying the fact that we’ve got to the first cup final of the season and we’ll look forward to that.”

It is difficult to see where Rangers go from here. They are heavily in debt and despite the possibility of a domestic Scottish treble they are probably not a particularly appetising prospect to the type of money men that would be needed to turn things around.

Investment

With the Scottish game attracting far less investment and money generally than the game in England and the English clubs consistently voting against the addition of Rangers and Celtic to their leagues, it is difficult to see where any businessman would be likely to get any return on his potential investment.

Rangers are a ‘big club’ but they do not have a realistic prospect of getting any bigger or becoming a major force in European football, which is exactly what they need to do if they are going to achieve their ambitions.

Vicious

It is something of a vicious circle that Rangers find themselves in. They need money and investment to bring in the type of players who would bring them international success. To attract that type of investment you need to be able to show that players such as those can be attracted to then club. Without the realistic prospect of European success those types of players will not go near the club and investors will look elsewhere.

It is a really sad position to be in that at the moment Rangers are the dominant team in Scotland. They look as though they will run away with their league title and may well pick up two other cups. Despite that, it looks fairly sure that dire financial problems lie ahead. So as a fan of Rangers you can celebrate success on the pitch but face potential disaster off of it.

Success

In a city just a couple of hundred miles south there are two football teams who are big players. One of them has debts way in excess of anything that can be found at Rangers yet they are massive and have achieved success on the pitch at national, European and World level for many years. The other team have had little success but have attracted investment from one of the richest men in the world and seem able and determined to buy some of their neighbours’ success.

Rangers must be wondering how a distance of just two hundred and fifteen miles can make such a difference to clubs with similar fan bases and similar stature in European football terms.

Rangers are a great club and I truly hope that the pessimism of Walter Smith is found to be misplaced.