How what Celtic’s manager does, does and doesn’t affect Rangers | OneFootball

All the rumours that Stavros is leaving Glasgow’s east end for Spurs are certainly ‘interesting’ but just how relevant is it to Rangers?

See, we’re not so foolish on Ibrox Noise to make a claim that what happens over there doesn’t matter a single bit – they are our big rivals and currently the champions, so whether we like to admit it or not, news of this gravity does make impact to us in a sense.

Plenty of our fans like to angrily protest the idea that they are irrelevant to Rangers, the same fans who talk about their court cases, about how the media portray them, how the First Minister played down the title stuff etc.

So consistency is not coming any more from fans than it is from fan sites like Ibrox Noise who don’t pretend we will be totally consistent with every view and stance, and on this particular topic we do feel it both does and doesn’t have relevance.

Who manages Celtic both does and doesn’t matter – they’re a chequebook club with expensive players and any half-decent boss with a blank budget can pretty much thrive in Scotland for a team that gives them that much money, by comparison with rivals who have nowhere near that financial clout.

Where that manager is really tested is in Europe, and Stavros was a joke at that level – ignore Rangers’ diabolical Champions League campaign, we did ourselves and our country proud in Europe the past 5 years, but that lot only see the UCL flunk. They actually pretend they did a tonne better despite having themselves one of the all-time worst UCL campaigns as well. He choked at that level.

He also choked in every other European competition in the qualifying rounds – three exits last summer year which is a world record incidentally.

So he’s not exactly a great manager, only domestically when he has money – which he also did at his previous clubs, incidentally.

That said, Ronny Deila also had big budget and failed to do much with it, he also flunked, as Brendan Rodgers also did, in Europe.

But what is the Rangers angle here? If the Greek moves to London, and it’s starting to look like he will, it will seriously disrupt their Asian and Oceania-based squad – most of them joined that lot because of the manager, and now a new guy coming in will affect them significantly.

And any Rangers fan saying that makes no difference to us is head in the sand arrogance. It’s irrelevant in the sense that what we do ourselves matters primarily, but what happens over there is also of note to us in this context.

And given their whole club is now built on Asian or Aussie-based players, ripping away the builder and leaving the lot of them on their own makes a big impact.

But none of it matters if our work this summer isn’t good enough – we have to ensure we’re bringing in players like Haji Wright and more Cantwells and Raskins, and the rest will take care of itself.

But we will monitor the eastern events with interest too…