Rangers: was John Gilligan right about Dave King? | OneFootball

We explained a little earlier on Ibrox Noise about the complicated ownership and share division of Rangers, and why it’s so difficult for a prospective new owner to actually buy the club.

For now, as we know, John Gilligan has come in as acting chairman, appointed by the current board, to try to steady Rangers’ ship in the absence of both a permanent chairman and of course CEO, but he was very vocal yesterday about effectively telling former Three Bears colleague Dave King to more or less shut up.

How do we feel about what Gilligan has said?

We agree, that’s how.

Dave King might be in a better ‘position’ to help Rangers, but the man is doing nothing but blowing hard at Chris Jack and other media allies while moaning loudly.

He suggests an EGM but has no allies on the board with whom to secure support, and let’s not forget a lot of Dave King’s (bad) decisions cost Rangers big money in court over the Sports Direct fiasco.

King also promised in 2015 that he would be putting Rangers back on the stock exchange – it was a complete lie and he never had that intention.

In short, King is a bigmouth – in fairness that isn’t headline news.

He can’t even be credited with the appointment of Steven Gerrard because that was actually ex-Sporting Director Mark Allen’s idea.

King complains at the situation (like everyone else) at the club but offers only one solution – him as chairman, which when you’ve been slaughtering the existing board for months/years is not a position they will happily put you into.

He demands an EGM to secure that, but fundamentally what difference is King going to make as chairman when he isn’t going to invest and in fact wants his cash back?

The reason the board members are who they are is down in huge part to investment – like them or not, Bennett, Johnston, Park, Wolhardt and Taylor, among others, have hard investment in the club – they’re not keen on King and the way he’s systematically criticised them.

It’s not helpful, and fundamentally it’s well known that King wants to sell his shares and be done with all this, and his play to be Chairman is likely his way to get that cash back.

So he is left to moan and gripe about how bad the club is being run, and while he’s not completely wrong, it’s empty rhetoric.

King isn’t helping anything by shouting in the press all the time, and even many of his biggest backers do agree his verbals in the media are sensationalist and very attention seeking.

We don’t see anything wrong that Gilligan has done, but so many fans think the sun shines out King’s backside that they’ll side with him over anyone else and have indeed started attacking the acting chairman by slaughtering one of the men who saved the club from Mike Ashley and co. And did so with the minimal of fuss and the maximum of humility.

Dave King did the same, he saved the club alongside Gilligan and Paul Murray, but in recent years has become more and more vocal about criticising the club and the board.

This is the guy who wouldn’t sell his shares to Club 1872, remember, calling the attempt ‘futile’.

Does he have Rangers’ best interests at heart? He is very much a Rangers man and supports our club, we’d never deny that, but he wants his money back, and that for him is more or less priority.

If he ever gets rid of his shares, we will probably never hear from him again.