What’s Rangers’ board got to do with it anyway? | OneFootball

Ibrox Noise is well aware that some sections of the support think we ‘support the spivs’, that we were in Mike Ashley or Derek Llambias’ pockets back in the day, and that we are in cahoots with the charlatans. It was especially noted that we didn’t condemn Charles Green way back when, and we still don’t have any axe to grind with the Easdales.

Why?

Ashley was just a cynical businessman who is infamously ruthless and takes things for every penny. We never supported him for even a second.

Llambias was just his man, doing his bidding. We didn’t support him either.

Charles Green? Businessman who put together a bunch of other businessmen as a consortium and who didn’t really do a lot wrong – he got his CEO pay out of it, £750,000 but that was and remains the standard salary for CEOs of the Old Firm. We’re not aware of him stealing anything.

Easdales? They put loans in interest free – they might actually some of the biggest reasons Rangers survived those dark days. But fans hated them and they were defined as some of the worst toxins in the board. The comment about stairways was a hugely misguided faux pas.

We also know Ian Hart, another one fans seemed to hate back then, invested well over £500,000 into the youth program, cash which was completely ringfenced for that purpose. But his association with Green made him another ‘bad guy’.

And in this piece today, after that long-winded intro, we express how we just aren’t jumping onto the anti-John Bennett and anti-board bandwagon fans are happily leaping on, because there’s no evidence which merits it.

This window the club has already spent £10M – whether we believe it’s well-spent is another matter, but to suggest the board isn’t backing Philippe Clement is absolute poppycock.

£4.5M on Diomande – yes, that cash was part of the summer budget, £2.5M on Hamza Igamane, £800,000 on Jefte, £500,000 development fee on Barron, and signing on fees for Liam Kelly, Barron and Clinton Nsiala.

Unless we just can’t add up, that’s around £10M – inc. the signing on fees.

So the idea there’s been no backing for the manager is false.

Now we also factor in the exits – a whole glut of dead wood shipped out, and now around £11M gained in fees from the sales of Sam Lammers, Connor Goldson and Jose Cifuentes.

It’s safe to say the board really isn’t doing a massive amount wrong in that area – their job is to back Clement and Nils Koppen – are they not doing that?

We said before we simply couldn’t buy before we sold – we’re starting to sell now, and we’re also getting in a decent free agent or two in the likes of Barron, while adding quality loans in the form of Cerny.

The big ugly vile blot of course is the stadium fiasco – it was diabolical and we can’t even remotely defend that. It’s stained the upcoming season and no one knows when we can use Ibrox again. That is on the board, on whoever made a very bad call to order steel from Asia. Someone was allegedly fired, but we don’t know who.

No, the biggest immediate problem right now, aside that, is how badly Philippe Clement is managing the players he currently has.

Let’s not pretend the preseason performances have been anything than garbage. They’ve been atrocious – disorganised, no shape, no direction, and always starting with terrible XIs.

While we concede our squad is far from finished, a long long way indeed, the teams Clement are putting out don’t play like teams. It’s a rabble, and even Leon Balogun pulled no punches slaughtering it.

Clement’s management for most of 2024 till summer was generally dreadful, and we really see no sign this preseason he’s learned a single thing from his errors.

Even thousands of fans are having doubts about him – an Ibrox Noise poll a few weeks ago had 95% in favour of him, no doubts he was the right man. That went down to 65% the past few days.

We do feel a little better with some of the players leaving and coming in, but we don’t exactly have a lot of belief any more that Clement is the right guy to manage them. He refuses on pain of death to play Sterling in midfield and admitted Goldson was going to start in Birmingham despite being on the verge of leaving.

And his handling of Todd Cantwell was, in a word, abysmal.

So what’s the board got to do with Rangers conceding yet more bad goals at St Andrews?

We don’t pretend Bennett is perfect – Bisgrove to CEO was a massive mistake and it backfired – we initially praised it, naively assuming his brilliance in commercial would transfer to being a CEO, which it clearly didn’t – and then he got out when the Saudis came in.

Bennett has also handled the stadium shambles abysmally – the communication was horrendous and the apology far too slow. Rangers’ social media displays have been borderline amateur. Three times it took to post correctly the exit of Robby McCrorie.

The board does seem to run things quite badly at times – they promised a Director of Football then literally gave up and appointed a Director of Football Recruitment instead in Koppen.

It does feel very ramshackle all too often.

So we’re not completely relieving the board of their part in where our club is at the moment.

But we aren’t ‘sack the board’ like everyone else because the primary currency of football is results, and we’re not sure how a terrible preseason of horrific results sits on the board.

Even a second string Rangers team can play better than it did v Birmingham, but it just isn’t doing so, is it?

That’s heavily on Philippe Clement and of course the players.

If he can buck up his ideas and put together a few results while the club gets in a few more bodies and dumping some more, the calls for the board to go will quieten down a lot.

It’s a results-based business and Clement needs results. Performances would be nice too.

Or are you going to tell us the players we currently have are literally not good enough to beat Hearts?

We’re not ready for them, very true, but it’s more that the system and the tactics look AWOL – no shape, no coherence, disconnected XIs – what’s that got to do with John Bennett?

Philippe Clement can easily put out an XI that can at least beat Hearts if it’s well-organised and the right players in the right positions are picked.

But we don’t have a lot of faith that he will.

Butland; Tavernier, Balogun, Souttar, Ridvan; Sterling, Diomande; Cortes, Lawrence, Cerny; Danilo.

Do we think it’s the best Rangers XI ever? No. We’d never put Tavernier in if we could help it for a start. But surely that thing can take a worthy fight to Hearts.

Cue Scott Wright, Cyriel Dessers and Ben Davies getting the nod (as they did v Union Berlin) as usual.

John Bennett wasn’t the one to pick them.