Boardroom shakeup as Rangers prepare for Premier League bigwig | OneFootball

Once again, it looks like the Rangers might be shaking up their backroom staff. There’s a rumor that Nils Koppen could be leaving his job, potentially for another position, with Kevin Thelwell coming in to replace him as the new sporting director. Why would there be a shake-up in the backroom staff? What has gone wrong to make a potential change necessary? And why might the Rangers be interested in Kevin Thelwell? Here’s a breakdown of the situation (and the people involved), with all the intrigue that comes with the Game of Thrones-style power plays that frequently take place in the world of football management.

Being at Rangers means you’re in one of the top two clubs in Scotland, and if you’re at one of the top two clubs, you have to deliver not just good performances, but great ones. Performances that lead to trophies. Except Nils Koppen, the man brought in by Rangers to oversee the club’s strategy as sporting director, hasn’t done that. Sure, he’s had the odd decent moment, but overall his work has been very much under the radar, which isn’t a good place to be when every single bit of your job is dissected a million times over by the power of a club like Rangers’ fan base.

You may not have heard of Kevin Thelwell, but you should have. He’s one of the architects who took Wolverhampton Wanderers from the Championship to the Europa League. During his recent five-year stint at the club, Wolves made some pretty smart signings that turned them from a team that was perennially getting stuck in the mud of the tail end of the Championship and the bottom of the Premier League into a regular participant in the top flight of English football, which effectively meant that they were now contesting not only domestic but also European football.

Switching to Thelwell isn’t just a matter of changing one person for another; it’s the Rangers Football Club (quadruple majors) indicating that they have a new plan, a fresh approach, for how they intend to win. And, make no mistake, the Rangers board wants to win. Thelwell is going to be in charge of recruitment and player development, the two key areas that determine “winning” in modern football. He might be a difference-maker for the club. We have to wait and see, but the club obviously thinks that the Kevin Thelwell era will bring them closer to a winning formula.

Rangers are a club with a rich history, and they’ve evolved and survived quite a bit over the last 142 years. Like countless plotlines in the world of football, this change at the top doesn’t spell the end. It’s just a halfway point, the start of another era. But unlike many of those plotlines, this one is associated with the kind of genesis effect that sporting director Kevin Thelwell could have. With him possibly coming aboard, things are about to get very interesting indeed in Govan.