Rangers finally have a plan, a bit of structure and a sense that things, as painful as they are now, are heading in the right direction.
Last summer, Rangers had four key director posts vacant, an unacceptable situation for any organisation that plans to turn a profit and have a consistently successful output.
The appointment of Patrick Stewart as CEO was a start, as was Fraser Thornton replacing John Gilligan as chairman.
The sacking of Philippe Clement became inevitable but no replacement will be made until Stewart has appointed a sporting director.
After a sticky start, and a big to-do list at Rangers, the former Man Utd CEO has a lot on his hands and his mood won’t have been helped by Sir Jim Radcliffe’s barbed comments about the mess he inherited at Old Trafford.
Patrick Stewart under fire after Jim Radcliffe’s Man Utd complaint
Stewart wasn’t personally responsible for transfers or the financial position that Utd currently find themselves in.
What is a red flag for Stewart though is, as a senior director involved in contract negotiations and as CEO, he will have had as much of an insight as anyone else.
Speaking to the BBC, Radcliffe hinted at a long period of negligence by those running Utd and, by default, Stewart also came under fire:
“Yes, and I sympathise with them because Manchester United is not where it’s expected to be,” Radcliffe said when asked if he understood the anger of the fans.
“We are expected to be winning the Premier League and challenging for the Champions League and we are not there at the moment. But I think we need to get the house back in order before we can get back to our winning ways.
“That’s the process it takes. It’s not a light switch. I’ll give you an example, if you look at the players we are buying this summer, that we didn’t buy, we are buying Antony, we are buying Casemiro, we are buying Andre Onana, we are buying Rasmus Hojlund, we are buying Jadon Sancho.
“These are all things from the past but whether we like it or not we have inherited those things and we have to sort it out. For Sancho, who obviously now plays for Chelsea, and we pay half his wages, we are paying £17m to buy him in the summer. So, it takes time for us to move away from the past into a new place in the future.”
