01-06-2025
Delivering trophies is one thing but changing Rangers' culture might be tougher fix for new owners, reckons Bill Leckie
TWENTY million quid might make you or I happy for the rest of our lives.
But in football terms it doesn't even touch the sides.
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Rangers' new owners, including Andrew Cavenagh, might want to shake things up
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And guys like Paraag Marathe will want to echo the American sports experience
It gets you one-fifth of Bruno Fernandes. Or a year's wages for Mo Salah.
If new European champions PSG are feeling generous, it might just about buy you one of their unused subs from Munich on Saturday night.
So if any Rangers fans believe this summer's war chest promised by their new owners is enough to get them 'back where they belong' — to quote chairman Andrew Cavenagh's open letter from America — they are kidding themselves.
Fact is, it won't. It might get them closer to Celtic next season, it might help them win a trophy.
It's only a gesture, though. A down payment. A taste of what might be on tap if everyone knuckles down and gets their act together.
Most of all, it appears to be a sign from the 49ers that bringing in new players, much like finding a new manager, is only part of what they have signed up to do.
Or, at least, that's how it should be.
Because for me, while revitalising the dugout and the dressing room has to be the short-term aim after a dismal campaign, what matters way more is a long-term plan that changes the culture of a club broken from top to bottom.
The business culture. The corporate culture. The communications culture. And, maybe most of all, the FAN culture.
Sure, if Donald Trump had bought them he wouldn't have changed a thing.
Rangers fans react as 49ers takeover completed
He'd already be wearing a No One Likes Us We Don't Care baseball cap.
He'd be serenading Vladimir Putin with a chorus of No Surrender.
Cavenagh and sidekick Paraag Marathe are cut from a different cloth, though.
They built the foundations of their sporting empire on the family-friendly, tailgate-BBQ vibe of NFL game days.
I can't see them being comfortable with the kind of atmosphere that generations of Ibrox boardrooms accepted not only as normal, but somehow as the look they wanted for their brand.
It's an angry place. It's a place that distrusts outsiders, a place that screams abuse about the faith of half its own country.
Surely that isn't the image Cavenagh and Co want for their investment?
One of snarling faces, of religious hatred, of visiting supporters staring down the double barrels of a shotgun.
Not to mention a world of potential sponsors recoiling in shock at the sight?
If I was part of this consortium, that banner before the last Old Firm game would have sealed the deal for me as far as the need for cultural upheaval was concerned.
It might even have made me think more than twice about whether this was the club for me and my dosh after all.
It's clear chief executive Patrick Stewart isn't having the Union Bears thing, at least not in its present trouble-making form.
You'd think he'd be telling the 49ers this, though you'd hope they would not only already be aware of it, but also would see it as a no-brainer that it cannot be allowed to go on.
After all, if a clean slate applies to the dugout and the dressing room, then surely it should also apply to the stands.
As in, if you're not prepared to buy into a new way of thinking, a new attitude, then off you pop and we'll fill your seat with someone who is.
At which point, I'm well aware that the emails will start flying in about why the same isn't being written about THEYM across the city, about THEIR intolerances and THEIR anger.
But this isn't about 'theym'.
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Chief executive Patrick Stewart is already trying to make his influence felt
Credit: Getty
They are not the ones beating themselves up about serial failure on and off the pitch. This is about Rangers.
And one of the first things the new people running Rangers have to do if this takeover is to work — genuinely work long-term, not just deliver the punter-appeasing quick fix of some silverware — is to stop worrying about what Celtic are doing, and start getting their own messy house in order.
If they are properly serious about the job in front of them, they will set about rebuilding from top to bottom, and succeeding will mean as much as delivering titles and making an impact in Europe.
If they are properly serious, they will look ahead to the day when they themselves ride off into the sunset, and promise the club they put up for sale won't trade on sectarianism and loathing its neighbours.
That it will be one where mums and dads and kids can sit together and enjoy something as healthy as it is successful.
Rangers have had this chance before. When the version run on tick by David Murray hit financial and footballing rock bottom in 2012, they could easily have come back up as a better club — but they blew it.
Instead of finding the humility to set a wage structure that would let them rebuild from the ground up, they chucked more money at individual players than the rest of League Two spent among them in a week.
Instead of reflecting on the boastful, wasteful, self-entitled mindset that had caused their humiliating fall from grace, they chose instead to blame it all on a world that they believed was out to get them.
They either couldn't see — or chose to ignore — the bigger picture that the whole No One Likes Us schtick was dragging them down, and that they needed to re-market themselves as an outward-looking, progressive organisation where everyone was welcome.
Today, and for very different reasons, Rangers have that same chance again.
It's one they simply MUST grab, and run with like a 49ers wide-receiver in full flight.
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