Heart & Hand Podcast@ibroxrocks
Chairman’s Update
Dear supporter,
The international break provides an opportune time to share an update on the broader direction of our beloved club.
Our ambitions are clear – sustained winning and winning sustainably. Having now spent ten months in the club, our views on how to accomplish our ambitions are much clearer. We need to create a culture of winning, and we need to continue to prioritise and invest in the men’s first team.
Culture
Rangers’ supporters are direct, hardworking, passionate, and emotional. I want our supporters to see themselves in the club, whether on the pitch or in the club offices, and I think some of that has been missing over the last months and years.
This starts at the top. Over the last four months, we have reconstituted our executive team. Jim has joined as CEO and Fraser has become an Executive Director. We believe our current football structure is working well, and we do not plan to hire a sporting director. The executive team is committed to being smaller, nimbler, and more entrepreneurial. We want an executive team willing to get its fingernails dirty. If there is a hole to be dug, we want people fighting over shovels. We want fewer consulting firms and less bureaucracy.
A culture of winning means returning to Rangers’ historical DNA and standards. I have tried to spend time with many supporters and former players and staff, and their input has been invaluable. Across the club, we need to continue to partner with these individuals, whether informally as thought leaders and advisors or formally as ambassadors and parts of our staff. These links to the past must be strengthened.
Financial Resources
In football, the level of resources committed to the squad is directly linked to the quality on the pitch. If we want to continue to improve on the pitch, we need to increase the total amount of resources of the club while also shifting as many of those resources to the men’s first team as possible.
We are raising season ticket prices by 6.5% (except juvenile tickets, which will be kept at the same price). We do not take ticket prices and increases for granted. We recognise the exceptional commitment supporters make to the club in the form of ticket purchases. The costs to run the club - player wages, agents’ fees, security, food and beverage - are all rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. We either need the club’s revenues to keep pace, or we need to decrease the money spent on the squad. We don’t believe this is the time to decrease the player and football budget; in fact, we think the opposite.
We are not asking supporters to do all the heavy lifting. We are raising £16m of additional capital through a new share issue, effective immediately. The capital will be used to support player acquisitions and other club needs. This increases the total capital invested in the club to £36m in the last year.
Increasing the revenue and capital is only part of the path to allocating more resources to the men’s first team. If we are going to ask supporters to pay more for tickets, we have an obligation to spend those funds wisely. We have the shrunk the size and cost of the executive team. We are systematically reviewing every part of the club, looking for ways to be more efficient, thus enabling a greater share of the resources to go to the men’s first team.
