Chris Sutton is amazed that there has been no distress signal out of Ibrox.
Juventus, Bayern Munich and Barcelona have announced pay cuts or deferrals, closer to home Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen and Celtic have gone public with their concerns over possibly going six months without staging a home match.
Over the last decade those four Scottish clubs have balanced the books, matched outgoings with income ad brought a business sense to running a football club even if supporters have been left angered at various aspects of how their clubs’ have operated.
At Ibrox they do things a bit differently. Stopping Celtic whatever the cost has been the model followed.
Over the last five years the directors have chucked £35m at the project with 260m worthless shares now in place rather than the 81m they inherited in 2015.
In November the club announced a shortfall of £10m for the season with Director of Football Ross Wilson unable to move anyone in during the January transfer window.
Despite all of those issues there hasn’t been any comment from Ibrox over financial matters but in the Daily Record Sutton expects that to change.
Now, I don’t profess to have any clever line into the finances of Rangers. I don’t know the exact figures of what they have and what they don’t.
But in November last year the club announced losses of £11.3million in their annual accounts, revealed they needed a fresh cash injection of more than £10m to get to the end of the season and confirmed Dave King and Douglas Park had converted a staggering £35m in soft loans into shares over the past 18 months.
So I think I can safely assume they simply do not have enough cash in the bank to just ride this out for six months as if it a couple of matches lost due to a waterlogged pitch.
It is not that long ago that Rangers had a financial meltdown and ended up down the leagues. That came about through blatant mismanagement and not doing things properly when situations arose. That’s not just my opinion, that’s a fact given the way things turned out with the administration.
He concluded:
As tough as it may be to tell employees, Celtic, Hearts, Aberdeen, Hibs and others are doing the right thing to look at implementing cutbacks. I find it inconceivable bordering on reckless that Rangers won’t do the same thing.
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As well as wages the Ibrox club have instalments to pay on the transfer fees for Ryan Kent, Filip Helander, Eros Grezda, Connor Goldson, Janie Murphy and George Edmondson during the summer.