CITY TRADER WARBURTON PLAYING FOR HIGH STAKES AT RANGERS

Nothing new boss had done in money markets will have prepared him for this

AT least David Weir should be able to show him around. There will be little risk of Mark Warburton wandering into a broom cupboard as he searches f or either t he first-team dressing room at Auchenhowie or the Blue Room at Ibrox.

Nor is the former City trader likely to be bamboozled by any of the big numbers forever swirling around the club where he will be unveiled as manager today.

If anything, Warburton’s financial expertise — he used to turn over up to £2billion per day — might come in handy at an institution used and abused by what would have been loosely described as ‘ blue- chip investors’ in recent years.

Still, the 52-year- old Londoner, who landed his first managerial post only 18 months ago, won’t be completely immune to surprises on his first day at work. And not just because a job as big as leading Rangers will always be accompanied by knocks, bumps and kicks.

Nothing Warburton has done, either in football or in his previous life — when he was gambling fortunes on the blip of a price chart — will have prepared him for this.

There are absolutely no guarantees he will succeed in an environment which is guaranteed to expose every weakness.

If unusual times call for unusual measures, then the arrival at Ibrox of a ‘veteran rookie’ — plenty of life experience, a healthy dose of football, but still new to the alchemy of team building and leadership as a head coach — certainly fits the bill.

In the history of men to have donned the club tie and ascended the famous marble staircase to take charge of the Rangers first team, Warburton stands out as something completely different.

Maybe that’s what is needed. Maybe the guy who took Brentford to within shouting distance of the English Premiership last season — losing to Middlesbrough in the Play-Off semi-finals with a bunch of players who already knew he was leaving — will make a quick start and leave all doubters gasping in astonishment.

However, it is not enough merely to marry a guy boasting good ideas and obvious talent with a club in need.

Running a football club is as much about feel as it is about hard facts. It’s about the guy taking charge of the team. There is no way to know if Warburton and Rangers will be a good fit.

With the former non- leaguer installed alongside lionised Ranger Weir, then, what will this driven and self-motivated self-starter — a man who took a 90-per-cent pay cut to pursue his coaching dream — find upon his arrival at Ibrox?

To be blunt, not enough players, not nearly enough good ones, no scouting network and a budget as dependant on season-ticket uptake as at any club in the land.

Chairman Dave King (right) may speak publicly about spending whatever it takes — music to the ears of any incoming manager — but, in private, Warburton and the board have discussed hard facts.

He will have needed to know what kind of wages he can offer the raft of signings who will be on their way.

That spending will be required is obvious. Rangers may technically have enough footballers on their books to field a team plus subs. But nobody is in any doubt about how far they are from being rated fit-and-proper promotion contenders.

King has made it clear that winning the Scottish Championship title is a must. Or else.

In full understanding of what price he will pay for failure, then, the first priority for the new manager has to be just catching up with Hibernian.

The Easter Road side finished ahead of Rangers in the table last season an d, although they lost to the Ibrox club in the Play-Off semi-finals, manager Alan Stubbs has moved quickly to build for a second campaign in the second tier.

While Rangers have been paralysed by the absence of someone to make decisions — bar the obvious call to let all 11 out- of- contract players leave without delay — Hibs have been busy signing and re-signing key men. So Rangers need bodies. More than that, they need winners. There were far too many faint hearts playing in Light Blue last season, guys who crumbled when the pressure was cranked up even incrementally. We know that, like most managers, Warburton has arrived with a list of targets. Lew is Macleod returning to Ibrox f rom Brentford might seem like an obvious move, although a guy with contacts across Europe will be expected to make a few clever signings from surprising sources.

There isn’t an area of the team that does not require strengthening, from an entire new back four right through to a front line lacking composure and movement.

There are a number of decent young players on the fringes but, to be honest, they are not going to carry this team to the title.

As for what Rangers are getting in their new guv’nor? Like any new arrival, Warburton will turn up in Glasgow accompanied by an avalanche of warm words from former players, colleagues and admirers who like the way he has shaken up football.

The former Enfield and Boreham Wood defender, a guy who cited ‘deep philosophical differences’ with the Brentford board when his departure from Griffin Park was announced back i n February, certainly does things differently.

But what he does share with some of the big-name players who move i nto management is a pile of personal wealth, meaning he doesn’t need the gig. He is in this for the love of the game.

Any who doubt his passion need only know that, at the age of 40, he quit the lucrative environs of the City to follow his heart, funding his own trips to learn from the best at Barcelona, Ajax and the like.

Something of a visionary who set-up the NextGen series that eventually morphed into the UEFA Youth League, he has also worked at the grass roots, in academies and on windswept training grounds.

With one promotion — f rom England’s League One to the Championship — already on his CV, he has taken the kind of punt that came naturally in his days making trades on stocks, shares and commodities, and — for all we know about how the City works — the birth weight of the latest Royal baby.

Undoubtedly, Rangers have taken just as big a risk by appointing Warburton — even with old favourite Weir there to keep him from getting lost.