GOING NOWHERE

Even £40m bid wouldn’t force sale of Morelos

DAVE KING last night claimed that Rangers would turn down £40million for Alfredo Morelos in January due to their new-found financial stability.

The chairman rocked the club’s annual general meeting yesterday by announcing he will quit his post in March — five years after returning to Glasgow.

Announcing a fresh share issue in the New Year which will address the current shortfall following an £11.3m loss, King, who will remain the club’s biggest shareholder, said the days of the club making financial decisions in an ‘ad hoc’ manner would soon be a thing of the past.

Morelos, the 22-goal Colombian striker, is likely to be subject of significant interest in the next window.

Adamant that the club was no longer in a position where it had to sell its best assets to balance the books, King pledged that the striker is going nowhere.

‘I can’t imagine a circumstance where we will sell Alfredo,’ he said. ‘I’ve said to the manager, if you get £25m (offered) for him, £30m, I wouldn’t sell

him. You make your decision. I don’t want money in the bank. We’re here to win league titles. ‘I made the point — we’re not like a mid-tier Premier League club who can trade players, make good money but are not under any pressure to win the league. ‘The most important thing for us this year is to have the best shot at winning the league. ‘I would rather keep Alfredo. If they offered £40m and the manager came to me, I’d be saying my instinct would be to keep him. ‘We know he’s going to score goals. My view is not to sell him under any circumstances. ‘And there would be no financial pressure whatsoever to sell Alfredo. I can safely say Alfredo will not be going anywhere in January.’ Together with Paul Murray and John Gilligan, King succeeded in gaining control of the boardroom from associates of Sports Direct and Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley in March 2015. Explaining his decision to relinquish his post, the businessman said: ‘It’s been two main things — my businesses in South Africa have been struggling and need my attention and I can’t explain adequately how much time Rangers has taken up over the years, so that is a factor. ‘But also, the club is ready. I went to the board meeting yesterday and said the days of me running around checking things is over. ‘Let’s do one big fund raise, square everything off and then you’re on your own. Go and run the business like every other club.’ Asked if being ‘cold-shouldered’ by the Takeover Panel as a consequence of breaking their rules was central to his thinking, King replied: ‘No, I might have stayed around just to be defiant but the Takeover Panel cold shoulder doesn’t affect me or the club. ‘They just wanted to punish me because I didn’t play by their rules and I get that.’ As yet unable to reach a satisfactory solution to the ongoing wrangle with Sports Direct, King will remain a director of Rangers Retail Ltd. ‘By and large, I have achieved what I set out to achieve when I came in five years ago,’ he continued. ‘Sports Direct remains a source of huge frustration because it’s been the one, big failure. ‘I thought we were on top of it, I thought we had nailed it. I thought the second agreement was workable, but they are persistent chaps. ‘They look for angles and they find angles and we obviously don’t agree with them all. I’ll certainly be sticking around as director of Rangers Retail Ltd because I want to see a conclusion to this. ‘It would not be fair for me to hand that on to someone else. I am determined to see this through and it’s important I do not walk away.’