‘I knew Rangers would win with Gerrard’
Hglasgow club’s sporting director Ross Wilson teamed up with manager to deliver 55th title after darkest days
The Rangers players’ celebrations to mark a historic 55th Scottish league title this month, after 10 years in the wilderness, bring a smile to the face of their sporting director, Ross Wilson, as he recalls the excitement of the club’s pugnacious Colombian striker, Alfredo Morelos.
Morelos, a goalscorer who is also no stranger to the club’s disciplinary processes, surprised staff by singing many of the Rangers fans’ favourite chants in perfect English. “He is not even supposed to be able to speak English so it was quite a sight to behold,” Wilson reflects. “I don’t know what happened with him. Winning title number 55 seems to have given him a facility for English on the spot. Unbelievable! And he has not stopped talking since.”
For Wilson, 38, these are great days at one of Britain’s most famous clubs. Under Steven Gerrard, Rangers are back on top of Scottish football, having stopped Celtic’s quest for 10 titles in a row and being well placed to progress to the Europa League quarter-finals in their second-leg tie against Slavia Prague on Thursday. The star of the show is undoubtedly the former England and Liverpool captain but, as Gerrard often acknowledges, the renaissance of Rangers has been a team effort.
Bringing Wilson from Southampton in October 2019 was a crucial part of chairman Douglas Park’s plan. Originally from Falkirk, Wilson has built a stellar career in the director of football profession and ran Saints’ trading model. He was instrumental in signing, and selling, Virgil van Dijk as well as bringing the likes of Pierre-emile Hojbjerg and Danny Ings to the club. He also appointed Ralph Hasenhuttl as manager.
“The Rangers job had come my way a couple of times before and I had rejected it for personal reasons and ultimately because I had a magnificent job at Southampton,” Wilson says on a Zoom call from Prague last week. This time his decision was sealed with a visit to see Gerrard at home on Merseyside. “Within 10 minutes I could see how much Rangers had captured Steven,” Wilson says. “I knew how driven he was to be successful. I knew that if I came here this wasn’t a job I could cruise in, tick a few boxes, finish second in the league and get to the odd cup final. We had to win. I was sitting with a man who is a winner and I knew then that we would work well together.” What now for Rangers? Plenty more league titles, their fans hope, but as football in Britain and across Europe prepares for a battle
over its post-2024 future, where do the modern Rangers fit in? At Southampton, the club’s turnover prepandemic was around £150million. At Rangers it is around a third of that. The club have been supported by their investors in the comeback from their insolvency meltdown of 2012, but one day, Wilson says, Rangers will have to be financially independent.
“The history of the club is about winning and we had been through fundamentally the worst period in the history of the club and hadn’t been winning,” he says. “So that’s
why title number 55 is talked about so often, because it was one of the most coveted titles in the history of the club. We had waited so long as a club and a fan base to get to 55.”
The future also lies in European competition, where Gerrard already has more wins than any manager in Rangers history. “We don’t have the revenues of a Premier League club so Europe will always be important to us,” Wilson says.
Wilson has made eight signings since he arrived and has three precontract agreements with young players for the summer. He has a pitch to potential signings that many find irresistible: the chance to work with Gerrard, and play – after Covid – at a full-to-capacity Ibrox.
“The expectation to win all the time is created by the fans,” Wilson says. “In normal times when there are 50,000 at every game and a following all over the UK and Europe, that brings an energy and excitement when we are talking to players. We ask: ‘Do you want to play in front of 50,000 people on the world stage where you can be a hero? You can be a legend here but you have to come with an expectancy to win.’
“In the majority of Premier League clubs you don’t have that expectancy to have to win every single game. If we draw, it’s a borderline crisis. We love that energy and excitement. We want to capture that in the players we sign.”
There were summer offers for Morelos that the club rejected because of the importance of winning the title this season. Wilson also accepts that, for Morelos, “another day it might be the right time and the right value”. That is the reality of life at all but a few clubs.
“We have to be a strong playertrading club,” Wilson says. “That means we have to sell well and buy well. I don’t think it’s inevitable that every player performing well here has to leave. We will make sure we trade players out at the right time.”
Wilson’s job is to help drive up standards in all areas from recruitment to facilities, from the medical department to the academy.
Does Wilson agree, as The Daily Telegraph’s Jamie Carragher wrote this month, that managing a midranking Premier League club, without any prospect of winning trophies, would not interest his former Liverpool team-mate, Gerrard?
“I find it hard to imagine Steven doing anything that doesn’t demand that you have to win every single day,” Wilson says. “I am sure there are more clubs than Rangers and Liverpool that demand you win every single day. I don’t know what the future holds for him other than it’ll be a successful one. This is a man who has to have that intensity to win. As a club we have been absolutely committed to Steven and the group of staff that work with him.”
It is a demanding job breathing life back into such a big club. Next year Rangers will be 150 years old and their hope is this landmark will offer some closure on the trauma of the lost years.
When he checks his phone one last time at night there will often be a message or two from Gerrard that Wilson says falls into one of two categories, “operationally important right now or, ‘how can we improve the club this way?’”
We return to the question of selling and buying well, of competing in Europe above and beyond the budget. “It’s not an easy model,” he concedes, “but we are not here for an easy life, are we?”