Gap year will let Ibrox youths take on the best
Rangers skip league for a season to face continent’s finest
RANGERS will not take part in next season’s Development League after receiving dispensation to embark on a season-long schedule of youth challenge matches against English and continental opposition.
Both the SPFL and SFA have rubber-stamped the Ibrox side’s proposal to take their second-string team out of the Scottish structure for a year as the club bids to accelerate the development of its brightest prospects by exposing them to matches against some of Europe’s elite clubs.
The club has made contact with several English Premier League outfits including Chelsea and the two Manchester clubs, while there have also been discussions with Germany’s RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich as well as Benfica and Sporting Lisbon of Portugal, boss Pedro Caixinha’s home country.
The radical move has the endorsement of the SFA’s new performance director Malky Mackay and is being driven by the club’s head of academy Craig Mulholland, who has also helped conceive the association’s Project Brave initiative.
‘We have been working on this for the best part of a year,’ said Mulholland. ‘It is mandatory to have a team in the league, so we are grateful to the SPFL board that they have excused us for a season to pilot this.
‘I think we probably needed Malky’s backing before we went to the SPFL board because it’s a radical step for a Scottish club.
‘He was delighted with it. If it’s as successful as we hope, it has to help not just Rangers, but also the national game. It would have been hard for him to back something that was longer than a one-year pilot because it’s important Rangers are part of Scottish football.
‘After the year, we can look at the outcome.’
The logic behind the move stems from the fact that while Scottish youth teams are generally competitive up to Under-17 level, there is a drop-off in achievement thereafter.
By exposing his young players to a higher technical and physical standard earlier, Mulholland hopes Rangers can start to bridge the gap. He continued: ‘It really hit home when we played a match down at Southampton. We drew 0-0 but were way ahead of them.
‘I spoke to my equivalent and he said they expected three or four to (eventually) play in the first team. He asked about our next few league games and then told me they were playing Chelsea and then flying off to play Borussia Dortmund.
‘It struck me that although we had players who are as good as those in other countries, it is what we do with them between 17 and 21 that will make a difference.
‘At Under-17 level, Scotland have qualified for the last three or four European Championships but 37 per cent of the players, who are mainly from Rangers and Celtic, have dropped off. What other sport would let the best young talent drop off like that?
‘We need to be radical. We have to accept we haven’t, as a country, produced players of a level that we want to produce. I think if we take these players out of their comfort zone and challenge them against Man United and Man City, that will be better.
‘The boys will probably struggle against these teams in the first couple of months. Once they get used to it, we expect they will compete with these teams.’
Rangers’ decision to remove themselves from the Scottish league set-up, however temporarily, will inevitably attract criticism from some quarters.
Mulholland believes there is compelling evidence that removing players from the traditional pathway to the first team will yield better results.
‘Arguably, the two most successful clubs at producing players are Spurs and Southampton yet look at the EPL Under-18 and Under-23 leagues,’ he said.
‘I think one of their teams won four games and one had five wins all season. They didn’t care. They would take younger players and challenge them against older players. ‘Look at Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Harry Kane. It works.’ Mulholland acknowledges there remains a win-at-all costs mentality at Rangers. Nevertheless, he believes there are gains to be made by sacrificing results. He said: ‘The challenge for us is that every time our players pull on that blue jersey, they must go and win. That will never change. But we have to take them out of their comfort zone. ‘At Under-20 level, we effectively put in an Under-18 team. I’ve heard people being critical of Rangers finishing sixth in the league. We’re delighted with that. ‘They got a challenge. They struggled in the first half of the season but got much better once they coped with that challenge.’ Although no fixtures or dates have yet been set in stone, Mulholland reports a clutch of clubs receptive to Rangers’ advances. ‘We’ve an agreement with about ten or 12 clubs and, hopefully, we can get more to play us home and away.
We’ve spoken to Spurs, Southampton, Man Utd, City and they’re delighted to take games with us. We were over at Leipzig last year and have spoken to them, also Sporting Lisbon.
‘We’ll firm up the programme of games pretty soon. We will play cross-border games three of the four weeks in the month. Then in the other week we will look to play a League One or League Two side on, say, a Wednesday night.
‘That way the lads will play against men in front of a crowd. We hope that will help further enhance their development.
‘Some of the games will be at Ibrox, some at other stadiums and some at the training ground.’
Rangers’ experiment has echoes of the NextGen Series, a Europe-wide tournament that saw Celtic invited to compete alongside the cream of the continent’s young talent in 2011.
The NextGen project was partly founded by Mark Warburton, who later managed Brentford and Rangers. Warburton departed Ibrox in February but he and assistant David Weir were involved in the genesis of Rangers’ new venture.
Mulholland has been at the heart of the drive to reconstruct a youth set-up ravaged by the club’s financial collapse of 2012 and hopes this latest move will help it bear fruit.
‘We created a technical board at Rangers just before Mark came in,’ said Mulholland. ‘It involved Mark Warburton, myself, David Weir, Stewart Robertson, Andrew Dickson and now Pedro and his team.
‘We’ve been working hard on it. When I took the job two years ago, we were down to 13 youth scouts. We’re now back up to 30.
‘We think this initiative will be a success. If it works, we have to look at Scotland as a whole and how we can build it for every club. We want to make it better for every club in Scotland, not just Rangers.’