This feels like start of the long goodbye for Gerrard
DRENCHED in champagne and high on life as the big dog of Scottish football, Steven Gerrard marked the final day of last season by gushing over his ‘really interesting’ meetings with the directors of freshly crowned champions Rangers.
Drowning in mediocrity ever since, and now giving off the testy vibe of a chow chow with tapeworm, it is comforting to know at least some things around Ibrox haven’t changed entirely in the space of four months for the manager.
His next sitdown with the boardroom powerhouses last seen celebrating the glory of ‘55’ by proving unable to run a home-made flag up a pole properly — the biggest anti-climax since Weekend At Bernie’s 2 — should be interesting all right. More than interesting. Particularly now that Gerrard has trained the spotlight on them in the wake of another Europa League defeat by raising the thorny old business of nothing being spent on transfer fees for two windows.
This Rangers board spend so much time firing off the blunderbuss at the outside world that they maybe haven’t quite been paying enough attention to the cracks now
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beginning to show within. And given their record of dealing with people who say things they don’t like, who can say how they will react to Gerrard’s hottest-of-hot takes? Iron it out privately? Demand public contrition? Charge him 25 grand to get into his own press conferences?
Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear. This feels awfully like the start of the long goodbye. The groundwork being laid for what is unofficially known as ‘doing a Brodge’.
It is the inevitable moment when the ambitions and expectations of a manager attuned to top-level competition prove incompatible with the restrictions and realities of working in Scotland at a club realising it needs to pull its horns in no matter how bullish it wants to appear to passing traffic. And it has been coming for a while.
Gerrard’s comments about the lack of investment in his squad have drawn predictable comparisons with his old Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers’ decision to start flinging mud at the board at Celtic just ahead of bowing out of the Champions League qualifiers to AEK Athens in 2018. Rodgers lost patience after missing out on a number of targets, including Hibs’ John McGinn. It opened up wounds that would never heal ahead of him bailing out to Leicester months later.
Yet, what is often forgotten is that Rodgers made a lot of dreadful signings. The business ended up running a £60million wage bill. By the time of that outburst on the eve of the most financially important games of the season, he came across as a man preoccupied with protecting his own reputation.
There may well a bit of that with Gerrard, too. Failing in Europe after previously doing well there with Rangers probably needs explained away to any suitors.
Getting an automatic spot in the Champions League groups next season and taking a few hammerings wouldn’t help either, so you can see why there is an argument that it makes sense for him to get this underperforming team across the line in the Premiership and bow out on a high in summer.
Certainly, a lot of his stuff on Friday about how big money has to be spent to even compete with the teams Rangers are facing in Europe right now doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The club was running an overall wage bill of £43.3m in last year’s accounts and it can be assumed that Malmo, who bounced them out of the Champions League, and Sparta Prague, who saw them off on Thursday, are not.
Gerrard has to take his share of the blame for where Rangers find themselves and is giving off the air of a guy starting to think about an exit strategy.
He is no longer talking about the backing he has received from the board. Far from it. However, in weighing up exactly what has brought things to this point, it is worth revisiting those remarks he made about his future vision in the aftermath of the 4-0 Ibrox rout of Aberdeen that closed last term.
‘I’ve had some really interesting meetings with the board and they’re with me, they’ll back me and we’ll go again and try and build on this success,’ he stated, excitedly. ‘This is a club where you can’t stand still. This has to be the launchpad.’
Vice-chairman John Bennett — in a podcast done with some guys from a pub, naturally — was clear on bringing in ‘quality over quantity’, too.
So what happened? John Lundstram, Nnamdi Ofoborh, Fashion Sakala and Juninho Bacuna arrived. Three free transfers and a geezer from Huddersfield.
It seems scant return for a fanbase that has paid through the nose for season tickets, shares, trophy tours, Bitcoin, Edmiston House and 424 different forms of strips, training wear, leisuregear and ‘anthem jackets’ — and presumably why Gerrard has looked weary and rather irritable instead of the bloke found sliding around the dressing-room floor on his belly not so long ago.
Whatever the existing salary levels, he performed the minor miracle of stopping Celtic from winning ten in a row and surely feels he deserved the reward of a meaningful budget with which to push forward.
Missing out on the Champions League is a disaster for a club which, going by Dave King’s last words on the subject, has a £5m loan to repay to its former chairman this month.
However, Rangers’ abject failure to bring in revenue from player sales — to move towards the business model they have detailed — is just as concerning. As is their overall management of key assets. They turned down a staggered £16m offer from Lille for Alfredo Morelos, for example, and will be lucky to get half that now.
There is so much around the club that rings alarms. That makes them feel unnecessarily smalltime. Issues with broadcasters, issues with the SPFL and its sponsor, issues with other clubs over locking out supporters, a sense that their own fans are being milked mercilessly.
And then there are the dark predictions about what this year’s accounts will bring. Last year’s reported a £15.9m loss and guesstimates suggest something similarly sobering.
As Gerrard sits on the podium inside the Ibrox press room and talks to the two men and a dog who now listen to him after domestic matches — thanks to an unusual policy of charging for access — do you really think he feels that this all screams: ‘Big club!’?
Rodgers came to the end of the road in Scotland at an outfit that still had plenty of cash in the bank. Gerrard is at one depending on loans to keep the lights on.
He insists his side will rediscover their spark soon, but it doesn’t look sure that he will. Rangers are standing still. And he says that can’t happen. So something’s got to give.