When chairman Dave King confirmed
Scottish football’s worst-kept secret that eleven players out of contract had
been released, the first reaction from fans unaware of the reality till then
was pure relief.
As broken on here a week ago (and
greeted by some readers with a level of scepticism of its truth) Lee McCulloch,
Richard Foster, Sebastien Faure, Steven Smith, Steve Simonsen, Kris Boyd, Kyle
Hutton, Ian Black, Jon Daly, Bilel Mohsni and Lee Robinson have all been
released much to the absolute joy of most fans, many of whom would already have
been armed with the knowledge if they were regulars on this site; but official
verification was slow to arrive.
Yesterday it finally did, but
curiously beyond the pleasure at seeing a glut of absolute dross leave Ibrox,
is the rather wonderful news (less reported) that the exodus has freed up
approximately £400,000 of monthly wages.
Rangers’ stale squad members cost
the Club an overhead of nearly £5,000,000 a year, and it would have to be said
the return for such an outlay was minimal, borderline non-existent.
With the Club still not in the
black, even if it is debt-free, such a massive saving will be a gigantic boost
to the coffers and surely new signings from a new manager will be much more
sensibly financed with a much bigger emphasis on value for money.
Quite frankly Ian Black, Lee
McCulloch, and Richard Foster, to name only three, have been a horrible waste
of money – those three set the Club back around £130,000 a month alone, and are
the ultimate representation of how far back the McCoist era set the Club, and
how much ground the new manager and regime have to make up.
But freeing these guys clinically
without sentiment is the first step to moving the Club forward, and this site
congratulates the board on not bowing to ‘loyalty’.