How Rangers lost £2.5M

Departing Bruno Alves’ wages have been a subject of some debate, with the summer 2017 marquee signing ditching the sunny climes of Serie A for the dismal rain of Govan.

It took some persuading to make the European champion willing to sacrifice a plum gig in Italy for the ill-fated Hispanic revolution (read- ‘shambles’) at Ibrox and that certainly wasn’t possible by simply having a Portuguese manager (who no one even knew) in charge.

No, the real clincher for Alves was money, and a wage reported to be around £25,000.

Don’t get us wrong, you don’t get top players for less these days, unless they have personal investment in Rangers or have suffered a loss of stock in the game, so we are not going to slur the ex-Zenit man for being paid what he probably reckoned he was worth, but if we tot it all up, Rangers wasted at least £1.3M in wages on Alves over the course of 12 months.

We shudder to imagine what we wasted and may continue to lose on Carlos Pena.

But there is no denying deep mistakes were made last summer, and this club is having  to financially recover from them.

Effectively £11M wasted in transfer fees (Morelos and Candeias aside) plus the added wages and it adds up to many millions.

Alves has been training with the Tardini crew in Italy (albeit that move is now in jeopardy), in advance of the transfer being verified, but we cannot help but wonder if the £1M for his services, and near £1.5M (£2.5M effectively down the drain) for his salary could not have been better used spent elsewhere.

Regardless of the board’s errors last summer (and Stewart Robertson was a monumental culprit here) the funds have had to be dished out again to support Steven Gerrard, and we carry a little sympathy for the suits who saw possibly around £20M completely wasted in that window and over the course of the year, but have to keep it coming to finance and support Stevie Ger.

And Bruno Alves, decent guy though he is, was a symbol of that wasteful spending.

Let’s hope this window has been wiser.