Robbo tells us we’re all wrong about Rangers’ Champions League fortune

Stewart Robertson has this morning come out fighting over claims Rangers pocketed £40M by saying it’s effectively false.

The Managing Director decided to tell the publication he was seemingly speaking to, The Glasgow Times, that they were themselves liars, by alleging Rangers will only get £20M from the group stage, in yet another case of the boss taking known facts and changing them to suit the board’s interests.

Indeed, the Rangers Review, which is the Times’ Rangers-only magazine, itself explained how it’s £40M some weeks ago, and while Ibrox Noise believed it to be £60M, thanks to a change in how TV money is calculated, we learned that £40M is correct.

But Robbo wants to tell us all it’s sub-£20M.

He claims it’s £13M for the group stage, £1M TV money, and £2M coefficient. And that’s it.

In short, he claims the £40M figure is baseless.

He’s right about the group stage, but that’s the only thing he’s right about.

TV money, as we explained in an earlier entry, is more than £1M because of how our share is among the English clubs, meaning we get a piece of the biggest UCL TV market in the whole competition due to BT’s massive £1.5B deal with UEFA. It’s more like £4M Rangers get, same as Celtic.

The coefficient has people confused. Is it based on current rankings or last 10 years – Celtic fans like to tell Rangers fans it’s last 10 years, and so does Robbo. But we’ve looked into this and found nothing definitive to confirm that. He’s right that we’re around 30th ranking in Europe, but we’re not entirely convinced that only earns £2M.

But the huge omission is the gate receipts – nothing more shows the disdain our board holds the fans than the complete unimportance of our contribution to the club’s Champions League plunder. Each match earns around £3M in ticket sales, multiply that by 3 and you’ve got almost £10M.

There’s also the massively increased exposure, and the hard-to-measure increase in sales of merch and club services, so we won’t put a figure on it but it definitely adds to the UCL numbers.

So, and it’s an estimate:

£13M group, £4M TV, £4M coefficient, £10M gate:

If we’re being conservative it’s around £30M.

But it’s likely to be more than that. But what would we know?