When we discussed recently Michael Beale’s transfer budget this summer, and suggested it was in the same region as previous summers of around £12M, give or take, one response we did get was to ask about the ‘ringfenced cash’.

So here we will discuss this notion and what it means.

So the ringfenced cash boils down to the idea Rangers kept £9M-£10M ringfenced specifically for James Sands and Malik Tillman.

That almost £10M was put aside for the potential signings of both of these loan players, given both had purchase options in their loan contracts and had they impressed, Rangers would have had the cash on standby to sign them in the summer.

Now, there is every reason that this was absolutely true, and therefore some fans are assuming that if we add that cash to the summer budget, we’ve got approaching £22M to spend.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

The money we have this summer, we understand, INCLUDES that ringfenced cash – had we spent it all on both players, we’d be looking at having a couple of million quid budget this summer and that would be that. It would not be the first time Rangers have relied on summers with spending basically no cash at all – absolutely nothing new there.

The idea, we understand, was that money was put aside for those two, but it also doubled up as summer budget, and would only be used if either or both impressed hugely and we felt the fee justified it.

As it has turned out, Sands was sent back to the USA, and Tillman went home to Germany, so the money remained completely intact, but with the lovely bonus that Bayern very graciously compensated us for Tillman and have sent a nice sweetener of around £2M in purely goodwill, which has actually helped our summer budget.

And because the cash ringfenced was around £10M, and that’s a little extra of £2M, PLUS a potential chunk extra as well of internal revenue amounting to about £3M.

So all in all, the budget really is about the same as normal, £10M-£15M.

Spent wisely, we’ll see what it can do for us.