Ibrox Noise has been quite vivid about our opposition historically to a ‘Director of Football’, but as long as Philippe Clement approved such an appointment we naturally kowtowed to that.

As has been seen though, Rangers more or less abandoned the idea, and downgraded the role to Director of Football Recruitment, which means that instead of that position being the head of all football parts of Rangers as a club and company, the chap in question would only deal with exactly what his job says: football recruitment.

This is very specific, and indeed, Nils Koppen, the current incumbent of the new role at Ibrox, has admitted already that his job is to improve Rangers’ trading model.

Now, what is the trading model?

In layman’s terms, it’s bringing in cheap players and young talent and selling for a good profit while improving Rangers’ first team in the long run.

That’s basically it.

Classic examples of success here are Joe Aribo, Calvin Bassey and Nathan Patterson – those were the trading model working.

Ryan Kent and Alfredo Morelos were fails, Glen Kamara was a decent success.

But the telling part of this particular recruitment is it actually isn’t strictly endorsed by Clement at all.

He has been quite vocal in admitting he doesn’t really have a clue who Koppen is, and only met him for the first time during the hiring process. Indeed, Rangers’ boss had to get background on him from old contacts at PSV and Brugge to get the SP on what Koppen is all about.

So this is not an experienced guy Clement knows well and trusts – this is a newbie he doesn’t know or strictly trust, and has had to get others in Belgian football to vouch for him.

He said:

“I had been talking with all the candidates together with the members of the board. The first time I talked with Nils we said it was a pity that we missed each other in Genk. We were there six months when I was working with the first team and he was working in the academy. He left after six months and went to PSV and that year we won the championship and he missed the big party! So I didn’t know him before we first talked but of course I took some information from people who worked with him in PSV and Genk. Everybody was really positive.”

As for what Koppen’s role is, as we say, it’s not Director of Football. It’s the all-new position of Director of Football Recruitment. Does this mean Rangers will get better players in the first team? That’s the end goal, yes, but this chap doesn’t just mean we can now avoid Dessers and Lammers-type signings, or that we will always get Basseys and Pattersons.

It just means we have someone who will try to improve our trading model, and hopefully helps to see a bit of an improvement in the transfer windows over time.

Quite what a PSV scout-now-Rangers head of scouting/recruitment can actually do to get us value in the immediate transfer windows we’re not sure, we don’t even know if that’s part of his role.

But we guess we watch and wait.