Rangers’ Chief Financial Officer James Taylor has confirmed Rangers are ‘sort of’ £10M in the red, ish, and that has to be cleared up ASAP before player trading can normalise.

Effectively, Rangers’ money boss confirmed at the AGM that shareholders and fans were to pay attention to the £10.5M trading loss on players, and that this basically meant that there was no ‘real’ money available.

Ibrox Noise has discussed the roof of £3M that we had in January, but in reality it was zero because we really refused to touch that cash, as history shows us.

But the overall trading loss is an issue, and requires the club to normalise that before big money can start being spent.

Essentially, Michael Beale spent more than Rangers had – it’s been confirmed now that Beale spent £20M in the summer and £4M last January, meaning Rangers actually dumped nearly £25M on players.

There is of course the Calvin Bassey and Joe Aribo not to mention Nathan Patterson, Fashion Sakala and Glen Kamara revenue coming in still, but overall, there’s a massive deficit in trading because of Beale.

Normally, in a year, Rangers would spend around £15M tops. Roundly £3M-£5M in winter at most, and about £9M-£13M in the summer.

Beale went WAY over that.

And now we have to find a way to normalise it:

“There are a number of different facets around how we make that go away. I think you will see across various different football clubs that that is a challenging target, to be clear, but I think it is one that we should set ourselves and that we believe as an exec and a board that we can deliver against. It will likely take the first half of the strategic cycle to really deliver on that and deliver on that consistently but we do thing that we are on the right path. The changes that we have made in the first four or five months, we are seeing the outcomes of those. But it will take a little bit of time to make sure that we have that sustainable number moving forward and making that £10million go away.”

This number isn’t debt, but it’s a loss on turnover. We aren’t supposed to be losing cash on player trading, but of course, we are. We’ve spent more than we’ve earned in recent times, and that’s basically why summer 2021 saw nothing spent and why January this year was the same.

Past Managing Director Stewart Robertson was pretty clear that player trading was a big part of Rangers’ revenue, and alluded to a system being put in place – evidently it didn’t work, or Mr Beale upended the whole thing.

But fundamentally, that errant £10.5M needs cut out before the summer or Philippe Clement will be dealing with a fair chunk of Bosmans and loans again.