Rangers chairman John Bennett made what now appears to be a prophetic announcement at the AGM that Rangers were down £10.5M on player trading, and the following is exactly what he said when asked for a follow up:

“I very deliberately called out a number at the AGM and it’s not an overstatement to say that upon becoming chairman, my number one mission off the pitch was to rid the club of pre-player trading loses. I called that out at the AGM. That number to June 2023 was £10.5million. It’s unsustainable and we should talk about sustainability, financial fair play etc.

“That right there, is wholly unsustainable and I said that has to go away. Well, you can’t just will things to do away. It takes action. If I look at that number, that is well on the way to being eradicated. That’s taken a lot of work from a lot of people and I have driven that hard and it’s been hard on some people, for example to drive that through and execute it.

“But execute it we must. I’m not having a club – I’ll come to the ‘famed’ player trading model, we need to address that – but first, this club should not be losing £10.5m pre-player trading in a year. My goodness me. When I became chairman, it’s not an overstatement to say this required cultural change. Football clubs are brilliant at wasting resources. Really, really good at it. I talked to loads of people around the UK and Europe. We were good at that as well and that’s changing big style, and fast, because it had to change fast.

“That’s cultural change that has required people change. We’re not done in terms of that cultural change, there’s more to come. Eradicate that £10.5m, that is not a sustainable business model if you’re sitting there with that kind of number. And that’s before you come on to player trading, which we should come on to.”

There’s a lot in here, we’re not going to bore you with details in-depth, but what we will say is this explains why Rangers have nothing more to spend this summer.

Those figures, £10.5m, were up till June 2023, and all sales and purchases since then have (obviously) affected it. £20M spent on Michael Beale’s players last summer, £12M made on sales. The gap was £10.5M. It had increased there to ~£18M.

The money accrued through player sales this summer (£250,000 for McCrorie, £4.5M for Lammers, £2.5M for Goldson) has completely failed to reduce the trading gap enough – £11.5M gap.

But the money spent thus far (~£11M) was the limited cash we were able to use, and it has meant that unfortunately the ~£18M player trading loss, in theory, is very much still there and is now about £22M.

So financially, farcically, Rangers are weaker now than when John Bennett announced how much he wanted to resolve the player trading model last year.

Rather than closing the gap, it’s unfortunately widened because we’re simply not selling enough players.

Rangers have failed painfully to sort the trading model, and have actually made it worse.

The Ibrox shambles has clearly hurt this massively, as has failure to win 56 last season.