As is being widely sourced and understood, Rangers simply cannot afford to fire manager Philippe Clement despite rumours this morning that the club is about to do exactly that.

Sadly, due to a stressed-out ex-chairman John Bennett, who stopped Clement resigning some months ago via a wage rise and extra year on his contract, Rangers are unfortunately locked into an expensive prison with the manager, and would have to shell upwards of £5.5M to let him go.

Clement approached Bennett earlier this year saying he was unhappy and was ready to walk away, and the chairman, already stressed via the stadium fiasco, made a very bad judgement call to try to keep Clement and avoid another manager search.

Bribery was more or less the answer here.

And now that’s trapped Rangers into approaching a £6M payoff to fire Clement, who now clearly is on borrowed time.

Rangers’ hope is that Clement does the right thing now and resigns, saving the club a lot of money, but then the Belgian will almost certainly feel like he owes nothing to Rangers and doesn’t have to walk away without a bean. Or maybe he’s a better man than we give him credit for, and will do a PLG.

As things stand, Rangers are completely trapped with Clement, unless someone happens to have a spare £6M in their pocket to give the man – the only other possibility is the notorious mutual consent – a fat payoff to rinse the contract out but without paying the whole thing.

This is how Michael Beale was freed – he told the club he was done without formally handing in a resignation, and the club agreed, and a payoff was mutually sorted out.

But for a pure firing, it will cost Rangers around £6M.

That’s spare cash we really just can’t waste.