Rangers’ finances in a nutshell, and how we fix them

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Rangers’ finances in a nutshell, and how we fix them
Rangers interim chairman John Gilligan.

We at Ibrox Noise are trying to be avoid panic or alarm, we don’t want to spread fearmongering in any way, given just how poor Rangers are these days and how much malaise is among the club and fans right now, but we also have to report the facts as much as we can.

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And financially, Rangers really aren’t in a good place right now.

Not only are we running on an annual loss at the moment of around £15M, not only are our ‘losses’ in general around £17M, but we need to borrow a further £9M to simply stay afloat.

Meanwhile we are in debt by around £20M to our own directors.

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Overall, in a very, very, very crude sense you could argue Rangers are around £45M in debt.

It is a very, very bleak financial report, and it’s actually in some senses worse than 2012. Now, it isn’t actually; the big issue with 2011/2012 was the £6M Rangers were in debt by, particularly to Lloyds, which was short-term critical debt that simply had to be repaid pronto.

Indeed, Lloyds were able to put a director on Rangers’ board at the time, that’s how much power they had. Murray just didn’t want to pay that, and pawned the club off on Whyte, who also didn’t want to pay (didn’t have the money) to pay that cash, so he stored away player VAT, NI and IT payments, which alerted HMRC and the whole thing blew up.

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But that’s ancient history and it isn’t where Rangers are now.

None of Rangers’ losses or debt are critical – medium term it is not a sustainable business model, and would lead to administration, but for now, short to medium term, Rangers are surviving.

The directors we owe money to are surprisingly accommodating and aren’t pushing for their cash back immediately. The only guy who really wants his money back quite aggressively is Dave King.

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But for now Rangers are safe.

But the money bleed can’t continue, and we can’t rely on loans and director bail-outs forever.

How we turn it around is for better minds than Ibrox Noise to resolve, but Rangers clearly need two massive things:

Champions League participation, and big player sales.

These are the two big revenue sources for a club of our size, and we’ve failed at both for the past 2 years.

This is why we’re financially in the brown stuff, while Celtic are long gone in the distance with a completely healthy balance sheet.

The problem is we’re miles off making the Champions League, and not a single player Rangers have is credited with a market value of more than £5M, and that’s Nico Raskin.

So where any of this big money is coming from we couldn’t tell you…

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