Ibrox Noise has avoided the infamous £810,000 topic in any kind of depth, with it being confirmed the club accrued less than a £1M this summer for all five sold players.
Todd Cantwell, Connor Goldson, Sam Lammers, Robby McCrorie and Scott Wright all went for the combined amount of £810,000, which absolutely ‘scunnered’ Rangers fans on learning of it.
Chief Financial Officer James Taylor did confirm this figure at the AGM, which led to gasps from the arena, that asset players worth a combined £10M (with something to spare) were in fact sold for less than a tenth of that.
Why did this happen?
How did it occur that players with market values like Sam Lammers (£5M) and Todd Cantwell (£8M) were sold for what were six-figure sums?
The biggest explanation is cost-cutting. Rangers were far more desperate to get their combined wages (£100,000pw) off the bill than anything else, and were willing to lose out on millions in order to cut that cloth.
A lot of this lies in the wages they were originally given – Goldson with his absurd £40,000pw in 2022 was a colossal misjudgement from former Sporting Director Ross Wilson, while the likes of Cantwell and Lammers were living off the fat of the land at £22,000pw each.
By the summer, Rangers were far keener to just thin the herd and reduce the wage bill than actually make hard money off these players.
And the reason making that hard money off them was so difficult was those wages.
We all saw how hard it was to get shot of Sam Lammers – Twente wanted him, Utrecht wanted him, but the only way they’d take him was at 50% of his wage max, and for a long time he was unwilling to lose that salary.
In the end Rangers may have actually paid Lammers off a bit in order to get his salary off the bill, and Twente got themselves a £5M striker more or less for free.
Rangers made sweet FA from their sales because they weren’t selling, they were cutting cloth.
And that’s years of dire work in the transfer market coming back to haunt us.
How much of this is on the board? They’re not innocent, but buyers knew Rangers’ position wasn’t strong, and had bigger bargaining chips at their end.
The club does now claim to be self-sustaining from all this – the issue there is the only way they’ll prove that is the next accounts.
We’ll have our resident accountant pore over those numbers when they’re released.
Goodness, what a pickle.