One more (rather depressing) thing I would add is this. At risk of making most of FF feel very old, if you take your average footballer in his mid-20s today, you're talking about someone who was born in the mid-1990s.
When he thinks of Rangers, he will have no memory of us winning 9IAR or competing in the CL when most EPL sides weren't. He won't know about when we knocked out Leeds Utd or when we nearly reached the CL final. He's probably too young to remember the sides we had under Advocaat.
He has lived his entire life in the era of Sky pumping billions into the EPL. He has experienced nothing except the financial clout of EPL sides over everyone else, not least Scottish teams.
He may realise that Rangers have a massive support, but if you don't have any emotional attachment to Rangers, this counts for little. All he cares about is money and playing for one of the big EPL sides.
When Souness was attracting English talent, the financial gulf between ourselves and the top English sides was much narrower than it is today. Even when we signed Paul Gascoigne - one of the most talented and most famous footballers of his generation - the man himself confessed, when we were approaching him, that he would "love to play for Glasgow Rangers". And he was being sincere. We signed him from Serie A. He could have instructed his agent to get him a move for more money in the English top flight. But he chose not to. He wanted to come to Scotland to play for Rangers. Such is the regard we were once held in.
But our membership of the Scottish league has been eroding our stature. We are not alone in this of course. The mob from across the city suffer from this too, as do other huge clubs trapped in leagues outside of Europe's big five. Sides like Ajax, PSV and Porto.
What do we do?
