Why dont we have any money?

[nublu2u]

8 out of the 10 highest paid OF players are at Rangers.
Davies is paid more than Carter Vickers (27k p/w vs 24k p/w), let that sink in !
Davies is in contract until June 2026.

High earners leaving are Roofe, Barisic and potentially Lundstram (best part of 70k p/w for those 3), Jack, McLaughlin, Balogun account for about 20k p/w.
Obviously we’re bringing in new players, definitely Diomande, but it’s likely our wage bill is going to increase.

There are not many high earners out of contract in 2025, so, as others have alluded to, transfer window will be difficult in trying to balance the books.

Rangers 2023 Wages | Player & Team totals

Rangers's total wage bill per year is £26,010,400 and £500,200 per week | Search the most comprehensive salary and contract database.

salarysport.com

 

[SaulBearenson]

Not limited to us obviously but it’s little wonder we’ve got deadwood quite happy to chill out and pick up a wedge for doing absolutely nothing, the club makes it far too comfortable for these guys.

Are we about to reach the constructive dismissal for everyone we don't like stage of having lost a game?

 

[WilldeBoer]

Football agents must see us as a soft touch handing out these tasty contracts.

 

[onedadoprso.1]

If the mooted weekly wages for the likes of Davies and other non contributors are true then that alone looks like basic financial mismanagement. It got us into bother before and given what we had to endure on the way back I never want to see reckless spending anymore.

 

[kirkiebluenose]

We spent £15 million on absolute shite for a Scottish team that is a serious amount in transfer fees

 

[SimonLeBon]

Are you just saying that or do you know for a fact or are you just getting at the players.

It's in the accounts of both clubs, we pay more in wages than they do. Aye and Iam getting at the players.

 

[GR3RFC]

Are we about to reach the constructive dismissal for everyone we don't like stage of having lost a game?

Of course not, but surely you can’t deny there’s a hell of a lot of money leaving the club for very little if any return in a lot of cases?

Buying smarter is the answer which we will perhaps learn at some point after we sign a few more crocks and mercenaries here for a pension top up. And for what it’s worth I’m not blaming players for signing the deals, why wouldn’t you?

 

[Fr-Bear]

As others have said, paying anything over £20k a week for any player playing in our league is just madness. We seem to have got into a bad habit of habitually paying over the odds wages for even average Scottish players, never mind the stupid amounts we pay players we bring up from England.
It’s really up to the board to be stricter and set limits on our wage structure. And any manager should be told the limits when they take job. And work within those limits.
And we should absolutely Avoid the inflated English market unless it’s for relative promising unknowns such as Bassy and Sterling.
Even in Scotland we should not be bumping up players from a couple of Grand a week at their clubs by 4 or 5 times to come to us. Double maybe at a push triple. But we really need to be smarter in that regard.

It’s maddening that we have more players on big wages than Celtic do and yet they’ve won more leagues than us in the same time our best paid players have been here.

 

[HarryBosch]

Hopefully Koppen is overhauling our recruitment approach, and we start getting the wage bill down, and the value for money up. i.e more time on the pitch than in the treatment room would be a start.

Of course, when Rangers start unveiling new Centre Forwards bought for 600k (someone mentioned Miovski earlier) then this place will be in uproar - without even seeing what they have to offer.

 

[AchtungBaby]

Im always hearing we have no money but it doesnt add up. We have some decent sales in recent years and our best european performances consistently for years. If we have no money now we never will. Imagine a poor year in europe. Where does that leave us. At what point does it change or is it permanent

We play in a tinpot league with pitiful prize money and broadcasting rights that were given away in a raffle. We also pay a lot of money in wages and in running the club. We see the transfer fees being paid a couple of hundred miles to the south and many fans forget that we can't even come close to paying 5 to 10% of those with our income. Fans expect the club to spend more than it can afford at times.

 

[AchtungBaby]

Of course, when Rangers start unveiling new Centre Forwards bought for 600k (someone mentioned Miovski earlier) then this place will be in uproar - without even seeing what they have to offer.

You got to wonder how a club like Aberdeen can find a talent like Miovski but we can't. How bad is our scouting network?

 

[A1bertz]

Because we've been spending millions on players we don't play / dont trust.
Our wage bill is horrendous considering they type of football we get to see regularly.

 

[Valley Bluenose]

There must be £200K of wages producing nothing every week for us when you count up Roofe, Jack, Davies, Dowell, Barrasic, Danilo, etc.
How can the wage bill be £60million , that's equivalent of having 40 players on £30 k a week

We employ more than players though.

 

[chickenhawk]

We employ more than players though.

Yeh but even if you take an average first team player salary of £20K thats 40 odd players for £41 million. Wheres the other 20 million going. I get that the management team Clement etc would be a few million but thats insane level of spending

 

[Valley Bluenose]

Yeh but even if you take an average first team player salary of £20K thats 40 odd players for £41 million. Wheres the other 20 million going. I get that the management team Clement etc would be a few million but thats insane level of spending

I think we employ over 300 permanent staff plus all the part-timers on match day. All the way from those around the First Team and Academy, Womens Team, admin staff, scouts, coachers etc. Its an expensive business and staff are a huge cost.

That's not to say we shouldn't be getting the best value we can for what the outlay is. Not great business having high earners who can't get on the pitch. Poor signings on expensive salaries are the root of the issue here. If we were winning titles nobody would bat an eyelid at our costs.

 

[robbo89]

I've got to be honest I do worry about OP's question "why dont we have any money?" sometimes myself.

There's a lot of chat about our current wage bill and the salaries of players like Davies and Matondo but this issue goes back way further than the last couple of seasons.

This got posted on the Scottish football subreddit a number of months back. It was (typically) posted by a scum fan and they got tore to shreds in the comments but the figures do line up with our annual accounts from the last decade afaik.

It's an issue I genuinely don't understand because I don't have the slightest bit of business accumen. With the amounts of money that we plough into the club as a support I would have thought the club should be highly profitable as a business and I don't really get why it hasn't been.

I do trust our board though and think that the money side of things will turn around when we can start to dominate the football side of things again. It will come - hopefully this season - and it's going to upset a lot of people in Scottish football when Rangers are back on top.

 

[Empire]

We pay around £12m a season on wages for

Goldson
Lundstram
Tavernier
Roofe
Lawrence
Cantwell
Butland

 

[GodStruth]

We pay around £12m a season on wages for

Goldson
Lundstram
Tavernier
Roofe
Lawrence
Cantwell
Butland

At least £7m of that is returning us nothing

 

[Thomas Milton]

Hopefully Koppen is overhauling our recruitment approach, and we start getting the wage bill down, and the value for money up. i.e more time on the pitch than in the treatment room would be a start.

Of course, when Rangers start unveiling new Centre Forwards bought for 600k (someone mentioned Miovski earlier) then this place will be in uproar - without even seeing what they have to offer.

Far too much sense in this post.

Will be 18 months before Koppens work is well in motion - but plenty of deadwood will be off the books by July.

 

[SaulBearenson]

You got to wonder how a club like Aberdeen can find a talent like Miovski but we can't. How bad is our scouting network?

If we were linked with a guy who had scored 27 goals in 102 appearances in Macedonia, do you think there would be much clamour amongst our fans to sign him, or would the usual comments about scrambling around the bargain bin while that lot are spending millions be made?

I'm entirely in favour of signing unknowns for low fees, but I've also seen this board when we haven't spent what fans had in mind, signed players for "free", or didn't get a "marquee" signing. Incidentally, if I were the board I'd be bullish and go for the low fee model. The support would just need to learn to live with it.

 

[joseph]

Im always hearing we have no money but it doesnt add up. We have some decent sales in recent years and our best european performances consistently for years. If we have no money now we never will. Imagine a poor year in europe. Where does that leave us. At what point does it change or is it permanent

Beale spent a big wad of our cash on duds

 

[Phil'ieve]

Im always hearing we have no money but it doesnt add up. We have some decent sales in recent years and our best european performances consistently for years. If we have no money now we never will. Imagine a poor year in europe. Where does that leave us. At what point does it change or is it permanent

No disrespect OP but I honestly don't know how you can not know the answers to that question. Look at the state of the squad and the wages we're paying out. We spend money on players and get very little return. Aye alright we got decent money for patterson and bassey but what we've wasted over the last few years massively over does that. We let contracts run down and remember we were running at a loss and paying off investors from before the European runs. Allot of what we did get in went straight back out to them for keeping us going when we first came back up and before the European runs. Remember we were running well in the red before we started making money in Europe, so when the money came in it went back out to who we owed it to. Bassey and Patterson money will have been mostly blown on shite. Davies matondo Danilo dessers lammers etc add all those fees up. Yilmaz fee was big aswell. Then got nothing for Morelos. And nothing for Kent who we spent 7 million on. Then there was paying off Gio, Beale and their staff. It's been a mess.

We've got so many players on big wages who contribute next to nothing.

 

[club175]

Run by folk who have mismanaged us. From poor manager choices, money spunked on dross and also numerous legal mess ups.

Also I would imagine at least half of our squad have played less than 5 matches this season . Wage’s ridiculous

 

[club175]

Total cost of NEH was around £12m to generate £29k a year profit which pretty much sums up our board.

We’ll be paying the £12m loan it took to build back over the next several years which will eat into our transfer budget going forward.

I like NEH but was it a priority in our position? Even if that money wasn’t spent on players it should have been used to increase capacity which would have brought in a lot more money short term.

100%. For 12m hearts nearly built a full main stand. It could have easily gone toward filing in the corners

 

[AchtungBaby]

If we were linked with a guy who had scored 27 goals in 102 appearances in Macedonia, do you think there would be much clamour amongst our fans to sign him, or would the usual comments about scrambling around the bargain bin while that lot are spending millions be made?

I'm entirely in favour of signing unknowns for low fees, but I've also seen this board when we haven't spent what fans had in mind, signed players for "free", or didn't get a "marquee" signing. Incidentally, if I were the board I'd be bullish and go for the low fee model. The support would just need to learn to live with it.

Many of our fans are batshit crazy though. If Rangers were to base their business model on "what will FF think about this" the club would be bankrupt buy the end of the week.

 

[LucyBlue]

You got to wonder how a club like Aberdeen can find a talent like Miovski but we can't. How bad is our scouting network?

Aberdeen never scouted him. it's not about scouts most of the time these days, it's about agents.

He was offered to Aberdeen by his agent. They took a punt on some video tapes and word of mouth.

His career previous to Aberdeen was middling to poor to be honest, he'd barely scored at a level below the Scottish league. Odds are they simply got lucky.

 

[AchtungBaby]

Aberdeen never scouted him. it's not about scouts most of the time these days, it's about agents.

He was offered to Aberdeen by his agent. They took a punt on some video tapes and word of mouth.

His career previous to Aberdeen was middling to poor to be honest, he'd barely scored at a level below the Scottish league. Odds are they simply got lucky.

Probably but we could have got 10 of him for the price of Dessers and Lammers and the chances are we'd have got one that was better than both of those.

 

[Myogi]

I've got to be honest I do worry about OP's question "why dont we have any money?" sometimes myself.

There's a lot of chat about our current wage bill and the salaries of players like Davies and Matondo but this issue goes back way further than the last couple of seasons.

This got posted on the Scottish football subreddit a number of months back. It was (typically) posted by a scum fan and they got tore to shreds in the comments but the figures do line up with our annual accounts from the last decade afaik.

It's an issue I genuinely don't understand because I don't have the slightest bit of business accumen. With the amounts of money that we plough into the club as a support I would have thought the club should be highly profitable as a business and I don't really get why it hasn't been.

I do trust our board though and think that the money side of things will turn around when we can start to dominate the football side of things again. It will come - hopefully this season - and it's going to upset a lot of people in Scottish football when Rangers are back on top.

I'd say those figures are spot on but there is a lot to factor in, we had to overspend to bring the club back to the required standard.

We probably went the best part of a decade with 0 spent on the stadium infrastructure between 2002 - 2016, we had to catch up all those years in a very short amount of time, for most teams they probably spend about a million a year on maintenance, due to the neglect we had to spend multiple millions over the past 7 or 8 years just to get to the point where we can spend a million or so to maintain it.

For all intents are purposes our only real source of revenue between 2012 to 2019 was season ticket sales, its one of the reasons we lost more during covid than other clubs, as we effectively had no back up revenue due to the spivs signing themselves cozy deals at our expense.

Recently however is looking a lot more positive, we now are finally rid of Ashley meaning we can truly profit from merchandising, I'm not Castores biggest fans but if we can get a massive upgrade on revenue from them when the time comes i'll be happy enough. Hospitality is starting to bring in revenues it did historically due to the cozy deals finally ending.

Add in we have finally started to perform in Europe as a club of our standing and expenditure should which again brings in much needed revenue.

I won't say everything is perfect, our board have a habit of fighting battles they can't win (sports direct) which has lost the club a lot of money and the player trading model needs truly overhauled if we are going to rely on it going forward but i have no reason to doubt our revenues wont increase over the next 5 years even if at a more gradual pace than before.

I just hope the board realise that a successful Rangers is a prosperous and wealthy Rangers, people can criticise the armchair fans and glory hunters ect. but the reality is we need them buying kits and watching games to maximize our potential as a club.

As far as i am concerned there is nothing that lot across the city are doing that our club cannot do, they have a running start but outwith them having a bigger stadium which really should only amount to a few million at most extra a season there is no reason we shouldn't be within a few million of their revenue at most each season once we have our act truly together.

 

[robbo89]

I'd say those figures are spot on but there is a lot to factor in, we had to overspend to bring the club back to the required standard.

We probably went the best part of a decade with 0 spent on the stadium infrastructure between 2002 - 2016, we had to catch up all those years in a very short amount of time, for most teams they probably spend about a million a year on maintenance, due to the neglect we had to spend multiple millions over the past 7 or 8 years just to get to the point where we can spend a million or so to maintain it.

For all intents are purposes our only real source of revenue between 2012 to 2019 was season ticket sales, its one of the reasons we lost more during covid than other clubs, as we effectively had no back up revenue due to the spivs signing themselves cozy deals at our expense.

Recently however is looking a lot more positive, we now are finally rid of Ashley meaning we can truly profit from merchandising, I'm not Castores biggest fans but if we can get a massive upgrade on revenue from them when the time comes i'll be happy enough. Hospitality is starting to bring in revenues it did historically due to the cozy deals finally ending.

Add in we have finally started to perform in Europe as a club of our standing and expenditure should which again brings in much needed revenue.

I won't say everything is perfect, our board have a habit of fighting battles they can't win (sports direct) which has lost the club a lot of money and the player trading model needs truly overhauled if we are going to rely on it going forward but i have no reason to doubt our revenues wont increase over the next 5 years even if at a more gradual pace than before.

I just hope the board realise that a successful Rangers is a prosperous and wealthy Rangers, people can criticise the armchair fans and glory hunters ect. but the reality is we need them buying kits and watching games to maximize our potential as a club.

As far as i am concerned there is nothing that lot across the city are doing that our club cannot do, they have a running start but outwith them having a bigger stadium which really should only amount to a few million at most extra a season there is no reason we shouldn't be within a few million of their revenue at most each season once we have our act truly together.

Glad to see your positive take because it's hard to not feel gloomy about some of the financial stuff. I agree that our board has done brilliant on a number of fronts - getting rid of the spivs, sorting out our stadium infrastructure, setting a new path with merchandising with Castore etc.

Do you think all of that will mean that 2024 will be the year we see Rangers profitable again? That's a question for you or anyone who has more of a handle on the financial stuff than I do. I was bewildered the last couple years when the accounts came out and it's been more losses - even after the CL income, Bassey and Patterson money. It would be a relief to see Rangers as a business in the black again.

As you say, if the scum across the city can do it, there is absolutely no reason we can't. I always thought that if we can just start to dominate the football side of things again we'll get control of the golden faucet that is the CL income and we can reverse our fortunes and force them into the mud. But the last couple years of losses have put some doubt in my mind about whether it's as simple as that.

 

[Valley Bluenose]

Glad to see your positive take because it's hard to not feel gloomy about some of the financial stuff. I agree that our board has done brilliant on a number of fronts - getting rid of the spivs, sorting out our stadium infrastructure, setting a new path with merchandising with Castore etc.

Do you think all of that will mean that 2024 will be the year we see Rangers profitable again? That's a question for you or anyone who has more of a handle on the financial stuff than I do. I was bewildered the last couple years when the accounts came out and it's been more losses - even after the CL income, Bassey and Patterson money. It would be a relief to see Rangers as a business in the black again.

As you say, if the scum across the city can do it, there is absolutely no reason we can't. I always thought that if we can just start to dominate the football side of things again we'll get control of the golden faucet that is the CL income and we can reverse our fortunes and force them into the mud. But the last couple years of losses have put some doubt in my mind about whether it's as simple as that.

If I'm reading it correctly, we are still paying the price for sorting out the mess with the Fat C*nt after losing our case. As at the last accounts we still owed some £5m to him in resolution of the case plus the legal costs. That appears to be down from about £9.5m over the last 2 or 3 years. Page 59 in Annual Report.