Neil Murray reckons a new priority should be in place ahead of finding Michael Beale’s successor.
Without one, Philippe Clement has never worked. Kevin Muscat received his coaching training from a person who later proved at Celtic that he didn’t require it. Neil Murray, a former Rangers star, can’t believe his old team still doesn’t have one.
Rangers have had a mixed history with football directors over the years. Murray, a former chief scout and head of recruitment at Ibrox as well as a four-time league champion under Walter Smith, worries that if his former team moves forward with plans to replace Michael Beale before finding someone to take over Ross Wilson’s responsibilities, they risk putting the cart before the horse.
It has been six months since the Ibrox board gave sporting director Wilson a pass from the escalating fan rage that was directed at him as another title chase fell through for the Light Blues due to a botched recruitment effort. The choice left Michael Beale in charge of the club’s finances, but without anyone above him to monitor his spending, it turned out to be another fatal error for the club and the Londoner.
Less than ten weeks into the new campaign, Rangers are searching for their third manager in as many years, with Celtic once again in the lead. Murray, though, believes that they should have started looking for Beale’s replacement on the bottom floor once they had first installed someone upstairs.
“I’ve got to be honest, I’m amazed that Ross Wilson wasn’t replaced,” the 50-year-old hero of Gers’ nine-in-a-row period, who now divides his time between working as an agent and for a sports data analysis firm, told Record Sport. It seems odd to me.
Giving a manager complete control over player acquisition and the keys to the kingdom is frequently a high-risk move. The club is now two months into the season and expecting a new manager to come in and work with players he might not particularly want. In Michael Beale’s case, it hasn’t paid off.
“I know it may happen in a system where there is a director of football, but at least in that way, the decision to sign the players was made by the organization rather than by a particular manager. Rangers will be able to learn whether the incoming manager wants to collaborate with a director of football through this interview process.
On this week’s episode of the Record Rangers Podcast, Belgian journalist Ludo Vandewalle cautioned that if the Ibrox board decides to trust former Genk, Club Brugge, and Monaco coach Clement, they will be putting their trust in a man who has never had to worry too much about recruitment because he always had someone else to do the hard work when it comes to spotting new faces.
Ange Postecoglou didn’t worry about not having someone perched over him at Celtic Park, though, making use of his knowledge of the Japanese game to bring over the best the J-League had to offer as he transformed a dysfunctional Hoops outfit in the space of one window.
But Murray reckons Rangers will be getting lucky if they could find a manager who could match the new Spurs boss’s signing strike rate. He said: “I’ve read that Rangers are going down a more data-driven model with their scouting to become more in line with a modern-day approach.
“But a part of that modern-day approach is a sporting director as every club has got one. OK, people will point to Celtic and say they don’t have one. But you could say Ange Postecolou was a director of football in his own right given the knowledge he had of the Japanese market.
“That worked for Celtic but if you’re copying blueprints for modern-day football structures then the vast majority have a sporting director. Rangers are a big club with big departments and in terms of a football figurehead, it’s a role that’s important.
“And it’s important for the board too because a sporting director acts as a buffer between them and the coaching staff. It takes away a lot of the pressure from the board and puts it on the director of football.”
With the position currently vacant at Ibrox, that strain to find a capable replacement now rests on the shoulders of chairman John Bennett and chief exec James Bisgrove after holding final interviews with leading contenders Clement and Muscat this week.
Murray continued, “I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both candidates. Philippe Clement has won league championships in Belgium and played for a prestigious club in Brugge where winning every game is expected of you.
Then he started working in France. Since Monaco is a top-tier club and Ligue 1 is a top-tier league, he has worked in an elite setting and achieved some measure of success by guiding them to third place.
“If you look at Muscat, he has been there before and is familiar with the stature of the club as well as the standards, demands, and level of Scottish football. You also have the story that he travelled from Australia to Japan and, possibly now, Scotland, following Postecoglou’s path.
“But I just think you need to be careful to scratch below the surface and not just assume that he’ll have the same success as Ange, just because he’s followed a similar trajectory.
“That’s what the Rangers board will have to be digging deep into right now. On the surface, he’s a worthy candidate, no doubt about that.
However, just because he is regarded as Ange’s disciple does not guarantee that he will achieve the same level of success as Postecoglou in Scotland. He will inherit a team that is quite different from the one Ange had at Celtic. The new man joining Rangers may find things difficult.
