A Normal Club: Rangers and the January Transfer Window

A Spanner in the Works

On 6 January, the Scottish Sun declared that Jamie Murphy’s move to Rangers from Brighton & Hove Albion was hanging in the balance. A “spanner was thrown into the works at the eleventh hour”, derailing a deal that had been presented as all but complete. The previous day, the same paper suggested Brighton would receive £1m up front. The eventual reality was a loan deal, with an option for Rangers to buy at the end of the season. Brighton, it was said, “preferred to wait”.

This peculiar episode was a microcosm of a transfer window defined by conflicting reports, dubious finances, and a compliant media. Rangers’ managing director Stewart Robertson spoke of a desire for “normalising the club”. Yet the club’s actions throughout January suggested a reality far from normal, one dictated by financial pressures outlined in their own annual accounts.

Those accounts, published for the year to June 2017, stated a need for £7.2m in additional funding to meet liabilities through to July 2019. Chairman Dave King’s company, New Oasis Asset Limited, was supposed to provide a “first tranche” of this funding last November. But reports emerged that the money, stated to be £2.9m, never arrived, leaving Rangers with a “shortage of operating cash”. This context makes the public pursuit of players like Murphy, valued at over £1m, difficult to comprehend.

The club needed to balance “transfer payables” with “transfer receivables”. Getting high earners off the wage bill was the obvious path. The departure of Carlos Pena on a year-long loan to Mexican club Cruz Azul was presented as a major success. Rangers fan-facing journalists Scott McDermott and Gary Ralston reported in the Daily Record that Cruz Azul had “agreed to pay” Pena’s wage “in full”. Yet Cruz Azul’s sporting director, Eduardo de la Torre, told Mexican media the official figures were “far from the ones you have heard”. Earlier reports suggested Rangers would still be paying half of his reported £26,000-per-week salary.

Nowhere Near Acceptable

While struggling to offload highly-paid flops like Bruno Alves and Niko Kranjcar, Rangers’ director of football Mark Allen pursued several Scottish-based players. Bids were made for Kilmarnock’s Jordan Jones and Hamilton’s Greg Docherty. Both were met with derision.

Kilmarnock manager Steve Clarke called the offer for Jones “nowhere near acceptable”, adding he would be “a little bit sad if I was the player that the bid was so low.” Les Gray, the Hamilton vice-chairman, said of the £300,000 bid for Docherty that there was “nothing on the table worth considering.”

Kilmarnock striker and former Rangers player Kris Boyd identified “a common theme” with “one club unsettling everybody.” He stated his club would not “be bullied anymore.” While low initial offers are standard negotiating practice, the pattern of bids that were so far below the selling clubs’ valuations suggested a strategy of unsettling players without the funds to complete a deal.

Docherty did eventually sign, though reports claimed the deal involved no upfront fee from Rangers.

The Word from China

The window’s most bizarre episode involved striker Alfredo Morelos. Signed for £1m last summer, the Colombian was suddenly the subject of multi-million-pound interest from China just as the window was closing.

On 30 January, an unnamed Chinese Super League club was said to have offered €6.5m. The Daily Record reported that Dave King had rejected the offer as it would leave only Jason Cummings to lead the attack. Guangzhou Evergrande were named as the interested party, despite their foreign player quota already being full, a basic fact seemingly beyond the reach of the Scottish press.

The story then shifted. The bidder was now newly-promoted Beijing Renhe, offering a “staggering £8m”. Rangers were “swithering” before rejecting this too, citing a lack of time to find a replacement. Graeme Murty, the manager, sounded less than certain: “Our position won’t change, as far as I can tell.”

This narrative was punctured, briefly, by BBC Scotland’s Kheredine Idessane. On 1 February, he tweeted that a source close to Beijing Renhe denied any bid, citing a full player quota and a prohibitive levy on foreign signings. Hours later, Idessane issued a remarkable retraction. He apologised to Rangers, stating he had since “SEEN the bids from Beijing Renhe” and that his previous information was incorrect. The daily tweeter has not posted since.

For a club whose accounts confirm a pressing need for cash, rejecting a fee of £7m or £8m for a player they bought for £1m just months earlier seems like financial insanity. It is a decision that makes little sense, unless the bids themselves were less than concrete. The episode bears a striking resemblance to the £6m RB Leipzig were said to have offered for Barrie McKay last January; Nottingham Forest signed him in July for £500,000.

A Vote of Confidence

As February began, Rangers announced they had “secured an overdraft facility” with Close Leasing, a subsidiary of merchant bankers Close Brothers. Stewart Robertson hailed it as a “real vote of confidence” and part of “normalising the club”. Chris Jack of the Herald Group wrote that the “dark clouds that once hung over the club have dissipated.”

The details suggest something other than a normal banking facility. The legal document, a “Certificate of the Registration of a Charge”, shows a loan secured against club assets including Edmiston House and the Albion Car Park. It is repayable “on demand” and the terms protect the lender from “any insolvency, bankruptcy, liquidation, administration, winding-up”.

This arrangement is not new. In October 2011, the same lender, Close Leasing, was given security over the assets of the old Rangers Football Club PLC. That deal staved off collapse for a time, but the club entered administration months later. None of this history featured in the glowing reports of the new facility.

With the Chinese transfer window still open, reports this week claim Beijing Renhe have now returned with offers of £9m and then £11m for Morelos. If Rangers need money so desperately that they are securing loans against their own car park, why would they refuse such a sum?