Rangers Chairman Admits Summer Rebuild is Clunky
Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh has admitted the club’s summer rebuild is “clunky”, results are short of the mark and more surgery is on the way before the transfer window shuts.
Nine new faces are already through the door under Derek McInnes, yet Rangers sit with a single point from their opening two Premiership fixtures and trail Jagiellonia Bialystok 2-1 after the first leg of their Europa League third qualifying round tie. It is not the launch anyone at Ibrox had scripted.
“Work to be done” – and more signings to come
Facing shareholders at an open forum in Glasgow, Cavenagh did not attempt to sugar-coat the situation.
“There’s certainly work to be done,” he said, before lifting the lid on what remains of the club’s transfer plans. He resisted nailing down an exact figure, but the scale of the next phase was clear enough.
“I don’t like putting a number on it but certainly I’d hope three to five more players are coming in and a number will possibly go out.”
That is a major churn for a squad already heavily reshaped, and it lands in the middle of a crucial European tie. Rangers must overturn their deficit to Jagiellonia at Ibrox on Thursday to keep their Europa League hopes alive, with either Northern Irish champions Larne or Iberia Tbilisi of Georgia waiting in the play-off round.
The timing, Cavenagh knows, is far from ideal.
“It sucks that we have to play a number of important games before the window closes but that’s how it works,” he said, a blunt reflection of the reality McInnes is working in: building a team while the competitive pressure is already at full tilt.
Changing a culture of “second”
Cavenagh and his board have been in place for roughly a year. From day one, he insists, the target was not just to win, but to keep winning – and to do it on solid financial ground.
“When we came in around a year ago, our ambition was sustained winning and winning sustainably,” he told the audience. “I understand we’re not there yet; I’m more optimistic now than I was a year ago.”
That optimism is not based on early scorelines. One point from six domestically and a deficit in Europe is a jarring start for a club that expects to set the pace. Yet Cavenagh framed these opening weeks as part of a longer, more awkward process: stripping out what he sees as an ingrained acceptance of coming up short.
“We could look at how things have gone in the first three games and sit here and sulk, but we’re not going to do that,” he said.
“When we came in, we realised finishing second and sometimes worse, was seeping into every corner of this club and we had to change that, but it takes time.”
That line goes to the heart of the project. This is not just about adding three to five more players. It is about dragging a club out of a mindset where “second” had become familiar and, in Cavenagh’s eyes, far too comfortable.
For now, Rangers stand at an uneasy crossroads: a squad still under construction, a manager only beginning to impose his ideas, and a fanbase impatient for the kind of “sustained winning” the chairman has promised. The next few weeks, on the pitch and in the market, will show whether this clunky rebuild can harden into something more convincing – or whether the weight of those early setbacks starts to drag it down.
