Rangers Chairman Andrew Cavenagh on Club's Summer Rebuild
Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh has admitted the club’s summer rebuild remains a work in progress and warned that more change is coming before the transfer window shuts.
Nine players have already arrived under new manager Derek McInnes, yet Rangers have stumbled out of the blocks. One point from their opening two Scottish Premiership fixtures and a 2-1 deficit to Jagiellonia Bialystok in their Europa League third qualifying round tie have sharpened the mood around Ibrox.
In front of shareholders at an open forum in Glasgow, Cavenagh did not attempt to dress it up.
He described the club’s transfer business to date as “clunky” and accepted that results are “not where he would like them to be”. The response, he insisted, will be to keep pushing.
“There’s certainly work to be done,” he said. “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.”
So the churn will continue. A squad already reshaped once this summer is about to be cut and stretched again, with McInnes trying to build a side on the fly while meaningful games come thick and fast.
Those games could define the early narrative of his reign. Rangers host Jagiellonia in Thursday’s second leg, needing to overturn that first-leg deficit to keep their European ambitions alive. Waiting in the play-off round, should they progress, are either Northern Irish champions Larne or Georgian side Iberia Tbilisi.
“It sucks that we have to play a number of important games before the window closes but that’s how it works,” Cavenagh said, acknowledging the awkward overlap between recruitment and results.
This regime has been in place for roughly a year. The chairman was clear about the scale of the cultural reset he believes is still required.
“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.”
The early-season evidence has not matched that optimism, but Cavenagh pushed back against any sense of fatalism creeping into the stands or the dressing room.
“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.
His most pointed remark cut to what he sees as the root of the problem.
“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.”
Time, though, is not something Rangers are often granted in generous supply. A restless support, a demanding fixture list and a manager still bedding in his ideas now collide with a frantic final stretch of the transfer window.
Three to five more signings. Key ties before the squad is settled. A club trying to rip out a mentality it no longer accepts. The next few weeks will show whether that ambition survives its first real stress test.
