Rangers: John Gilligan on Dave King, Celtic & overseas investment
Here is the question for Rangers – if a reputable and genuinely heavy-hitting individual or company made a bid to buy a majority of the club for game-changing amounts of money, would the most significant shareholders – King, Douglas Park, George Taylor, Stuart Gibson and Julian Wolhardt – facilitate the approach and sell up?
Gilligan said on Monday that Rangers would never go back to the days of having one person in command, a la Craig Whyte, or indeed, David Murray, the former owner who sold to Whyte.
The memory of the chronic Mike Ashley era has not faded either. Charles Green, Imran Ahmad, Derek Llambias, Barry Leach, David Somers – all these and more still have the capacity to make some on the current board break out in a cold sweat.
“We get approaches from all over the world from various sources,” said Gilligan of would-be investors.
“But it has to be the right people and the right conditions and for the right amount of shares. We don’t want one person owning the club.”
Rangers’ future is, in part, being determined by their past and their understandable fear of having another ownership cataclysm on their hands.
At the same time, without an influx of major investment from the outside – in other words, revolution with the change of ownership that would come with it – it is hard to see how this financial picture changes dramatically at Ibrox any time soon.
“There is a plan and I am here to bring stability to the enforcement of that plan,” said Gilligan, who later added: “We’ll be fine… we’re in a strong place.”
But for all of Gilligan’s optimism and dedication to duty, there continue to be more questions than answers at Rangers.
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