New Rangers CEO Patrick Stewart faced a fan grilling over the external review of the football department – as he was warned the club is “broken.”
Stewart appeared alongside recently appointed chairman Fraser Thornton the lounges at Ibrox before the victory over Aberdeen on Wednesday – with Record Sport exclusively revealing Thornton had branded the club’s away from under Philippe Clement “horrendous” in a damning verdict on the Ibrox boss.
And the former Manchester United chief also found himself in the firing line over his plans to bring in an outside team to review – with a second leaking clip from inside Ibrox showing an angry fan questioning the decision to bring in outside hires as part of the Rangers overhaul. Speaking last weekend, Stewart had revealed the club have called in external football experts to carry out an independent review as part of a “root-and-branch” study of the club’s football department.
The unhappy punter said: “For the last 10 years – probably bar a short period – this club has not been run properly. It starts from the top, from the board, and all the way down. Because that is broken, the team is where it is just now. You talk about the players, the language, we are responsible for bringing these guys into the club – you are responsible for it. Not you personally, but the board, us as a club need to fix it. So if we are having guys like yourself to come in and fix this and the first thing you do is look at an external review – I’m sorry, that is not good enough for Rangers Football Club.
“You guys need to look at things and say ‘this is all wrong, we are going to change it’ – when you change it, have a look at ‘are we doing it correctly,’ how do we then monitor that we are doing it correctly when we take the helm from external sources? Right now, this club is broken from top to bottom.
“If you fix it at the top, Rangers will have the success all the way down. Celtic are not that far in front of us and we can fix this very, very quickly by doing the correct things at the club. It’s not happening just now.
“Your answer to that is an external review – I’m not saying that doesn’t need to happen, but see right now, you need to do things internally yourselves and say ‘this is what needs done’. Every single thing that we are doing is wrong. The people in this suite are being treated with disrespect. Anything we do in this club it’s expected that we will back it. We will do that, we are all fans. But we also need the respect and to see that it’s getting fixed at the top, all the way down.”
Applause would then break out within the suite, before Stewart responded: “So, I think the first thing is we do respect you as a group. That is why we are here this evening, and that is why we are asking questions. Fraser and I are obviously fresh in the door, but coming to speak to you, speaking to lounges every week – this isn’t a one-off this is going to happen regularly – because we do respect and value your opinion. That is an important part of what Fraser and I are doing.
‘We are using externals but in a way if we don’t use externals that means we don’t have to do anything ourselves as well. We are not coming in and saying ‘right we will just get externals in and I don’t know what else we could be doing’ – we are working tirelessly to look at every aspect of the club, but we need support if we are going to try and accelerate this exercise.
“If it’s just me and Fraser doing it by ourselves we’ll make very little change and we will do it very slowly. But bringing in lots of firepower – you want to make things change as quickly as possible – and we are being very selective about where we bring in externals.
“Fraser and I are looking at lots of different things; the constitution of the board, John Gilligan at the AGM said that was being looked at so that is something that we are looking at. We are looking at the commercial area as well. We are looking at the wider culture, all these things take a lot of time though so we are spending a lot of time doing it. We are doing lots of different things.
“The review we are doing with football is something that we have spoken about with the media, but we are putting a lot of time into football because that is the most important aspect. If we are not getting it right on the pitch then almost everything else is irrelevant.
“To get it right on the pitch it can’t be a quick fix, you really need to dive deep, so that is why we are taking this exercise so seriously, but we are not devolving it. We are leading it with external support. We are very much on top of it as well.”