plymouthranger

Could be, they’ve signed a lot of players from smaller leagues/far East where wages are low. We’ve signed players from leagues with high wage averages such as the Dutch, Belgian, England etc.

Complicated, by the time you’ve taken all the staffing costs in house, your carrying a lot more risk for little extra

Club are very happy with Castore. Making more money from retail than ever previously, Castore value is as their biggest account (their losing Newcastle to Adidas shortly which is the only football team that comes close in terms of sales), and pay on time.

Yes, and the Bassey and Aribo sales (but not anything from the Europa run that season). Bascially we made a small profit (under £500k), despite CL football and bringing in a record fee. The reason why we made such a small profit, is because we had to pay off Gio and his team, hire Beale, sign all the dross from summer 2022 and no European football post/Xmas. Unless we go deep into Europe (e.g. Semi finals in Europa or Conference league), I’d expect us to run at a slight (e.g. under £5million) loss this coming year because of lack of CL money (although reaching the play off round did help). We brought in circa £10million by selling Sakala, Kamara and Colak, but spent more than that on the incoming players from summer 2023. Hence why Bennett is referencing that we need to make sure the player trading model is delivering consistently, he can see that despite moving a decent chunk of wages from the books, we’ve brought just as much onto them with some questionable quality in the likes of Lammers, Dessers, Matondo, Lawrence, Yilmaz etc.

Disgraceful we lost to them (both sides)

Last night was an odd one, I thought he did very well off the ball with his pressing, tackling and making space for our other forwards. On the ball, I can’t remember him doing anything

We were briefly linked to Haraslin under Gerrard when he first came in. Some player

What a difference a manager makes.

As a former goalkeeper (admittedly at a very low level), I can’t begin to explain how good he is. His positioning is ridiculous, not just for shot stopping but for crosses, intercepting through balls etc. Whilst he’s a big lad, he times everything in the air to perfection (which is far more difficult than it looks). Then you throw in his shot stopping with both hands, reaction saves etc. Most goalies are good at 1 or at best 2 of the above and then get by on the rest. The best can do the lot and whilst Jacks not in that world class bracket, we couldn’t have got a more rounded GK for 3-4x our budget for him. If you could combine those elite level saves McGregor/Goram was capable of with Butlands base on the rest, you’re genuinely looking at one of the best British keepers ever.

He’s worse than James Beattie was, and that’s saying something. Genuinely think he might be worse than Ostenstadt, who is probably the worst forward I’ve seen in a Rangers jersey. Cant believe we paid over £4million for this clown.

It’s easier for French clubs to attract players because of the league they play in. Means we often have to overpay for players or can’t attract better young talent. What’s inexcusable is teams like Sparta/Slavia/Malmo being better than us when their leagues are worse and they spend 3-4x less a year than us

Yeah that’s a fucking mental thing to say. I was brought in as an external consultant for a client in my line of work (workplace strategy), we proposed a solution that we felt was the best way to solve the clients problems, but their CFO went a different route. That’s fine, take the pay cheque, keep quiet and move on. Coming out after a decision has been made, publicly saying you backed a different route and then still remaining on the books, is fucking madness and it comes across as someone who thinks they know it all. Sadly Souness is a dinosaur for modern football, he was as a manager 20 years ago and he’s done nothing since barring punditry. We shouldn’t be relying on him in any capacity…

Roofes scored 1 goal this season, his records worse than Dessers

Fuck me that bench is as bad as I’ve ever seen for a European game.

2 years 😩

Sadly we should’ve signed Palma, no idea why Beale decided to go into a season with no wide players barring a loan signing and Matondo

Butland Souttar Goldson Davies Tav Lundstram Raskin Sima Cantwell Dessers Roofe Fuck it, 3 at the back seems to be the only way we don’t end up with someone out of position at LB. Tav sits more and we concentrate on attacks down the left where possible. Bit lopsided but as good as i think we can make it.

Czechs and Hungarians are fucking backward. Weirdly Poland and other countries like the baltics, which people often assume are worse, are far more tolerant and decent. Not sure what it is in Central Europe, but they’re all a bit mad and isolated.

Fuck them, absolute scum. Imagine your greatest rivals racially abusing a player and deciding to back them, over seeing the incident as disgraceful and also the fault of a team you despise. Fucking madness

Yeah Hagi sadly doesn’t fit into our side. He’s not athletic enough and Cantwell does his role much better.

He speaks with real clarity, which Beale never did and Gio was too guarded to do so. That should help us short term, as the players will have clear and concise instructions about what they need to do

Not really, I’ve just explained that we have family in Rotterdam and my post was based on that. Put it this way, if he was similar to early days Morelos (playing off the shoulder), he’s fucking useless at it as he’s offside more than Sakala. The problem we have is that hes a forward who does well in spurts, presses well (but we don’t do that as a team, so he wastes energy doing so), can drop deeper and play good passes but struggles against low blocks or when there’s an expectation for him to run in behind/into channels. All the above are pretty difficult to put together into a striker that is useful in most games for Rangers.

We’ve got family members who live near Rotterdam and go to some of the games. General consensus on Dessers is they loved him, but he blows hot and cold and his goal scoring tends to be in bursts (which to be fair, is how we’d describe Morelos over the period with us). But your point above is bang on. Apparently in the Eredivise he struggled for Feijenoord in a lot of games, especially where teams sat in and limited the space for him. In Europe he excelled that season where he was able to drop deeper and use his passing to play balls in behind for runners/get onto cutbacks. They all agree he’s useless at running into space behind and not the best when teams sit in against his side. You can see that across his career, scores loads in sides who are either lower half and set up to counter, or in European games where again things are more cagey. Problem is, that doesn’t fit the profile of what a Rangers number 9 needs to do.

Also, those stats really aren’t that bad considering they’re all in leagues better than ours.

That injury he picked up late last season at Cremonese has fucked him. Looks to have lost half a yard of pace and I imagine he’s playing through it, which isn’t helping him