Most of you will be familiar with The Rangers being taken over by a consortium of investors only two of whom are known. Andrew Cavenagh and 49ers Enterprises. Although Paraag Marathe is vice chairman and has a role with the 49ers investment arm, it is not clear if he has a personal stake in the club.
Rangers FC LLC are Delaware registered, and it’s fairly easy to understand what attracts certain businesses to form companies HMRC describes as opaque.
Some of the more important reasons are as follows –
- It’s essentially a tax haven for companies who do not do business within the state. There is no corporate income tax, no sales tax and no intangible (like trademarks or patents) property tax
- High Degree of Privacy – Delaware offers more anonymity than most other states. Companies are not required to list the names of directors or officers in their initial public filings.
The reality is that we do not have a full picture of who has invested in The Rangers, how much they have invested or what their exit strategy might be.
Opaque Ownership
We do know that the move from public to private ownership also makes information about the financial state of the club almost impossible to discern.
Furthermore, the sweeping changes to the articles of association mean that there is no accountability, as well as no transparency.
For instance, the awarding of contracts would not need to be put to tender and could involve members of the consortium awarding themselves or their associated companies whatever work they see fit, with no need to justify the costs or the decision.
Sale and leaseback of the stadium was also much discussed as a way for the consortium to recoup their costs in what many believe was a highly leveraged purchase.
The fact that most of the purchase was done with borrowed money is educated speculation, further bolstered by the fact that the much-hyped initial £20m investment, was actually funded with a share issue.
And here we are on the 25th March 2026 with another share issue launched for a further £16m, only ten months after the takeover was completed.
Rich Men North of Richmond
I’m sure fans of The Rangers who don’t spend most of their time online and disturbingly obsessed with certain non-football topics, might be more than slightly perturbed by the possibilities of what could go wrong.
But maybe, when you’ve been dead once and were heading that way again, you simply cross your fingers (just your fingers though, not yourself!) and hope for the best.
Or are they once again confronting the scenario of a club not prepared to be the best they can within their means, but instead be the best by any means possible?
They’ve had a record breaking net spend on transfers this year, throwing the kitchen sink at the possibility of not only Champions League qualification, but going directly into the group stages.
An incredibly risky strategy you might think, but they’ve had a look behind the wizard’s curtain in the land of Oz that includes Paradise, and they have seen the shortcomings of our board as an opportunity to attack this season aggressively.
Blind Greed
Maybe they will be proven right. They certainly appreciate the importance of Champions League money far more than our own board, who had a net spend of roughly half of The Rangers and then, with the title in the balance, decided not to make any serious purchases that could help get a threadbare squad limping over the line.
What if their gamble fails though? Does it seem likely that a club having already issued two rounds of share confetti is sitting on reserves of any significance? We know that since 2012 this has been a lossmaking club, with no facility to borrow, having recorded approx. £130m in losses since putting on the dead club’s sash and engaging in this pretence parade.
It certainly appears that they have already made at least one potentially catastrophic mistake.
Fools Gold
They accurately assessed that in all of Europe, Scottish Football gives them one of the lowest cost potential entries into the Champions League.
And based on what they were losing previously it really does need to be Champions League and not Europa. They even made a loss the last time they reached the Europa final.
The smart marketing and business people with Cavenagh and Marathe will have been looking at the potential for properly marketing the club. They’ll have seen a potentially massive upside to this big Scottish club with European potential but with such terrible branding.
They’ll have been aware of historic discrimination and a rather unfortunate association of the brand with unsavoury practices, displays, behaviour & songs.
However, the fools would have thought this was something they could rectify. Tidy things up. Make the place family friendly. Gradually excise the unwanted elements. Appeal to a much wider audience at home and abroad.
The Naivety of Rebranding The Rangers
There’s no need to go back through the whole unfortunate history of the dead club, a lengthy breakdown of which this humble blog could not handle.
Why don’t we start in the early 2000’s, which is roughly when UEFA decided that some of the racism and sectarianism from the stands of certain problem clubs had to be addressed.
Chief among them was Oldco. And so it began.
Key Recorded Fines/Sanctions Since 2000:
- 2006: UEFA fined Rangers £13,300 for sectarian chanting during a Champions League tie against Villarreal.
- 2007: UEFA issued an £8,280 fine following discriminatory chanting in a match against Osasuna.
- 2011: UEFA fined the club roughly €80,000 (£70,000) and imposed a suspended stadium closure following three separate cases of sectarian chanting within five years, specifically regarding ties against PSV Eindhoven.
- 2019: UEFA ordered a partial closure of Ibrox Stadium (3,000 seats) for a Europa League match following sectarian singing during a qualifier against St Joseph’s, a punishment that was extended to a second match against Legia Warsaw.
- 2025: UEFA fined the club €30,000 and imposed a suspended partial stadium closure (Copland Stand) following the display of a discriminatory banner during the Fenerbahce match.
Both versions of The Rangers remain the only Scottish clubs to be fined for sectarian/discriminatory chanting.
Which has led the new management to issue such pre game gems as this –
You must admire the humour. If that behaviour was truly unacceptable then the place would be as empty as the skulls of the Onion Bears.
Rebrand Resistant
It appears that Cavenagh & Co thought they could use some clever incentives to both change the environment and encourage a change in behaviour.
We’re talking about centuries of ingrained bigotry. Perhaps difficult to fathom for men whose country is only 250 years old.
I said in a previous blog after their most recent shameful display before, during and after the cup game against us at Ibrox
“That’s genuinely hilarious. Like saying you want to improve the Coca Cola brand by removing the fizzy dark liquid in the bottles.
How can you be so rich and so oblivious? So driven by dinero that you don’t do due diligence.
The racism, sectarianism & supremacism IS the brand.
Clean that up and you’ll have an empty stadium.”
The realisation and the reality
I’m told that Mr Cavenagh and his guests were horrified and embarrassed after that game and the “vitriolic & vociferous rendition of the entire range of vile racism & sectarianism in the sick songbook.”
Perhaps then he’ll have come to the realisation that there is no significant rebranding that can be done. The things he wants to remove are the foundational pillars of The Rangers fans. If you take them away, the whole of Ibrox implodes.
Celtic have a brand that is recognised globally thanks to the seemingly endless Irish diaspora. Even if you’re not interested in Celtic, the Irish branding & connection means that the merchandise sells incredibly well globally. Along with the 10,000 seat advantage in the stadium, these are Celtic’s biggest weapons in the fight for turnover, profitability and financial dominance.
The Rangers are ultimately a parochial, provincial club with no appeal to fans globally and no way to modernise their regressive brand without alienating their own support.
The Oldco researched this endlessly. They believed there was surely a global market for their goods. All they found was evidence of utter disinterest, if not active antipathy.
They simply cannot ever scale up their merchandise operations to match Celtic.
Now, all we need from our board is to use some of our massive cash reserves to ensure the domestic league is never this close again. Despite our board’s contention, infamously expressed by Nepo Baby, that European progression is an aspiration, the fans believe it is foundational.
More importantly, the transparent ambitions of The Rangers now make it an absolute necessity. They can make up the deficit in turnover by consistently qualifying for the Champions League. This cannot be allowed to happen.
If we utilise our dominant financial position to ensure our own consistent European success on the park, then it’s inevitable that budgetary constraints will eventually start squeezing the ambition, and perhaps even the life, out of the Ibrox club once more.
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