Rangers abandon plans to hire new Sporting Director
Written by
Simon Austin
March 26, 2026
Rangers have abandoned plans to hire a new Sporting Director, saying “we believe our current football structure is working well.”
The Glasgow club have not had a Sporting Director since Kevin Thelwell, now Elite Coach Developer for the Football Association, was sacked in November.
Rangers had planned to appoint a replacement for Thelwell, with Gretar Steinsson, Technical Director for co-owners 49ers Enterprises, leading the search.
However, Chairman Andrew Cavenagh (pictured) announced that those plans had been canned in a letter to fans yesterday.
“We believe our current football structure is working well and we do not plan to hire a Sporting Director,” he wrote.
“The executive team is committed to being smaller, nimbler and more entrepreneurial. We want an executive team willing to get its fingernails dirty. If there is a hole to be dug, we want people fighting over shovels.
“We want fewer consulting firms and less bureaucracy.”
American Cavenagh, who fronted the consortium that bought Rangers in 2025, also announced that season tickets would be going up by 6.5%.
“We do not take ticket prices and increases for granted,” he wrote. “The costs to run the club – player wages, agents’ fees, security, food and beverage – are all rising faster than the overall rate of inflation.
“We either need the club’s revenues to keep pace, or we need to decrease the money spent on the squad. We don’t believe this is the time to decrease the player and football budget; in fact, we think the opposite.
“In football, the level of resources committed to the squad is directly linked to the quality on the pitch. If we want to continue to improve on the pitch, we need to increase the total amount of resources of the club while also shifting as many of those resources to the men’s first team as possible.”
Supporters would not be doing “all the heavy lifting” though, with the owners raising £16m of additional capital through a new share issue, effective immediately.
“The capital will be used to support player acquisitions and other club needs,” Cavenagh said. “Increasing the revenue and capital is only part of the path to allocating more resources to the men’s first team.”
Former Liverpool defender Stig Inge Bjørnebye, who was previously Sporting Director at Rosenborg and Aarhus, was appointed as an adviser and consultant at Rangers in December. Dan Purdy, who joined under Thelwell, remains as Technical Director.
Rangers are currently second in the Scottish Premiership, three points behind leaders Hearts.
‘Alarming on many levels’
Omar Chaudhuri, Chief Intelligence Officer at sports intelligence agency Twenty First Group, described Cavenagh’s statement as “alarming on many levels.”
Firstly, he questioned the many references to developing a ‘winning culture’.
“In my experience the best sporting organisations – the ones who achieve the ‘sustained winning and winning sustainably’ that Rangers crave – make sure their culture is explicitly not about winning,” Chaudhuri wrote on LinkedIn.
“This is because winning is an outcome of good culture. Good culture focuses on the right behaviours and processes.
“A culture explicitly focused on winning ironically risks all kinds of bad behaviours: players sitting back on leads because they fear conceding, scouts pushing low-risk but higher-cost options, academy kids left sat on the bench because the coach can’t trust them.”
And he said that the club’s argument that on-field improvements could only come with increased spending on the first team were even “more alarming”.
“Rangers should look around, because a revolution is taking place across Northern Europe,” Chaudhuri wrote.
“Clubs with less money than their rivals are winning everywhere, while historic giants are floundering. Mjällby are Swedish champions. AGF are top of the table in Denmark, and FCK are in the relegation group.
“Everyone knows the Bodø/Glimt story now. Union SG are dominating in Belgium. Ajax have gone four years without a title in the Netherlands.
“And of course, 40 miles down the road, Hearts are top of the Scottish Premiership. Our analysis shows that while there is a positive correlation between spend and results across almost any league, when you look at an individual club the picture is dramatically different.
“Clubs that have increased their spending have, on average, achieved no better results. This counterintuitive finding reinforces the idea that for any given club, how well you spend is vastly more important than how much you spend.
“Additional spending often just serves to compound the bad.”
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