The Zombies are going bust too

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Rangers manager Ally McCoist says the club's squad have his full backing over their decision to reject a 15 per cent pay cut.

Ibrox chief executive Graham Wallace proposed the idea as part of his bid to cut costs at the Scottish League 1 side.

Wallace met with captain Lee McCulloch and manager Ally McCoist on Wednesday, where the cuts were discussed as one possible measure to reduce costs.

After discussions between the players, the club's hierarchy were informed the players would not agree to any such proposal.

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Rangers announced a £14.4m loss within their first 13 months of trading as a new company up until July last year.

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If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then Ibrox is indeed the mad house of world football.

It was bad enough that a combination of David Murray’s voodoo economics and Craig Whyte’s lies destroyed the oldco. For Charles Green and his gang of spivs to pull the rollercoaster back up the hill and to try and do it all again beggars belief.

After the initial demise, they re-started in the Third Division, not with a tight belt and a canny three-year plan, but like some 21st Century Loadsamoney character, snapping up some of the best players in the country on wages they could ill-afford with no regard for a ledger that showed a burn of £1m a month. Anyone who dared question the need to pay £7,000 per week to players in the fourth tier of Scottish football was looked upon like they had two heads.

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Ultimately, despite yesterday’s bombshell, players and management do see Wallace as an ally even though the chief executive could procrastinate no longer. Brian Stockbridge, the finance director, is on record as stating that the club will have just £1m in the bank come May, meaning savage cost-cutting is inevitable. Yesterday the whispers turned into cries of help from the rooftops.

Sportsmail revealed last week that upwards of £1m is to be trimmed across the board but there are fears that this is now the thin end of the wedge. The football department is braced to bear the brunt of any economies but all areas of the club are now under threat.

If McCoist’s players do eventually agree to the 15 per cent drop, the squad might just survive intact for the time being. If they don’t accede, the manager – and the club – have no obvious way out.

Paying up the bulk of the value of the contracts held by the likes of Emilson Cribari and Sebastien Faure is a non-starter. Money has already flown out of the door to square up the likes of Fran Sandaza and Dorin Goian and, besides, there is no credit line.

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Loaning some players out might make a minimal difference but finding potential suitors is another matter considering the sky-high wages many players are on.

Similarly, selling a prized asset is easy in theory but not quite so in practice. Only Lee Wallace would command the kind of fee that would make it worth the bother but there is a fundamental stumbling block to that: The player doesn’t want to go anywhere.

Last night Wallace’s agent Gary Mackay told Sportsmail: ‘Lee Wallace wants to be a Rangers player at the end of his current contract and longer if possible.’

Footballers on good contracts not being willing to just up sticks and leave because it suits a club will come as nothing new to Graham Wallace – given his previous employment as CEO at Manchester City.

But that was a club swimming in cash. Rangers as a business is sinking and today it is hard to escape the mental image of the chief executive frantically trying to stop the ship plummeting beneath the waves of financial misadventure by spooning water off the decks. He’ll have to work phenomenally hard to succeed.

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There are some grim portents for his hopes of pulling off a miracle. On Tuesday, Richard Hughes, a founder of Zeus Capital, made himself a tidy £500,000 profit by offloading the shares he received for a penny each from Green 18 months ago.

The price that day was 24p – well below the 70p supporters paid for their own little bit of their beloved club. Ask yourself this. If a savvy businessman like Hughes is selling his holding, what does it say about his predictions for the already plummeting share price?

Less than two years after the unthinkable happened, the prospect of history repeating itself is very real. The mood of one fan who tweeted last night seemed to sum things up.

‘This time last year,’ he wrote, ‘the Rangers board had £22m in the bank. Now they are asking the players to take a wage cut. Think about it.’

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