The Ibrox approach to pre-season has been sporadic and uncoordinated over the years. The format, nature and location of pre-season has chopped and changed with no rationale behind it.
What I’m going to suggest is the club works from the same rough guidelines every year and we stick to the plan.
We need to make sure the players are fit for the season but I would suggest it’s fairly easy to tie that in with rewarding our current fans and making a good few converts.
In recent years we’ve had some cracking friendlies - Chelsea at home was a belter on and off the field, Ajax midweek was a good run-out but the crowd a little low-key, 20 years ago pre-seasons with Marseille and Newcastle were perfect. The tournament at Highbury was great. Our two trips to Derby were great - football at just the right level to stretch us a little bit but not battles, the friendliness of the locals and the size of the town made for great trips and any Derby converts wishing to make Rangers their Scottish team have found it easy to travel up.
We have relationships with certain clubs that the fans favour - Linfield and the Glens in Ulster for instance, Chelsea, Man City, Hamburg, historically Arsenal, Portsmouth and what they have been through makes them an obvious candidate.
FIRST PRINCIPLES
The main purpose of pre-season is to get the players ready. So no more preseasons in sweltering high-humidity venues. A camp up in the Alps in Austria is an almost perfect setting - the altitude, the mainly dry heat and virtually guaranteed good weather. In a friendly against a decent Italian team on their preseason means a TV deal pays for the thing.
We should also endeavour to get as many players in as early as possible - this gives the manager time to work with them in decent surroundings.
In the early 2000s under Advocaat a preseason in Holland featured a training camp and games against three lower league sides followed by a couple of higher profile matches - the format and venue needn’t be set in stone.
If we have the training camp and warm up games in northern Europe then we have a chance to build a support - flights to Scotland are plentiful and cheap and most of the locals have English as a second language. We can build a legacy rather than wasting time, effort and money chasing imaginary millions in Japan as our cross-town cousins have on their own version of the Moonbeams Tour.
A glamour game or two at Ibrox and England should follow the training camp and we’re off!
All too often our pre-season has been badly-organised, badly thought out and wasteful - play Greuther Furth was a classic example - playing a club who wear green and white hoops emblazoned with a shamrock in the middle of the most conservatively Catholic part of Germany? Some legacy that generated!
The club’s attitude to Northern Ireland has not been great either - not so much the games themselves but behind the scenes the demands Rangers made on our hosts meant they were being screwed to the floor - amongst the host clubs it left a bitter taste in the mouth - what should have been a thank you and helping hand became a grind for them. A cycle of visiting Ulster with the full-team every second season with a mini-tour by the Reserves every other year means we could service our huge latent support over there. And make participation in the Milk Cup every year by the Youths a pre-requisite - a high quality international tournament on our own doorstep.
At the moment we are club coming out of turmoil - we don’t know who the manager will be next season and we don’t know what league we will be in - but we can plan for eventualities and have a couple of alternatives available every year which are consistent with a long-term plan to both give ourselves the best preparation, make money and make friends.