Rangers administration: Rangers could struggle to finish fourth next season - Ally McCoist

ALLY McCoist fears that the best-case scenario for Rangers next season could be scrapping it out for a place in the top six.

Even if the Ibrox club exit administration through a Company Voluntary Arrangement, they are likely to lose major playing assets. In return for 75 per cent wage cuts, all the high earners had clauses inserted into their contracts that will allow them to leave in the summer for modest fees. With none of the prospective new owners promising major investment, most players are likely to activate these clauses.

Even if Rangers are not liquidated, McCoist’s hopes of making a trophy-winning impression as manager will involve having to work with a squad with youth at its core.

Hibernian under Tony Mowbray flourished with a young side in the mid-2000s, finishing third and fourth, but McCoist fears even that may be beyond Rangers.

“You’d have to say that it’s a possibility [that Rangers will field a very young team]. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. I’m not in control of the situation in terms of bringing players in or selling players. We don’t know the finances, if and when we get a new owner.

“It’s not always gone badly when kids have been thrown in but you’d have to say there’s absolutely no way we’d reach any level of where we have been, if that was the case. Certainly for the foreseeable future, and the next two, three, four years could be challenging. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

“Hibs did well with young players but they arguably had the best batch in the last 20 or 30 years in Scottish football. I’m not saying our batch are anything as good as that. So fourth might not even be remotely possible.”

If Rangers became as irrelevant to the title race as the club were in the early 1980s McCoist admits it would become the “biggest test” of a support who largely deserted the club during that fallow period.

“I really do [think the fans would continue to back Rangers]. In a perverse way, they like adversity, a challenge. I think they’ve been sensational. I don’t think there are many clubs in the world who could get 48,000 for an old boys’ game. Now it could be about getting 48,000 for a young boys’ game.

“Ever since administration, the fans have turned up to Inverness and wherever we’ve been. I just think they’ve been great.

“It would be our biggest test, there is no doubt about that. It would be an absolutely massive test but I really don’t think it would scare them. It would galvanise them, be an act of defiance.”