Whyte warns of lean times as Rangers cut cloth

Just 130 days into his tenure, he felt the need to invite daily newspaper journalists to Ibrox as he attempts to deal with a wave of negative publicity surrounding the club he considers both unjust and unfounded.

Rangers may be leading the way in the SPL as they pursue a fourth consecutive championship triumph but the agenda dominating the club concerns balance sheets rather than league tables.

As Whyte wrestles with ongoing disputes with HMRC over tax liabilities which have seen doubts raised over Rangers’ long-term solvency, he has also faced scepticism over the financial wherewithal he has brought to the club since purchasing it from Sir David Murray at the start of May.

Back-to-back eliminations from the Champions League and Europa League at the start of the season came in the midst of a transfer window which saw Rangers frustrated in their pursuit of several signing targets.

Whyte admits he made mistakes during that period, ones he says will be rectified when the January transfer window comes around, but defended his level of investment in manager Ally McCoist’s first-team squad.

But he has also come to the conclusion that Rangers and their supporters have no option but to accept a more prudent fiscal policy in the years ahead if he is to achieve his goal of balancing the books at Ibrox.

“People have to get real,” said Whyte. “We are stuck in Scottish football here with costs which are significantly more than the income we are bringing in. That has to be dealt with, we have to have a reality check. We have got to get to the stage where we at least break even and live within our means. We are very far from being there at the moment. We have a situation where we are geared up to be in the Champions League every season, that’s the cost base we have got. But as we know, it is much much harder to get there now.

“We got knocked out by Malmo this year, whose wage bill is around five million Euros a year, which is significantly less than ours. We were then knocked out of the Europa League by Maribor, who have a wage bill of 1.5 million Euros a year. One of our players probably gets paid more than that.

“So when both those teams manage to beat us over two legs, that says to me there is something badly wrong with Scottish football, that we can’t beat teams like that. What that says to me is that we have to be focusing on our grass roots, our youth system to bring players through from there instead of paying for expensive foreign players.

“That’s absolutely what we are going to focus on. Our cost base and our first team wage bill have got to come down over time. I think the good thing is, though, that we have got a load of very good young players coming through now. Guys like Gregg Wylde and Jamie Ness have made it into the first team and I’m very confident about the future. I think that’s where investment has got to go in the future.

“There seems to be this attitude that we should throw money at things, that we should go and spend £5 million or £10 million on transfers every season. I think the days of doing that in Scottish football are probably gone now. We did spend in excess of £5 million this year. I know that has been treated with some cynicism but we actually did spend in excess of £5 million net. But I think we’ve got to look at whether that’s the way forward in future.

“Investment is required at grass roots level and on players who maybe won’t get into the first team immediately but can be brought on. An investment is exactly that. An investment where you bring a young player into the team, he can play with us for two or three seasons and then we can sell him on at a profit. That’s what we have got to look at. That’s the future for all of us in Scottish football. We all may have aspirations of a different league structure, be that a European structure or England or whatever, but we are absolutely where we are. We are in Scottish football and we have got to make sure that we cut our cloth accordingly to deal with that.

“What I found during the transfer window was that it was more difficult to spend money than I thought it would be. I can be self-critical and say that some things could have been handled better and we will be better prepared for the next transfer window.

“Everything is negotiation in football, it’s not like valuing an ounce of gold. Your valuation of a player may be different from mine and I make no apologies for trying to get the best deal for Rangers. That’s what I’m here to do.”

Whyte admits he has been taken aback by the level of scrutiny he has been subjected to since taking charge at Ibrox, in sharp contrast to his previously low key business career.

But he is dismissive of his critics, pointing out that he was not exactly part of a lengthy queue of would-be investors falling over themselves to buy the club.

“I absolutely thought about walking away from the deal to buy Rangers several times,” he said. “Why didn’t I? Because I’m a Rangers fan and I wanted to sort it out. Nobody else was stepping up to the plate to buy the club, somebody had to do it.

“With any takeover, you always get a few unpleasant surprises and this one is no different. The difference is that it is in the public spotlight. I’ve done a lot of substantial (business) turnarounds that are below the radar. Everything has been below the radar prior to this. I have deliberately chosen not to get my other businesses involved in the media circus that goes around Rangers.

“I now understand that everyone wants to know every detail of my life, everything that is going on. But Rangers is my public life, everything else should be private. I can understand our fans being concerned about sheriff’s officers turning up at the club but at the end of the day there is a big job to be done here in sorting this out as a business. I understand that the fans want to know what’s going on and that’s why I’m speaking to you today. We have got a tough job to do, we have got a financial mess to clear up and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”