Glen Gibbons: Nothing new about Rangers’ stadium re-naming

FAR from being ageing traditionalists, those Rangers fans ready to go to war over the name of the venue at which their heroes play their home games probably come from younger, more brittle stock.

Less volatile veterans among the club’s following will have long since realised that even referring to the ground as Ibrox is itself the result of usage, rather than official nomenclature. Until comparatively recently – sometime in the past 40 years – 
Rangers’ home was officially called The Stadium, complete with initial capital letters.

In that earlier age, that was the name which appeared on the club’s address column in the programme on match days. The same organ would refer to a forthcoming fixture as, “the next match at The Stadium will be against…” and even the pub on 
Copland Road, on the periphery of the ground, was for many years The Stadium Bar.

As with Parkhead and Celtic Park, Upton Park and the Boleyn Ground, or San Siro and the Giuseppe Meazza Stadium, Ibrox was merely the district in which The Stadium was located. In the same vein, old-time Rangers and Celtic men – proper traditionalists, these – would bridle at the very mention of “Glasgow” Rangers or “Glasgow” Celtic, arguing that there is no such club, that they were uniquely Rangers Football Club or Celtic Football Club, with no need for geographical embellishment.

Since, somewhere down the line, The Stadium became Ibrox Park virtually unnoticed and unremarked upon, there seems to be little sense in carping about Charles Green’s undisguised eagerness to welcome re-branding if it opens a gushing revenue stream to a business that cannot be said yet to be back in robust financial health.

What does seem immeasurably more puzzling is the seeming willingness of Mike Ashley, the owner of Newcastle United and the Sports Direct chain, to pledge the allegiance of his company to one half of the Old Firm – and, furthermore, to pay premium rates for the “privilege”. Alignment with Rangers has already done for McEwan’s Lager, Admiral and JJB Sports, the last two in the same sportswear manufacture and retail business as Sports Direct.

Has nobody told him that identification with only one of the Old Firm partners at a stroke casts adrift around half of your potential client base north of the border, tantamount to commercial suicide?