Walter Smith says Rangers fans' ownership is 'worth looking at'

• Rangers' fans protest at a recent game. Picture: SNS

Speaking at Murray Park yesterday, Smith said he did not know a lot about the proposal by the Rangers Supporters Trust (RST), but accepted that the model of fans controlling the club had already been shown to be viable elsewhere.

"I think everything at the present moment is worth looking at," Smith said. "That situation seems to be in place at a fair number of clubs across Europe.

"To be honest, I don't know a great deal about it. The reports in the papers this morning were rather sketchy in terms of what it fully entails.

"Like everything else at the moment, you can't rule anything out. It seems to work at a lot of places, big clubs across Europe. Whether we can bring that to a Scottish or British club would be an interesting factor."

However, sources suggested last night that the supporter-led bid is being treated with scepticism by Rangers officials, with doubts raised over how such a takeover could sustain the annual running costs at Ibrox.

With Rangers estimated to be at least 30million in debt, anyone planning a takeover would have to clear that sum and then prove to the club's bankers, the Lloyds group, that they had enough cash left over to maintain the business as a going concern.

The RST has had talks with a businessman, understood to be Clyde Blowers chief executive Jim McColl, designed to ensure that their bid is underwritten. This would almost certainly be necessary. When Rangers asked supporters to invest in the club through a share rights issue in 2005, during a far more favourable economic climate, the uptake was tiny. Sir David Murray, who was club chairman at he time, underwrote 50.2 million of the 51.4million that was raised. The original target was 57.2 million.

RST spokesman David Edgar says he welcomes Smith's comments. "It is very positive that Walter Smith is open-minded to look at this proposition. That's the attitude the football club needs at the moment."

The Trust plans to buy out Murray's 92 per cent shareholding by raising 30million from supporters over a five-year period. If the buyout were successful, those involved would become part of a membership scheme which had ultimate control of the club while ceding the daily running of it to an executive board.

As part of the nationwide Trust movement which aims to get greater supporter influence on clubs, the RST has been working for the past seven years to remove control of Rangers from Murray. "The Rangers Supporters Trust exists to do this," Edgar added. "We believe this is the right thing to do.

"We believe that Rangers can never be run at the whim of one man, because look at the situation it's got us into. The very existence of Rangers was threatened this season – that can never be allowed to happen again."

Edgar refused to confirm or deny that McColl was involved, and he is suspicious of the motives of whoever allowed that name to enter the public domain, believing that anyone who plans to underwrite such a scheme may react adversely to the welter of publicity which has followed. He and his colleagues also acknowledge that any potential underwriter could have second thoughts. Given the way events have unfolded thus far, though, he is confident the would-be underwriter has both the altruism and the acumen required to make a success of the scheme. If McColl's estimated worth of 800m is anywhere close to the truth, he clearly has more than enough money to buy Murray out in his own right. Edgar, however, believes underwriting a supporters' buyout is a sign not only of enthusiasm for the club, but of support for a business model which is more viable in the long term.

All the same, there remain two major doubts about the RST scheme. One concerns the length of time it would take to get to the stage of taking over Rangers, and the other is whether it would ever generate the cash required.

London-based property developer Andrew Ellis currently has an offer for Rangers on the table, and is undertaking due diligence. Should he decide to proceed and prove he has the money to do so, his new regime would be in place long before the RST was able to reach its estimated required total of around 20,000 member investors.

That would leave it as far away as ever from its ideal of supporter control, and it could then do no more than hope that an Ellis- controlled Rangers was run in a manner more to its liking. "If he does it, and he has the right ideas, we will back him," Edgar said.

Even if a bid from Ellis does not go ahead, it remains to be seen how many Rangers fans buy into the scheme, which is asking each willing individual to contribute a total of 1,500 over a five-year period. While Barcelona's membership scheme offers a longstanding model of fan control of a club, recent Scottish attempts by supporters to wrest ownership away from an individual have been fraught with difficulties.

When the 'Save Our Hearts' campaign raised funds in a bid to stop Chris Robinson selling Tynecastle, for example, the highest total it reached was 2.4m. In the end, it was Vladimir Romanov who stepped in and stopped the sale of the Hearts ground.

Rangers have a bigger supporter base, but the most recent share issue uptake is evidence that those numbers do not translate into financial backing.

Meanwhile, Uefa president Michel Platini yesterday backed Labour's plan to give up to a 25 per cent stake in clubs to fans.

The Government is considering a scheme to give fans first refusal on the purchase of shares in their clubs when they are put up for sale, and clubs could be required to hand over stakes of up to 25 per cent to supporters' groups, according to a report.

"Personally, I think it is a great idea for supporters to invest in a club because they at the end of the day defend the club's identity," said Platini. "They are always there, they are the ones always watching the games. There are clubs now where the president is not a national of the country, the coach is not of a national of the country and the players are not nationals of the country. The only ones to have any kind of identity are the supporters."