Kieran Maguire, a football finance expert at the University of Liverpool, has released a financial comparison of 74 UK clubs via his Twitter account PriceofFootball.
The comparison is made up of wage data from 74 EPL, EFL and Scottish Premiership clubs and shows the percentage of income each spent on wages across 2017/18.
The Scotsman picked this up in a story denoting the Gers as in an ominous sounding ‘red line’ for wages.
That’s because they are slightly over a UEFA guideline. The European body suggests that clubs should spend no more than £70 out of every £100 of income, on wages – a.k.a, no more than 70%.
For 2017/2018, Rangers operated at £73.8% which is the second highest proportion in the SPL, behind Dundee.
Meanwhile, fiercest rivals, Celtic, were down at 58.4%, which could be construed as worrying for Bears.
Little cause for concern
However, when you look outside of Scotland to British football as a whole, it soon becomes clear that there’s nothing major to worry about here.
If there was, a lot of big clubs would be in trouble.
Out of the 74 studied, Rangers sit 44th in terms of wages vs income. Therefore, while they may be overstretching slightly, their marginal excess is nothing in comparison to that of others.
In fact, 17 clubs from the EFL Championship and League One, including Wolves, Reading, and Scunthorpe were well in excess of 100% in this category. Birmingham City, top the pile, at 202.3%.
If Rangers were recording those sorts of numbers, there would be cause for concern. Yet, that simply isn’t the case based on these stats.
We don’t know where the Gers were operating at this season, but after tidying up the squad over the summer, we may even see the percentage spend drop to within the guidelines, for 2019/20. Based on this data, they haven’t far to go.
