Leading football finance analyst Kieran Maguire is always on the pulse when it comes to club finances and he’s certainly more of an authority on Rangers’ than your average Celtic fan.
Maguire has followed closely the club’s most recent share issues and is a reliable, unbiased and nonpartisan source when it comes to the finances of football clubs.
As the Gers invite supporters to invest directly into the club via a new £6,750,000 share issue, naturally Maguire has had to deal with a whole tranche of moonhowling Sevcoists aplenty.
But as one of these outspoken Rangers financial experts has come to find out, if you play with fire, you will get burned.
Peddling the popular Celtic fan myth that Rangers’ 400m shares are somehow an indulgent rarity and a sure-fire sign of imminent financial collapse, Maguire was happy to put the fan in their place.
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“Hi Stewart, you keep asking me if there are any clubs that have more shares in issue than Rangers 400 million,” tweets Maguire.
“I’ve found a wee club in Glasgow called Celtic who have 796 million in issue, not sure you’ve heard of them as you only ever contact me about Rangers.”
Moving on to matters considerably more pertinent, Kieran Maguire has also had Rangers vice-chairman and director John Bennett on his Price of Football show discussing the share issue in greater detail.
As part of this, John Bennett was asked about selling players to clear off investor loans this summer.
Here’s what he said:
“The short answer is no. Utterly not,” said John Bennett.
“Our whole model, our whole planning – no. No player sales to repay our loan, including mine.
“Absolutely not. Not part of the plan, not going to happen.
“And that’s what if you look at what we’ve done as director investors and known director investors in the six years, what have we done? We have steadfastly and consistently re-equitised the business. We’ve gone to shareholders at each AGM and asked for permission to issue shares.
“Whilst we’ve contributed soft loans, we then once we’ve got the shareholders permission, we’ve equitised the soft loans, we’ve converted the soft loans into permanent equity capital.
“Any business must stand on permanent capital first and foremost, that’s the equity.”
Rangers chairman Douglas Park has previously claimed he’s been “overwhelmed” by the fan response to the share issue with registrations officially closing on 11/06/21.