Inside the deal to take Rangers back to the top: How San Francisco 49ers chiefs will unlock the 'huge untapped potential' and why Leeds could become their FEEDER club, high-level sources reveal to IAN HERBERT

It’s a measure of how outsiders underestimate the size and potential of Scottish football support that the probable purchase of Glasgow Rangers by a consortium including the investment arm of NFL’s San Francisco 49ers has passed under the radar on the English side of the border.

No big deal, the old enemy seems to be saying.

The Scots would rather beg to differ. Rangers’ 50,000 season-ticket holders make Ibrox a permanently sold-out stadium, while European success in any of the Uefa tournaments would be a carnival. Around 200,000 flocked to Manchester for the 2008 Uefa Cup final.

It’s been a painful recent history. The club’s attempts to make ground on Celtic have been obsessive and, ultimately, hopeless. They’re currently 16 points adrift of them in the Scottish Premiership, and £45million in debt.

Influential parties around the club saw cash being haemorrhaged, year after year, and felt that such a footballing institution, with such a fanbase, was ripe for new money and a new perspective.

‘We needed someone who mixed in the right circles to make our case for international investment,’ one of them tells me.

And that’s where Andy Mason came in. He is a Gulf-based Scot, with a background in property and finance, whose work has included four years with the Abu Dhabi government, bringing backers to what the UAE describes as projects of ‘national significance.’

His connections with those of influence behind the scenes at Rangers, where he was a season-ticket holder for 10 years, go back to the 1980s. Going back further, he was a ballboy at a Rangers cup final at Hampden – later introduced to owner Sir David Murray by the late Sean Connery, an investment client of his at that time.

It was Mason who was asked to begin making inquiries about who might be willing to invest. ‘I needed to find someone who understood Glasgow and Scotland and football,’ he tells me, from his office in Dubai.

At moments like this, real, intuitive connections – something transcending the merely transactional – are what count. Mason’s network included another exiled Scot – US-based investment banker Les Allan at Californian bank Montminy & Co – who brought new investors together.

‘He instinctively understood the potential,’ Mason says. ‘I was able to push the idea down that line.’ If this deal happens, it will have been Scots helping Scots.

Allan had worked with American health insurance tycoon Andrew Cavenagh on a deal to buy QPR, which had come to nothing. Cavenagh liked Allan’s approach and acute feel for British football. He, in turn, sought partnership and expertise and approached the York family – owners of the 49ers – about them taking a controlling stake.

‘By investing together, you are getting the collective benefit and divesting the risk,’ says Mason. ‘The 49ers bring to the table all the expertise they have in running franchises and that’s gold dust.’

What I am most hearing from insiders who are party to this deal is the huge untapped potential which the investors feel is there, at Ibrox. What might be a £120m deal feels like a steal.

While Rangers labour, Celtic rake in profits year after year because of their superior player trading model, which sees them bring in around £25m for a player almost every summer; their superior recruitment system, which draws on analytics in a way that Rangers’ does not; and their superior merchandising and sponsorship operations.

‘These are precisely the kinds of opportunities that the 49ers have the track record to upgrade,’ Mason tells me. ‘They are into fan engagement, data, stadium. American money understands fan engagement, investment in infrastructure, how to monetise a £50m investment.

‘I think this is an opportunity that allows everything at Rangers to be upgraded. It allows the club to come back to the fore. It’s the culture that makes the money, not the money.’

Several of those I have spoken to point to the work the 49ers have done at Leeds United, top of the Championship with debt reduced by £200m, as a sign of what might be to come if the deal goes ahead.

‘The proof of the pudding seems to be Leeds,’ Mason says. The 49ers’ Paraag Marathe, chairman at Elland Road, has been seen at several Rangers games.

Questions surround whether Scottish regulatory rules preventing owners of one club from owning another might affect the 49ers plans. But sources suggest the deal could be structured to ensure that separate legal entities own Rangers and Leeds. ‘There’s a real will in Scotland for this to happen,’ says one source.

Among those looking on with great interest is Graeme Souness, who returned home to Scotland to manage the club through a glorious period from 1986 to 1991.

‘Any prospective buyer of Glasgow Rangers will quickly understand that they are not just buying a football club – they are buying an institution,’ Souness tells me. ‘If it were to be the 49ers, there’s early talk that that Rangers could be a feeder club for Leeds. 

‘But if they were to take Rangers up a few more rungs, I believe it could the other way around. There’s such huge potential to take this club to another level.’

The harrowing impact of Trump being Putin’s stooge 

A young woman I know has just lost her father to the war in Ukraine.

Just one more of the myriad consequences of the actions of Putin, currently emboldened by his new stooge Trump.

Our obsequious politicians flatter the bully Trump because they fear him. But the US will host a football World Cup and an Olympic Games within the span of his presidency, and he will seek to the bask in the self-reflected glory when he carries his sizeable, perma-tanned presence into stadiums.

Ample opportunity for the crowds there to heap on him the appropriate derision and ridicule which has been so lacking.

Another Dyer performance

No one would say The Football Factory, a film glorifying hooliganism, was a wonderful watch when it screened more than 20 years ago, but its ugly intensity did take you right into that subterranean world.

The long-awaited sequel, Marching Powder, which adds cocaine to the mix, does not befit its hype. It is a film of unremitting dross – crass, foul, repetitive, with desperately judged ‘humour’, offering new evidence of Danny Dyer’s woeful implausibility on the screen. 

The scourge of hooliganism is very much alive and well in this country, for reasons which is way beyond this film to articulate.

What are Cardiff’s real motivations? 

Cardiff City’s six-year legal fight over their liability for the £15million transfer fee agreed with Nantes for the Argentine striker Emiliano Sala, who died in a death trap aircraft carrying him to South Wales, has always been seemed like tawdry, classless money-grabbing.

In the last week, we have had evidence, from Cardiff’s published annual accounts, that it really is all about the money for them.

The club, who will this summer take their fight for the £15m to the Nantes Commercial Court, after rulings against them everywhere else, have earned themselves £12m in advance of that hearing by selling most of the rights to the legal claim to a third party. 

‘An exceptional gain’ is how the accounts of the loss-making club describe this, without the slightest appreciation of the grubbiness.