Rangers Chairman Andrew Cavenagh Reflects on Disappointing Season
Andrew Cavenagh leans back, considers the wreckage of a season without a single trophy, and does not flinch.
“Rangers occupies 150% of my thoughts,” the chairman says. It sounds like a line, but after a year like this, it feels more like a confession.
A year ago this weekend, Rangers heralded a new era. A consortium of investors, fronted by the American businessman and backed by 49ers Enterprises, took a majority stake in the club and spoke the language every support wants to hear: ambition, structure, success. Twelve months on, the trophy cabinet is untouched and the mood is raw.
The numbers are stark. Up to £40m spent on players. Three senior football figures removed. No silverware.
Russell Martin arrived as head coach in June and was gone by October. The clear-out continued in the boardroom, with chief executive Patrick Stewart and sporting director Kevin Thelwell both departing the following month. Stability never had a chance to settle in.
Danny Röhl’s appointment briefly changed the weather. Under the new boss, Rangers dragged themselves back into the title race, showing enough resilience to suggest something more lasting was forming. Then the run-in hit. They lost four of their final five games and any sense of momentum evaporated.
Cavenagh has not tried to sugar-coat it. He has already called it an “incredibly disappointing” campaign, one that “has left a terrible taste in everyone’s mouths”. He knows exactly how that sounds to a support that has lived through false dawns and failed rebuilds.
So did the scale of the failure ever make him question why he stepped into this?
“No, is the answer,” he says.
“This club gets into you at the molecular level. And, once it's done, you're done. It's happened to me and a bunch of us.
“I don't ever want to use the words ‘enjoy’ or ‘fun’ because you can't have a season like we've had and use those words.
“But the challenge is something I relish and Paraag [Marathe] relishes with the rest of us.
“The disappointment this year is very real for us, but all it's done is provide motivation for us going forward.”
That is the line he keeps returning to: pain as fuel. Cavenagh talks about this season’s failure not as a scar to hide, but as something that “will spur us on to where we want to get to” and “make success sweeter” if and when it comes.
He has not tried to manage the crisis from behind glass, either. Over the course of the campaign, he has made a point of engaging publicly with match-going supporters, including at the final fixture of the season away to Falkirk. It is not a risk-free approach when emotions run this high, but he appears to welcome the friction.
“My conversations with our supporters, I've really come to enjoy,” he says.
“Someone told me I should get to know them on a one-by-one basis. At Falkirk, that probably wasn't the right medium to do that.
“But whether it's in the stands or the streets, we all share certain things like the ambition to win and the understanding that we're not good enough.
“The common goal is the same so there's common ground in those conversations even if there are disagreements over methods.”
That last line cuts to the heart of Rangers’ next phase. The ambition is not in doubt. The investment is on the record. The anger in the stands has been heard up close. The question now is whether Cavenagh and his reshaped hierarchy can turn that “molecular” attachment into something more tangible than words and regret, and do it quickly enough for a support that has run out of patience with projects and promises.
