GRAEME SOUNESS has criticised the Rangers chairman Dave King for making promises to the supporters he was never going to be in a position to fulfil.
King famously pledged, not long after gaining control at Ibrox, to invest £30million of his own money to get his club back to the level where Celtic currently are, a move which has not been forthcoming, and while the owner has toned down his rhetoric in recent times, many of his previous declarations continue to haunt him.
Souness, who has never met the South African-based businessman, felt the support should have been given a clearer picture of the financial situation instead of being fed soundbites about 'warchests' and claims King would “spend whatever it takes” to make up ground on their former rivals, only for Mark Warburton to be handed a fraction of the sums mentioned during the last transfer window.
The former manager at Ibrox remains frustrated that a consortium he was heavily involved with narrowly failed to buy the club in 2012, when the group fronted by Charles Green took over, and insisted had he been successful then he would have been brutally honest about the lack of money available at that time.
Souness said: “If you make promises to football supporters it makes life doubly difficult if you don’t keep them.
“Along with Brian Kennedy we were very close, we actually thought we had it. There was going to be a hard sell, that’s one of the things we were going to say on day one; ‘This is not going to be a short or easy road, there’s a long way to get it back anywhere near where you want it to be because you can’t spend money you don’t have.
“That was the message we’d have put across on day one and every day we would have needed to say it.
“Where the problem arises for Rangers supporters now is if the owner has come out and said he’s going to put money in and he hasn’t. Then he’s caused himself a problem.”
There are many Rangers supporters who would like to see Souness return to the club in some capacity but it’s not something the man himself could envisage.
He said: “It’s hard to see what I could offer other than if the manager wanted to speak to me about if things weren’t going well or what I thought on something.
“I only ever worked with one director of football and it worked for me. That was at Southampton with Lawrie McMenemy. We had a great relationship.
“I don’t see that being a successful arrangement. There’s always that element of being over-ruled if you are a manager. I don’t see that as a very attractive position for anyone.
Souness insisted he does not think of what might have been had he and Kennedy, the Scots-born former owner of Sale Sharks rugby club, been able to finalise the deal which would have seen them running Rangers.
Indeed, the three-time European Cup winner with Liverpool is happy to be out of football, albeit he is a regular pundit on television.
He said: “It’s easy now, I can just talk about it and go home, have my dinner, a glass of wine, put my head on the pillow and fall asleep.”
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