PEDRO Mendes helped get him get his foot in the Ibrox front door. But after that it was all down to Pedro Caixinha.

The 16th manager of Rangers is hardly a household name of world football - Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers for one said last week that he had never heard of him - but it was left to Stewart Robertson, the Ibrox side's managing director, yesterday to piece together a recruitment process which alighted with a Qatari-based 46-year-old former goalkeeper from Portugal who had never previously worked in British football.

While the signing saga seems to have dragged on for ages, Robertson - part of the three-man selection panel tasked by chairman Dave King and the board with finding the successor to Mark Warburton - said they had known within maybe half an hour of sitting down with the Al-Gharafa head coach that he was the man for the job. The managing director insisted there was nothing untoward about the fact that as of yesterday Caixinha had yet to speak to the club's South African based supremo, with no meeting between the two men scheduled imminently.

Gut feel or not, that first half an hour in Caixinha's company was enough to suggest to Robertson that the 46-year-old possesses the strength of character which this job demands, the kind displayed by some of the more august previous occupants of the Ibrox manager's office. It was an assessment which was only reinforced when the club did their due diligence.

“Sometimes it can happen quite quickly and you just think ‘I like the cut of this guy’s jib’," said Robertson. "I can’t remember exactly how long into it, but certainly his passion came through right away and hopefully you’ve seen them that here today. It wasn't minutes, it took a bit more than that, maybe half an hour or so. But you then have to back it up with your references and take independent views on him. We did a lot of that.

“Pedro's was the first opinion we got," Robertson added. "At the back of that, we decided to have a conversation and see where it went from there. He [Mendes] is an intelligent guy whose football opinion you would respect. But that only gets you through the door, it doesn’t get you the rest of the way down the path.

"Strength of character is a key thing you need to be the manager of Rangers. I’ve seen that in our great managers of the past – whether it be Walter Smith, Jock Wallace, Graeme Souness – they’ve all had a strong character. You need that to make your mark at a club like Rangers. I know there has been a bit of criticism over how long it has taken us to do this. But the reality is that to take four weeks for what is the key job at the club, to get the right man, I don’t think is too long."

One native coach will be appointed to help Caixinha with the transition to Scottish football, in keeping with a methodology the Portuguese has used in his previous foreign jobs. And then there is the club's pursuit of a director of football or sporting director, a process which reached something of an impasse when Ross Wilson decided he was staying at Southampton. As much as the 46-year-old claimed that his was the "strongest squad in Scotland", 33 points is quite a margin and time is tight when you consider the scale of the rebuilding job which must be done on this squad this summer. John Park, who liaised with Caixinha during his time at Santos Laguna in Mexico, could be one alternative contender, although Alex McLeish continues to be linked with the post.

“That is a process which will continue," said Robertson. "We were starting to look at a restructuring of the football department even prior to the previous management team leaving. So events overtook that and we had to react to it.

"It became more important to get Pedro in, get him established," he added. "We will work away on the director of football in the background. I’d rather get the right person than set a two or three week deadline for it.

“Can I just say, on the director of football, it’s not an older manager peering over the shoulder of a younger manager. It’s someone coming in who is going to help with the recruitment and the scouting and the other aspects of the football department, allowing Pedro to get on with the coaching. It’s not the classic sense of what a director of football is. Maybe the title is Sporting Director, if you’re looking at it. Does it have to be a former player? Absolutely not.”

On the subject of squad rebuilding, although noticeably short on specifics, assurances and guarantees have been sought between the head coach and the board about a level of investment. Robertson said yesterday that these would be unaffected by yesterday's boardroom development which saw the Takeover Appeal Board (TAB) rule that King was acting as a concert party with the three bears (George Letham, George Taylor and Douglas Park) when acquiring shares in Rangers International Football Club two years back and was such obliged to offer to buy all the other shares of RIFC at 20p a share.

“I don’t think it will have any affect at all," said Robertson. "That’s a regulatory process that has to be gone through. Dave has put a statement out but that will not impact on any process moving forward.

“There will be investment there," he added. "We are going to strengthen the squad but I’m not putting numbers on it. You would question any potential manager coming into the club who didn’t ask you that question."