Duff & PHELPS have never faced such scrutiny.

In the space of seven weeks, Paul Clark and David Whitehouse have been confronted regularly by television cameras, radio microphones, notepads and, often enough, a grilling. Behind the scenes, they have delved into the kind of complex arrangements that need to be picked apart one by one, often involving court judgements. All the while, they have been aware of the need to sustain the optimism of the Rangers support, which is their only source of income.

As one financial source remarked, "they can't win, even when they're winning". This is Duff & Phelps' first experience of football administration, and the particulars of the industry have been as awkward to come to terms with as the convolutions of Rangers' finances. They have also found themselves being appraised. Supporters are irked at the slow progress, even if the legal cases alone are time consuming, because the accountancy staff charge by the day.

There has been a welcome willingness to keep fans informed, through regular briefings and statements, but occasional contradictions have generated alarm, not least when, during the negotiations with players over wage cuts, the administrators said that the club might not be able to fulfil its fixtures. The warning achieved its aim, with the squad agreeing to wage cuts across the board, but it briefly left supporters wondering what the future held.

In other cases of administration in Scottish football, players were made redundant almost immediately, yet Duff & Phelps pursued this strategy of wage cuts. Their explanation was that they wanted to maintain the competitive integrity of the squad, so that the club would be more attractive to buyers, rather than requiring an immediate investment to restock the team. Also, in England players cannot be made redundant (wage deferrals are more common), and the administrators are an English firm.

According to insolvency experts, Duff & Phelps have mostly handled the process well, with only the occasional miss-step along the way. They have been hostages to fortune, not least the perception at the outset that there was a conflict of interest, since David Grier, a colleague of Clark and Whitehouse, had advised Rangers and Craig Whyte previously. So they felt the need to start on the defensive.

"Being a fellow professional, I'm in a position to criticise what they've done, but I'm not in the seat and I don't have all the knowledge," said one source who works in the insolvency industry. "It's a tough one. They took the job on with a perceived conflict, because they had advised the purchaser. So that was a position of slight weakness. And the very first thing they did was the Daniel Cousin thing."

A club cannot sign players once it has entered administration, but Clark and Whitehouse assured fans that they were attempting to complete the registration of Cousin, who was a free agent, even although there was also an obligation to cut costs. As with much of their approach, at least to the public statements, they were seeking to reassure fans and generate some hope. To an extent it worked, since Ibrox has been sold out for every home match since the club entered administration on February 14, and was all but sold out for a friendly between Rangers Legends and AC Milan Glorie.

"Their general handling of things seems fine," says the source. "The deal they did with the players was the best they could do in the circumstances and I can understand why they did it. I'm not sure the strategy was right, the best thing to do in my view was to do all the redundancies on day one, take away all the uncertainty, generate your siege mentality and get all the costs right down, then make the most of it from there."

An early assertion that an exit from administration might be achieved before March 31 – the deadline for the SFA to grant a UEFA licence – seemed, and turned out to be, generous. Yet the worst that could be said of Duff & Phelps was that they were being too positive, until they then discussed the prospect of liquidation, which alarmed fans.

"There's been so much murkiness and such a lack of transparency that it's very difficult for outsiders to take a realistic view of what's happening," says Maureen Leslie, of the insolvency practitioners, MLM Solutions. "I don't think the [administrators] are dragging their heels unnecessarily. There are issues of huge legal complexity."

Having felt the need to distance themselves from Whyte, their language towards him has been uncompromising. They talked of him being an "irrelevance", despite still being the major shareholder. Some have also been irked by references made about them in statements, and the overall picture seems to be one of trying to drum up as much interest from bidders as possible. Yet their duty is to generate as much money as possible to pay off debts, which is helped by an auction.

"One week they're saying they will never liquidate, then the next week they're saying we might have to," says the source. "There's been a lot of mixed messages. There's a learning curve."

As other administrators have found out the hard way, football is not a conventional business, and so insolvency episodes are also unique. Duff & Phelps would probably admit that they would handle another one using the lessons learned with Rangers.