Martin Bain rose stealthily to power at Rangers.

But Bain’s swift ascent, and the patronage of the club’s owner, meant Rangers fans often remained ambivalent towards him, while others blamed him for the club’s financial predicament.

Bain joined the club’s commercial department in 1996, became a director in 2001, then the director of football business in 2002. Bain proved a ruthless operator, with an intuitive grasp of the unique demands of making business decisions in a football context. In 2005, he became only the fourth man to be appointed Rangers chief executive, having already been dealing with most of the duties of the role.

He worked closely with Alex McLeish, Paul Le Guen and Walter Smith, each of the managers who served alongside him. The Frenchman’s reign was too brief for any relationship to become established, but the two Scots, both of whom are unsentimental figures, speak warmly of Bain’s support and his negotiating skills, particularly on difficult transfers.

But to supporters, he often could not escape the sense of being a Murray placement, a ‘yes’ man to the club’s owner. Some pictures of Bain posing as a model in his younger days emerged, and along with his ever-present suntan, they added to the notion of him being valued by Murray for his pliability rather than his business acumen. The caricature was inaccurate and unfair, but he was always vulnerable to being left as the blame figure because Murray made all the critical decisions himself.

Bain might well have suggested to the Rangers owner that he should curb the club’s spending, but he was effectively powerless to stop Murray. It is only in the recent years of near-crisis that a wider appreciation of Bain’s work has become established, particularly with his insistence that as budgets were slashed, the football department suffered the least disruption.

Without Bain’s hard-headedness, Smith would have had fewer resources to work with, something the Rangers manager made a point of praising as he departed after winning his third consecutive title. Bain has also attempted to tackle sectarian singing, playing a leading role in the Pride Over Prejudice campaign that was commended by Uefa and so reduced some of the punishments imposed on the club for supporter behaviour during European matches.

There were controversies, too, though and Bain reacted to criticism of The Famine Song, a racist anti-Irish chant that Rangers fans briefly adopted in 2008 by saying: “Some of our supporters feel aggrieved that a song they believe to be no more than a ‘wind-up’ should be singled out.” When Rangers were disciplined by Uefa again last season, he tempered his rebuke of the fans by adding that he felt the club was being unfairly persecuted, a stance that seemed to pander to a grievance among the support.

Bain also launched a legal action against a French newspaper that claimed he received money from an agent that related to Jean-Alain Boumsong’s move to Ibrox in 2004. Bain denied any wrong-doing and the money was said to be part of the private purchase of a property in France that was once owned by a player who was also a client of the same agent.

It has been a challenging 15 years at the club, involving success, failure, largesse and near financial collapse, but nobody could claim that Bain ever acted with anything other than Rangers’ best interests.