A TOP City analyst believes Mark Warburton will have a tougher time trying to bank trophies with Rangers than he ever did trading billions of pounds in the Square Mile.
The former Brentford boss has been handed a three-year deal by Ibrox chairman Dave King and charged with leading Rangers back to the riches of the Premiership. But he has already proven himself a success in the City of London.
After his playing career was ended prematurely by a cruciate knee injury, the 52-year-old switched tack as he took up a job playing the international FX currency markets. Warburton worked with huge institutions like Bank of America and AIG, before walking away from his last posting at the Royal Bank of Scotland in June 2005 as he decided to give football one last go.
His career switch - which saw him start off coaching Watford's under-nines before moving to Brentford - has now taken him up Ibrox's Marble Staircase and into the Light Blues' manager's office. But Alastair McCaig, a Rangers-supporting market analyst at major City firm IG, thinks Warburton is now about to discover what pressure really feels like.
He said: "I suppose the beauty of being an FX trader is that you are almost anonymous. Sitting behind his desk and working away on the phone, no-one on the outside would know what he looked like. But he won't be able to say the same now that he's at Rangers.
"Let's face it, Glasgow is a goldfish bowl. He's going to find it pretty difficult to get away from things, wherever he goes. He could choose to live in Edinburgh, but there will still be plenty of people who want to share their opinions straight to his face through there. So I think he will probably find managing Rangers is an even harder gig than being a City trader."
In his old career, Warburton would be at his desk by 5.45am each morning. Over the course of a gruelling, high-pressure shift, he would be personally responsible for trades totalling as much as two billion pounds. But McCaig revealed even those eye-watering sums would not put him among the City's fattest cats.
"That's decent-sized," he said. "It's not the top, top transfers, but it is pretty good trading. There would have been plenty of stress associated with it too. It tends to be the higher up the tree you go the closer you get to popping Rennies and Gaviscon like sweeties.
"The thing about the FX markets is that it doesn't just open at 8am and shut at 4.30 pm. It's a 24-hour market and to a certain extent there is no such thing as being off work. The Asian market kicks things off on Sunday evening at 11pm and it doesn't really shut up shop until 11pm Friday, so it can even be six days a week rather than just five. So there can be plenty of stress in that side of the business, depending on what section you're working on.
"I worked at RBS, but not at the same time as Mark, so I don't know exactly what his responsibilities were. But had he been working on the Euro-dollar accounts, that accounts for 25 per cent of the global FX business, which is coming on for six trillion dollars a day. So it's a pretty volatile market.
"The speed which these things move can be quite aggressive. The profit and losses can be seven digits in no time at all.
"If you didn't have your finger on the pulse, it would be relatively easy to see a lot of your hard work over the course of a month, let's say, wiped out in seconds. So Mark will know what pressure is about - but I don't know if it will prepare him for life at the Old Firm."
Glasgow-born McCaig owns a small chunk of Rangers shares and even once opened up a pub near the City with some friends so they would have somewhere to watch the club's European clashes. Now he is keeping his fingers crossed that new chairman King can finally lead the club back to prosperity.
"There's a fair contingent of Rangers fans down here in the City and we've all watched with baited breath to see exactly how Mr King transpires and what actually materialises," he said. "But now I think we're all as optimistic as we've been for a while. The fact there is no-one with the name Green or Whyte about the place is good for a start."
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