How much does Bill Miller know about the trials that lie in wait?

Chief football writer

Monday 7 May 2012

IT isn't difficult to imagine Bill Miller's family, pals, colleagues and employees waiting until the old fella leaves the room before turning to one another and asking what on earth's going on in his head.

Rangers supporters raised on a winning team may not accept mediocrity. Picture: Stewart Attwood

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Michael Grant on Monday

What could entice a 65-year-old NASCAR fan, nowadays described as semi-retired and chilling out in the Fort Lauderdale sunshine, to immerse himself in the chaos of a loss-making football club 4000 miles away? It's not as if he can simply plunge £11m into Rangers for the fun of it and secure the undying adulation of their supporters. They'll soon want more. Rangers are as needy as a spoilt rich kid.

Now that he has his foot in the door, and has his people doing due diligence on the accounts, Miller may be as likely to feel a sudden chill and back out of this deal altogether as he is to plough on with it. If it turns out the club is in a bigger mess than he'd realised, or the SFA and SPL take tougher lines on punishment than he had anticipated (although Kilmarnock's Michael Johnston isn't the only chairman willing to sell sporting integrity down the river when they discuss sanctions today), Miller has the right to withdraw his bid or reduce its value to the point that Duff & Phelps can no longer endorse it. But let's cross that bridge if it comes. For now, let's assume Miller gets Rangers.Everyone's in the early days of forming an opinion about him. The consensus is that he's a straight enough guy, hard-nosed and pragmatic with no track record of flamboyance or risk-taking. His business record seems pretty transparent. There aren't lost years or a foggy confusion about how he made his money. No-one has pinned down exactly what he's worth, but it is fair to say that he is comfortably rich enough to buy Rangers and not so loaded that he can do so without noticing an £11m-sized hole in his wealth.Miller has bought into foreign companies before but he's never come across like an Andrew Carnegie, looking around for charity cases to help out. Buying Rangers looks impulsive and out of character, a project that has somehow caught the imagination of a guy with time on his hands and some cash burning a hole in his pocket. By now he will perhaps have seen footage of 180,000 fans hitting Manchester in 2008, or capacity crowds in full voice at Ibrox, and felt himself getting hooked on a cultural phenomenon. "I don't need or desire to see my name in headlines," Miller has said. If he does execute this takeover, he can be as high or low profile with Rangers as he chooses. Dermot Desmond has been hands-off to the media from day one at Celtic and coverage of him is minimal. Miller isn't going to be uprooting himself from Florida to Govan, so it will be all about the management team – chief executive and directors – he puts together at the coalface. He'll need people who know how football works, because Rangers' transfer dealings and registration work under Whyte were a mess.But meeting expectations will be down to one man and one man alone. If Miller's people are advising him properly they'll tell him how demanding Rangers supporters will be. It won't take long for the gratitude to dilute, for the cries to turn from 'You're the man, Bill' to 'Hey Miller, get spending'. The Old Firm's financial model these days is this: qualify for the Champions League group = big profit, qualify for the Europa League group = small profit, no Europe = losses. Miller won't have European football for his first three years at a club which currently loses £10m a year. He has been clear about the need for a "disciplined business approach", "strict" adherence to budgets and even the likelihood of Rangers re-entering administration unless there are "significant" changes to the business. In other words, cuts, cuts, cuts. Good players leaving and poorer ones arriving. Miller wants to save Rangers, but then to brutally re-educate them.This has been the first season in which Rangers have suffered on the park. The money ran out three years ago, but Walter Smith kept delivering titles. What happens if Rangers finish behind Celtic again next season, and the season after that, and the season after that? Celtic's financial superiority should take them to four-in-a-row before Rangers play their next game in Europe. And gradually that will start to seem like Miller's fault. Survival and stability isn't going to come without mediocrity and competitive decline. How will Miller, by then nearing 70, react to criticism? If his gameplan is an eventual share issue to recoup his initial investment and leave the club in some form of fan ownership, will there be a mood to reward him from a generation of supporters with no experience of watching an uncompetitive Rangers?People ask about Miller's motives but other issues are just as significant: how easy will it be to adapt to an owner who won't address every problem by throwing money (his own or other people's) at it? And how long will the novelty of owning Rangers seem like a fun idea?

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How much does Bill Miller know about the trials that lie in wait?

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