McGeady Names One Reason Why Rangers Board Could Be Forced To Sack McInnes After What’s Happened

There’s a particular kind of pressure that builds around a football club when spending and results stop lining up, and Aiden McGeady believes Rangers are now sitting right at the point where that pressure becomes impossible for the board to ignore. Speaking on the Go Football Radio Show alongside Mark Guidi, the former Celtic winger laid out, in blunt terms, exactly why Derek McInnes’ position at Ibrox could become untenable if results don’t turn around quickly — and it has nothing to do with reputation, history, or goodwill, and everything to do with the sheer scale of money the Rangers board has already committed to backing him.

McGeady’s argument is straightforward and, on the surface, difficult to dispute. Rangers have just been through a record summer of spending in the Scottish Premiership, shelling out more than £35 million on transfer fees alone, with thirteen players arriving at Ibrox during what McInnes himself has described as the most demanding transfer window of his managerial career. The two most eye-catching arrivals — South Korean winger Kim Min-su from Girona and striker Kevin Kelsy, a deal reported to be worth £9.5 million — rounded off a summer of recruitment that has fundamentally reshaped this Rangers squad in a matter of weeks.

For McGeady, that level of financial commitment changes the entire conversation around accountability. “For me, though, at some point something’s got to give,” he said. “I know you say you can’t keep changing managers, but what are the board going to say when they’ve spent that amount of money” and results still haven’t followed. It’s a question posed almost rhetorically, because the implied answer is obvious: a board that has just written cheques totalling over £35 million is not going to sit back indefinitely and watch that investment fail to produce results on the pitch, regardless of how uncomfortable another managerial change so soon after the last one might be.

What makes McGeady’s intervention particularly interesting is that he doesn’t stop at simply calling for accountability from McInnes individually — he widens the lens to take in the club’s entire recent managerial history, and it’s here that his comments carry real weight. “But equally, Rangers can’t keep changing managers,” he said. “The fans need to accept it as well, it’s not the Rangers of 25/30 years ago, and nine in a row, and Dick Advocaat. It’s one title in 15 years.” That’s a genuinely uncomfortable historical marker to lay out in public, but it’s also an accurate one, and it frames the current situation not as an isolated crisis specific to McInnes but as the latest chapter in a much longer pattern of instability at Ibrox.

McGeady pushed the point further still, arguing that the recurring cycle of hiring and firing managers has become, in itself, part of the problem rather than the solution. “At some point you have to say ‘okay, as a football club what do we need to do to arrest the decline?'” he continued. “Because it can’t always be down to the manager, there’s been some top managers in the door and they’ve fired them all. So, it’s about the football club and what they do as a business and what they do on the park on a Saturday.” It’s a rare pundit take that manages to simultaneously build the case for why McInnes could be sacked while also questioning whether sacking him would actually solve anything, and that tension is exactly what makes this such a defining moment for the club’s hierarchy as much as for the manager himself.

To understand why this conversation is happening at all, barely a handful of games into McInnes’ tenure, it’s worth setting out exactly what’s gone wrong since he arrived at Ibrox. Rangers have dropped out of European competition altogether, losing 1-0 on the night to Czech side Jablonec in their Conference League play-off round tie before being eliminated 4-3 on penalties, with Findlay Curtis and James Penrice both missing their spot-kicks in the shootout. That result alone would have generated significant scrutiny on its own, but it followed an already underwhelming start domestically, with Rangers failing to convince in the Scottish Premiership even as scrappy, hard-fought wins at Aberdeen and Falkirk eased some of the immediate pressure.

Those two wins matter, and it would be wrong to characterise this as a Rangers side losing every game they play. But the manner of both victories — a penalty-decided 1-0 at Pittodrie and a nervy 2-1 at Falkirk rescued by a Lawrence Shankland brace — has done little to convince supporters or pundits that this Rangers side is playing anything close to the level its summer investment should demand. McInnes has, by his own admission, won just two of his opening seven games in charge, a record that would be considered troubling at almost any club, let alone one that just spent a club-record-adjacent sum on a single striker and backed its new manager with a baker’s dozen of fresh faces.

McGeady’s comments arrive at a moment that McInnes himself appears to recognise as pivotal. September brings with it two fixtures against Old Firm rivals Celtic — one in the Scottish League Cup, one in the Scottish Premiership — fixtures that carry outsized significance regardless of the broader context, but which take on even greater weight given the questions already swirling around McInnes’ position. A poor set of results in those two derbies, layered on top of the European exit and the underwhelming performances against Aberdeen and Falkirk, would make it considerably harder for the Rangers board to maintain the patient stance they’ve adopted so far.

That patience, for what it’s worth, does appear genuine, at least according to sources close to the situation. One report from earlier in September suggested it was unlikely the board would part ways with McInnes so early into the season, “especially after 12 new signings this summer,” with the added context that while transfers at Ibrox are typically a collaborative effort between manager and recruitment department, McInnes has had considerable influence over the incoming business this summer. Sacking him barely weeks after backing him so heavily in the market would, as multiple observers have pointed out, represent an admission from the club’s decision-makers that their own judgement in appointing him and sanctioning that spending was flawed — hardly a flattering position for a board to find itself in, and exactly the kind of scenario McGeady’s wider point about “changing managers” over and over again is designed to highlight.

It’s worth giving proper weight to the counterargument here, because it’s not simply reactionary supporters or pundits demanding blood after a difficult start. There’s a considered case being made in several corners of the Scottish football media that sacking McInnes now would be a serious overreaction, one rooted in short-termism rather than sound footballing logic. As one assessment of the situation put it in the aftermath of the Jablonec exit: “None of this means Rangers should sack McInnes immediately. In fact, doing so now could create an even bigger mess. He needs more time to establish his squad and implement his methods. A managerial change this early in the season would represent another admission that the club’s long-term planning has failed.”

That same assessment, though, was careful to draw a clear distinction between patience and blank-cheque tolerance: “But there is a difference between giving a manager time and giving him unlimited time. McInnes now needs results quickly.” It’s a nuanced position, and one that essentially agrees with the substance of McGeady’s warning even while resisting the idea that the axe should fall immediately — McInnes has been backed, meaningfully and expensively, which means responsibility for turning results around sits squarely with him, but there’s still a recognition that wholesale squad rebuilds take time to bed in, particularly with thirteen new faces needing to gel in a matter of weeks.

Central to McGeady’s argument, and to the wider debate around McInnes’ position, is the simple fact that this is not a manager who can point to a threadbare squad or a lack of resources as an excuse for poor results. Quite the opposite: McInnes has been backed as extensively as almost any Rangers manager in recent memory, given the funds to reshape his squad from front to back. Kelsy’s arrival for a fee in the region of £9.5 million makes him the second-most expensive signing in Rangers’ history, trailing only Tore André Flo’s £12 million move from Chelsea back in 2000, while Kim’s move from Girona brought a further significant outlay to bring in a player many have already identified as one of the more exciting technical talents to arrive at Ibrox in recent seasons.

Add in the further reinforcements that made up the rest of that thirteen-player intake, and it becomes very difficult for anyone — supporters, pundits, or the man himself — to argue that McInnes hasn’t been given the tools to succeed. That’s precisely the dynamic McGeady is pointing to when he talks about the board’s likely thinking: this isn’t a case of a manager working with somebody else’s broken squad and no resources, as one assessment bluntly put it. He has been backed. That means responsibility inevitably sits with him, and it’s exactly why the board’s patience, however genuine right now, has a shelf life attached to it

There’s a slightly uncomfortable historical resonance to all of this for anyone who has followed Rangers and Scottish football closely over the years. Managerial upheaval at Ibrox is nothing new, and pundits have been making versions of McGeady’s argument — that the club’s board, not just its managers, needs to take responsibility for a pattern of instability — for the best part of a decade. Former striker John Hartson made a strikingly similar point years ago during a different managerial crisis at a Scottish club, arguing that “it’s easy to blame the manager and point the finger at the players but it is the decision makers who are at fault,” and questioning why the people responsible for appointing managers who ultimately fail are so rarely held accountable themselves.

McGeady’s comments fit into that same lineage of criticism, but with a specific modern twist: rather than simply arguing the board bears responsibility in the abstract, he’s pointing directly at the financial commitment made this specific summer as the mechanism that will ultimately force their hand. It’s not really moral or philosophical accountability he’s describing — it’s the far more concrete, unavoidable kind that comes when a business has spent tens of millions of pounds and needs to be able to justify that outlay to itself, to its shareholders, and to a fanbase that has watched successive rebuilds fail to deliver sustained success

For McInnes personally, the picture painted by McGeady’s comments is about as clear a piece of pressure as a manager could receive without an explicit ultimatum from his own board. He knows, as multiple reports have confirmed, that he’s entering a defining period — one where a difficult September against Celtic in two competitions, layered on top of an already underwhelming start, could crystallise exactly the kind of financial accountability McGeady is describing. Kris Boyd’s blunt assessment of Rangers’ “pub team” performance against Jablonec, and the broader wave of criticism that followed, only adds to the sense that patience, while still present, is being tested in real time with every passing fixture.

The bind McInnes finds himself in is a peculiar one: he has been given almost everything a manager could ask for in terms of resources, and yet that very generosity is what now makes his position more precarious rather than less. A manager working with a threadbare squad can point to circumstances beyond his control when results don’t come. A manager who has just overseen £35 million of spending and thirteen new arrivals has no such shelter. Every poor result gets filtered through the lens of “is this money being well spent,” and as McGeady’s comments make clear, that’s a question the Rangers board is going to have to answer for itself sooner rather than later if results don’t start matching the outlay.

McGeady’s warning isn’t really a prediction that McInnes will definitely be sacked — it’s a diagnosis of the mechanism by which he could be, should results continue in their current underwhelming vein. The reason is as simple as it is unforgiving: Rangers’ board has spent record money backing this manager, and record spending, in modern football, tends to compress the timeline for patience rather than extend it. Whether or not McInnes ultimately survives this defining stretch of fixtures will likely come down to results against Celtic and Motherwell over the coming weeks, but McGeady’s underlying point — that the board’s own financial commitment has effectively set the terms of McInnes’ accountability — is difficult to argue with. Rangers can’t keep changing managers forever, as McGeady himself acknowledges, but they also can’t spend £35 million and simply hope things work out. Something, sooner or later, has to give.