After falling in love with Rangers, I dream of returning to manage the club one day

There’s a particular kind of love that football gives you, one that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t come with an off-switch. It arrives sometimes through blood — a father’s scarf, a grandmother’s stories, a family tree with blue running through it — and sometimes it arrives from nowhere at all, a single moment that reaches into you and simply doesn’t let go. However it happened for me, the effect has been the same: falling for Rangers wasn’t a decision I made so much as something that happened to me, and once it happened, it never really stopped happening. Somewhere along the way, that love stopped being just about watching and started becoming about wanting — wanting to be part of it, not from the stands, but from the touchline. The dream, when I let myself say it out loud, is simple and enormous at once: I want to manage Rangers one day.

I think most football dreams like this one begin the same way — not with ambition, but with wonder. There’s a version of this story that plays out in stadiums all over the world, in front of different badges and different colours, but the shape of it is universal. A young mind, not yet cluttered with the practicalities of adult life, watches grown men chase a ball around a green rectangle and somehow understands, instinctively, that something important is happening. For me, that something important had Ibrox’s name on it.

I remember, or think I remember — memory has a way of polishing these things over time — the first moment the size of the club actually registered. Not the trophies, not the history lessons about nine-in-a-row or the club’s place in Scottish football’s DNA, but something smaller and more human: the way a whole stand of people could move together, breathe together, roar together, all because of the same team wearing the same colours. There’s something almost primal about that kind of collective feeling, and once you’ve felt it, you understand why people build their identities around it. I built mine around Rangers.

What followed wasn’t casual fandom. It rarely is, once it takes proper hold. It became appointment viewing, then obsession, then something closer to devotion — reading match reports long after the final whistle had blown, learning not just the current squad but the history behind the badge, understanding why certain fixtures carried more weight than others, why some results mattered in ways that went beyond three points. Somewhere in that process, the club stopped being something I watched and became something I was part of, in whatever small way a supporter can be part of something so much bigger than themselves.

There’s a specific moment in a lot of football-obsessed lives where watching stops satisfying the itch entirely. For some people, that moment translates into playing — getting boots on, joining a team, chasing the game for themselves rather than through a screen or from the terraces. For others, myself very much included, the itch takes a different, stranger shape: not the desire to play the game, necessarily, but the desire to shape it. To stand on the touchline and make the decisions. To be the person other people look to when things go well and, just as importantly, when they don’t.

I won’t pretend that dream arrived fully formed, with a clear five-year plan attached to it. It didn’t. It arrived the way most big dreams do — quietly, almost embarrassingly, tucked away somewhere I didn’t say out loud for a long time because it felt too big, too unlikely, too much like the kind of thing you’re supposed to grow out of once real life sets in. But it never quite left. Every time I watched a Rangers manager stand in that technical area — win, lose, or draw — some part of me was imagining what it would feel like to be the one standing there instead. Not out of arrogance, and not because I thought I somehow knew better than the people who’ve actually done the job. Just because some part of me recognised, watching them, a version of what I wanted for myself.

There’s a particular kind of difficulty that comes with a dream this specific. If I’d simply said “I want to manage football somewhere, someday,” the path would feel more open, more forgiving, less fraught with the particular anxiety that comes from caring about one outcome above almost any other. But that’s not the shape my dream takes. It isn’t “a club.” It’s this club. It’s Ibrox, specifically. It’s that crest, that history, that support. And wanting something that specific means also accepting something uncomfortable: the odds are genuinely long, the path is genuinely narrow, and there’s a real possibility that no matter what I do, it simply doesn’t happen. Not everyone who dreams of managing a club they love gets to. Football is not sentimental in that particular way, however sentimental it can be in others.

And yet I don’t think that difficuly is a reason to let the dream go quiet. If anything, I think dreams like this one are worth more precisely because they’re hard — because they demand something of you, because they can’t simply be wished into existence, because getting anywhere close to them requires building something real, brick by brick, over years rather than moments. A dream that costs you nothing to hold isn’t really a dream at all. It’s just a preference. This one has cost me plenty already, in the quiet, unglamorous sense of every hour spent thinking about the game differently than a fan usually does — not just “will we win,” but “why are we set up this way,” “what would I do differently,” “how would I handle that press conference, that substitution, that half-time team talk.”

It’s worth being honest about the practical shape of this dream, because dreams that stay purely abstract have a way of remaining exactly that — abstract, distant, permanently “someday.” The road to managing a club like Rangers, for almost everyone who isn’t a decorated former player with an obvious playing pedigree already opening doors, runs through years of unglamorous, often invisible work.

It starts with coaching badges — the UEFA C, the B, eventually the A and the Pro Licence, each one a genuine test of football knowledge, tactical understanding, and the ability to actually communicate ideas to players rather than simply hold them in your own head. It continues through jobs that have nothing to do with Ibrox at all — youth team roles, assistant positions, spells at clubs far removed from the spotlight, learning the trade in rooms with far fewer cameras and far less glory than the one you’re ultimately dreaming about. Scottish football’s recent managerial landscape offers a useful, humbling reminder of this: even a figure with a boyhood connection to Rangers, someone who’d actually played for the club, spent years managing elsewhere first — building a reputation gradually, taking jobs at clubs outside the traditional spotlight, absorbing lessons the hard way, long before Ibrox ever became a realistic possibility rather than a private hope.

That’s the part of the dream that doesn’t get romanticised in the daydream version. It’s easy to imagine standing in that technical area on derby day, the crowd roaring, the tension in the air. It’s much harder to imagine the version of the path that gets you there — the early mornings at a training ground nobody’s watching, the setbacks that come from a job that didn’t work out, the years spent proving yourself in contexts that feel a very long way from the one you actually care about. But I think that’s precisely the point. The dream is real precisely because the path to it isn’t easy, isn’t guaranteed, and isn’t romantic in the way daydreams usually are. If it were simple, it wouldn’t mean nearly as much.

Part of what makes this dream feel less like fantasy and more like something worth actually pursuing is watching how it’s actually played out for others — the managers who’ve stood in that technical area having once been exactly where I am now, on the outside, loving the club before ever being trusted to lead it. There’s something genuinely instructive in that, if you pay attention to it properly rather than just admiring it from a distance.

What strikes me most, watching those stories unfold, isn’t the moment of appointment itself — the press conference, the photograph in the new tracksuit, the declaration that this is “a boyhood dream” or “a real honour.” It’s everything that came before that moment, the years of work that made the appointment possible in the first place rather than simply desirable. A manager doesn’t get handed a club like this one because they loved it as a child. They get trusted with it because, somewhere along the way, they proved — through results, through the way they build a team, through the way they handle both praise and criticism — that they’re capable of carrying something that heavy. The love is necessary. It’s clearly not sufficient on its own.

That’s a distinction I try to hold onto, because it would be easy to let the emotional part of this dream — the part that’s really just about how much the club means to me — crowd out the practical part, the part that requires actually becoming good enough, credentialed enough, experienced enough, to be trusted with it. Love gets you to the door. It doesn’t open it. Only genuine competence, built patiently over years, does that

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a quieter, less comfortable feeling sitting underneath all of this — something close to fear, if I’m honest about it. Not fear of failing to get there, exactly, though that’s part of it. Something closer to the fear of what it might mean if I did get there, and it didn’t go well.

There’s a particular kind of vulnerability in loving something this much and then putting yourself in a position where that same thing could hurt you in a very public, very permanent way. Managers who take charge of clubs they support carry an extra weight that outsiders don’t — every defeat isn’t just a professional setback, it’s a wound to something personal, something that’s been part of your identity since long before the job title ever existed. I’ve thought about that a lot, turning it over, wondering whether wanting this so specifically is wise or whether it’s setting myself up for a particular kind of pain that a more detached manager, one without the emotional history, simply wouldn’t have to carry.

But I keep landing in the same place: I think that vulnerability, uncomfortable as it is, might actually be part of what would make me good at it, if I ever got the chance. The managers who’ve meant the most to this club, historically, haven’t been the emotionally distant ones. They’ve been the ones who understood, in their bones, what a result meant to the people in the stands — because they’d once been one of those people themselves, feeling exactly what the supporters feel, carrying exactly that history into every matchday. That understanding doesn’t guarantee success. Plenty of boyhood fans have taken charge of the clubs they loved and it hasn’t worked out, results going against them just as they would against anyone. But I don’t think the love is the problem, when it doesn’t work out. I think it’s usually just football being football — unsentimental, unpredictable, unwilling to reward good intentions on their own

I try, sometimes, to imagine the specific moment — not the press conference, not the tracksuit, but something smaller and more private. Walking into that stadium for the first time not as a supporter making my way to a seat, but as the person responsible for what happens on that pitch. I imagine it would feel less like arriving somewhere new and more like finally being let properly into a room I’d been standing outside for years, watching through the window, loving what I saw without ever quite being allowed in.

I think that’s really what “coming home” would mean, in this specific case. Not simply working at a football club — plenty of jobs in the game could offer that, at plenty of clubs, and I don’t take that lightly, because there’s genuine meaning in coaching anywhere, at any level, working with any group of players trying to get better. But this particular dream isn’t really about coaching football in the abstract. It’s about a specific relationship, one that started before I had any say in the matter, one that’s shaped how I think about loyalty, about identity, about what it means to belong to something bigger than yourself. Managing Rangers wouldn’t just be a job, if it ever happened. It would be the closing of a loop that opened the very first time I fell for this club, whenever and however that

If there’s one thing I’ve had to learn, sitting with this dream for as long as I have, it’s how to hold it without letting it become the only thing that matters. There’s a version of chasing a dream this specific that curdles into something unhealthy — where every setback along the way feels catastrophic, where every year that passes without visible progress feels like proof the dream was always unrealistic, where the distance between where I am and where I want to be becomes a source of constant quiet unhappiness rather than motivation.

I try, instead, to hold it more lightly than that, even while taking the practical steps toward it seriously. To let the dream be a direction rather than a deadline. To find genuine satisfaction in the work itself — in learning the game more deeply, in whatever coaching or football-adjacent experience I manage to accumulate along the way, in simply getting better at understanding the sport I love — rather than treating all of that work as merely instrumental, valuable only insofar as it might eventually lead to Ibrox. Because if it doesn’t, if the specific dream never quite arrives in the specific form I picture it, I don’t want to look back on the years spent working toward it and feel like they were wasted. I want them to have been worth something on their own terms, regardless of where they ultimately lead.

So I keep it. Quietly, mostly — the kind of thing you mention out loud only occasionally, to people you trust not to laugh at its size or its unlikeliness. I keep learning the game, keep watching not just as a supporter but as someone trying to understand the decisions being made, the patterns behind them, the reasoning a manager might have for a substitution or a formation change that looks strange in the moment but makes sense in hindsight. I keep an eye on the paths other people have walked to get where I want to go, taking what lessons I can from them, understanding that love alone was never going to be enough, but knowing too that without the love, none of the rest of it would feel worth pursuing in the first place.

Maybe it happens. Maybe, somewhere down the years, after all the badges and the unglamorous jobs and the slow accumulation of whatever credibility the game actually rewards, I find myself standing in that technical area, in Rangers colours, on the biggest day of the football calendar, carrying not just a tactical plan but an entire lifetime of feeling for this club into every decision I make. Or maybe it doesn’t, and the dream stays exactly that — a dream, something that shaped how I thought about the game and myself without ever quite arriving in the form I imagined.

Either way, I don’t think I’d trade having it. Some dreams are worth holding onto not because they’re guaranteed, or even likely, but because of what wanting them, and working toward them, makes of you along the way. Falling in love with Rangers gave me that. Whatever comes of the dream itself, I don’t think I’ll ever regret having let myself want it this much.