Three wins in a row would, in most circumstances, be the kind of run that eases pressure on a manager rather than intensifies it. At Rangers, under Derek McInnes, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. According to sources cited by Football Insider, McInnes has been handed four “huge games” by which to prove he can deliver consistent results with this Rangers squad — a run of fixtures that began with Saturday’s 1-0 win over Motherwell and now moves into a period widely regarded inside Ibrox as defining for his immediate future in the job.
It’s a strikingly narrow window for a manager who, on paper, has just extended his winning run to three matches across all competitions. But the context behind that scrutiny explains why goodwill hasn’t translated into security.
McInnes’s Rangers tenure began under difficult circumstances and has stayed difficult for much of the time since. He inherited a squad following Danny Rohl’s departure after a third-place league finish last season — already a source of frustration among a fanbase accustomed to considerably higher standards — and was tasked with rebuilding almost from scratch, a process that eventually produced 14 new signings across the summer window. Results, however, were slow to arrive. A sluggish start to the domestic campaign was compounded by genuinely alarming form in Europe, with Rangers suffering shock defeats to Jagiellonia and Jablonec that eliminated the club from all European competition altogether — a result McInnes himself described as leaving him “mortified” at the time.
That European exit was characterised by sources speaking to Football Insider as nothing short of a “disaster” for the club’s season-long ambitions, and it’s fair to say the fallout has coloured almost everything since. Back-to-back league wins over Aberdeen and Falkirk in the immediate aftermath were welcomed as a step in the right direction, but by Football Insider’s own reporting earlier in the week, those results had done little to fully ease frustrations that built up around the European elimination. Supporters, by multiple accounts, have voiced their unhappiness at Ibrox, and there remains a clear sense that McInnes must prove he can deliver results on a consistent basis rather than in isolated bursts, if he’s to be judged a success in the role.
Saturday’s win over Motherwell was, by Football Insider’s framing, the first of that run of four decisive fixtures — and by most measures, as good a start as McInnes could have hoped for. Ryan Naderi’s early goal, pounced on after a Motherwell goalkeeping error, proved enough to see Rangers home 1-0 and extend the winning run to three games in all competitions, even with the further complication of captain Lawrence Shankland being forced off with what McInnes has since described as a “significant” hamstring injury.
But the games regarded as truly pivotal are still to come. Next up is a Scottish Premiership trip to face St Mirren, a fixture McInnes himself will be forced to watch from the stands having been hit with a touchline ban. That’s followed in short order by a Scottish League Cup quarter-final against Celtic at Ibrox on September 13, and then the Old Firm’s first Premiership meeting of the season at Celtic Park on September 20 — a daunting back-to-back double header against Rangers’ fiercest rivals that will, in all likelihood, do more than any other fixtures this season to shape the wider narrative around McInnes’s position.
Speaking on Football Insider’s Transfer Insider podcast, the outlet’s reporting made clear just how much weight is being attached to that upcoming sequence: results against Motherwell and St Mirren in the league were described as essential, before attention turns to the League Cup meeting with Celtic and the Old Firm derby that follows soon after — a run of fixtures explicitly framed as the barometer by which McInnes’s immediate future will be judged.
Part of what makes McInnes’s situation unusual is the disconnect between his results and the pressure he remains under. Three consecutive wins is objectively good form by almost any standard, and yet Football Insider’s reporting suggests scrutiny on his position is, if anything, set to intensify now that the transfer window has closed and there’s no longer any external factor — incoming signings, deadline-day business, injury-enforced team selection headaches — to draw attention away from pure results on the pitch.
Former Manchester United chief scout Mick Brown, speaking to Football Insider earlier in the week, characterised the situation as one where an overall feeling that McInnes would be given time by the club’s hierarchy exists alongside genuinely high tensions around Ibrox — tensions rooted as much in supporters’ lingering frustration from last season’s underwhelming finish as in this season’s rocky opening months. It’s a dynamic that leaves little margin for error: a club willing to be patient in principle, operating inside a fanbase with a much shorter fuse in practice.
None of this is entirely without precedent for McInnes, whose managerial career has long been defined by exactly this kind of parallel — the sense that a single result against Rangers, or now, in a twist of circumstance, a single result as Rangers manager, tends to be the game he’s judged on. It’s a dynamic that has followed him for years, long before he ever took the Ibrox job himself.
What’s different now is the stakes. A poor sequence of results across the St Mirren fixture and the double-header against Celtic wouldn’t just represent a disappointing week of form — given the framing already being attached to these games by sources close to the club, it would almost certainly reopen serious questions about whether McInnes is the right man to lead Rangers forward, barely months into a tenure that began with genuine optimism after Slot’s title win elsewhere in English football briefly reshaped the managerial market. Conversely, results in Rangers’ favour across all three remaining fixtures — particularly victory in the Old Firm derby itself — would go a considerable way toward settling the argument in his favour, at least for now.
For McInnes, the message from those close to the club appears to be unambiguous: three wins have bought him a stay of judgement rather than a guarantee of security, and the next fortnight — St Mirren away, Celtic at Ibrox in the cup, and Celtic away in the league — will do more to determine his immediate future at the club than anything that has happened so far this season. Rangers supporters, still processing a chastening European exit and a mixed start to the campaign, will be watching those three fixtures as closely as anyone.
