Daniel Lewis

Mon 2 October 2023 21:50, UK

Dave MacKinnon has urged Rangers to appoint Graeme Souness to help select their next manager following the sacking of Michael Beale.

Rangers brought an end to Beale’s 10-month reign on Sunday [1 September] after making a slow start to the 2023-24 campaign.

As the Light Blues begin their search for a fourth different manager in two years, former player MacKinnon wants someone with more football knowledge to have a say in the appointment.

“It’s all about the process for me,” he told PLZ Soccer [2 October]. “I heard Frank Lampard’s name being bandied about yesterday. I think that’s a commercial decision, where they’d bring in someone like Lampard to do something like Steven Gerrard did.

“If you look at the board of the club, there’s not really any football people. In years gone by you had Sandy Jardine, John Greig and Walter Smith, who would all contribute and have a say on the football side of it.

“What I’d be doing if I was on the Rangers board is contacting Graeme Souness, asking him to come on board and lead a recruitment party to get the right manager on board.

“What you need at the club right now is not just a coach, but also someone who can restructure the whole football organisation. There are many areas that need tightening up.”

Get it right

This is an appointment Rangers cannot afford to get wrong, having parted company with Beale and Giovanni van Bronckhorst in the two years since Steven Gerrard left.

Souness certainly knows the club well, having spent five years at Ibrox as a player at the end of his career and then five years as a manager.

Some will argue that Souness will hardly provide a modern-day take on who the Light Blues should go for next, having not managed a club since leaving Newcastle United in 2006.

That is not to say Souness does not have plenty of knowledge of the game, and what it entails to be a coach at Rangers, but there are surely better options out there if the Gers are going to go down this route.

In fairness, Beale’s appointment looked as though it would be shrewd at the time, but it did not pan out that way.

The most important thing is that the club do not rush into making a decision, particularly with a two-week break on the horizon, otherwise we’ll be having this same conversation a year down the line.

In other Rangers news, a Sky Sports reporter has shared an update on the managerial vacancy at Ibrox.