Oliver Glasner reacts to Rangers manager speculation, shares where he’s jetting off to next week
Oliver Glasner has effectively ruled himself out of the running for the Rangers job.
The Daily Record reported on 5 October that the 49-year-old former Frankfurt manager had “thrown his hat into the ring” to succeed Michael Beale in the Ibrox hot seat.
However, nothing has really come of that since and Glasnger has now gone on record to say that he’s enjoying his break from the game right now and that he’s going to jet out on holiday to the USA in the coming days.
“I have never commented on that speculation and I never will,” Glasner told Austrian media, as quoted by The Scottish Sun on Saturday (14 October).
“I notice it and am amused by it.
“But it doesn’t affect my daily routine in any way. It’s nice that it all happens more or less in the background.
“I haven’t had any withdrawal symptoms from football yet.
“At the moment I have other things that are in the foreground. I only watch football when there’s nothing else to do which is very, very rare.
“Every day, I am very relaxed. I feel like I am on holiday each day.
“The time will come when I return to management, I will feel it. It would need to be a project that excites me again. If I can make a difference and I have a good feeling about it, then I will do it.
“But for now, I am flying to San Francisco next week to watch the Golden State Warriors basketball team. I’m really looking forward to getting some impressions from another sport from another culture, from another country. Let’s see what I can take back from it.”
Never in the running
It’s odd that the Daily Record so adamantly named Glasner as wanting the Rangers job when it seems like the Austrian doesn’t want any job at all right now.
And who can blame him?
Glanser’s had a great first decade in management, starting at SV Ried and LASK Linz in Austria before heading to Germany to join Wolfsburg and then Frankfurt, who he won the Europa League with in 2022.
Of course, that unfortunately came at the expense of Rangers. But far more well-known managers with better squads fell to the Gers in that Europa League campaign and it was Glasner who eventually stopped the rampant Scots.
He’s a very good manager and most clubs would be lucky to have him.
Maybe he doesn’t believe that ending his holiday for what is a fairly toxic job at Ibrox would be in his best interests.
He’ll have seen how it went downhill for Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Beale and how impossible the task looks in Govan due to Celtic already running away at the top of the Scottish Premiership.
In other Rangers news, personal terms have been thrashed out for the new manager at Ibrox.