Three Reasons Why Rangers Will Challenge For The Title Next Season
Rangers are improving hand over fist in recent seasons following their demotion back in 2012 and have designs on regaining their Scottish Premiership crown.
Here are three reasons why they may achieve their goal as early as next season:
Balance of Nature
Rangers and Celtic have battled closely for years and we’ll look back in ten years time to them having done so again. Celtic’s current domination wasn’t born of their own fantastic planning, rather it owes itself to Rangers’ demotion to the 4th tier of Scottish football and that was always going to take some coming back from.
Celtic and Rangers have a similar fan base in Scotland, which leads to similar revenue potential, which leads to similar pull for players, which ultimately leads to similar quality. It’ll happen sooner or later, regardless.
Rangers, in fact, have a greater record of history than Celtic and there are still plenty of players, domestic or otherwise, who would consider it a huge honour to pull on the Rangers jersey. So, as the club’s top-level revenue gradually increases, as will the quality of their squad.
Their Rate of Improvement
In the 2014/15 season, while clear favourites to go up, Rangers’ performance level went somewhat plateaus and they finished 3rd in the Scottish Championship.
The following year, they won that division with a young squad before re-entering the Scottish Premiership full of expectation. Although the perceived failure can be attributed in part to Mark Warburton and more specifically his choice of new players, their finishing position of 3rd place in 16/17 with two cup semi-finals represented a fair rise given where they’d come from.
This season, another year on, they have faced more turmoil with player and management changes but are again moving forward. Their proximity to Aberdeen and relatively small gap (11 points) to Celtic is not a bad position to be in but more telling are their results against those two.
In recent weeks, Rangers have beaten Aberdeen three times in a row as well as having earned a 0-0 draw at Celtic Park while outplaying their opposition which tells you an awful lot about where they expect to be next season.
Their Core Squad
The emergence of Josh Windass, James Tavernier and Wes Foderingham (as written about on these pages) is a huge plus and means the squad has a proper foundation, regardless of which other players come and go.
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