Mark Warburton and Dave King are on the verge of a major falling out, one that could see the Englishman’s tenure at Ibrox cut drastically short, over the manager’s plan to restrict contract offers to their youth players to short term deals only.
Warburton believes the club’s previous focus on securing their young talents on long terms deals has “cost the club” in wages when they haven’t been up to snuff. Short term deals “keep players hungry” he said, in a statement unsupported by any evidence.
This proposal is likely to be viewed with great disquiet in the Ibrox boardroom as it changes a fundamental part of what Warburton was brought to the club to actually do … develop players through the youth system so that Sevco could then sell them on for big money.
That won’t happen if their young players are all on short-term deals, and perhaps more importantly that kind of policy will see the club effectively shut out of the market to bring the most talented developing players into the club in the first place, as security in those early years is of paramount importance to kids who are just making their way in the game.
What kind of agent, or parent, is going to agree to a one year deal at Sevco if other clubs are offering that security? Not many, I would think.
There’s also something quite immoral about the idea of pressurising kids this way, something that will not endear the club to many people outside of its walls.
Considerations like that don’t often affect people at Ibrox though; more worrying, by far, to them is that this plan betrays a short-termism in Warburton’s thinking, and opens the door to key members of the first team squad being treated the same way.
This would further risk the plans of King and his board which, in the absence of European income, are built almost solely around the idea of selling on guys like Tavernier and Waghorn for inflated fees.
There’s also the prospect of Warburton setting things up for his next job, wherein he can go to Ibrox having identified all the best young players and snap them up for himself, for next to nothing.
Warburton has been in Scotland for nearly a year now, but with his family still living down south there is a feeling here that he’s simply treading water at Sevco and waiting for the next move.
Fortunately for the club, there seems to be less interest in a Scottish based second tier manager than he was led to believe when he signed on the dotted line and every day he spends in the proximity of men like King erodes his reputation south of the border.
Promises of transfer war chests have come to naught and blaming plastic pitches for his side’s inability to put away teams like Alloa will have been noticed in England as the whining of a guy who’s less talented than his PR would have people believe.
He has already clashed with the powers-that-be at the club, after being seen to demand a major squad overhaul in January, only to settle for a couple of frees, a loanee and one of two players he identified as key to his plans.
His talk of wanting to sign five or six “quality players” to go straight into the first time will have dismayed some in the dressing room and caused heart palpitations in the boardroom, as the directors know there’s no way they can finance that on top of savage loan repayments from Hong Kong.
The more you listen to the conflicting views of King and Warburton on how the playing side at Ibrox should be structured, the more you realise they are miles apart in their overall “vision” for the club.
It is a matter of time before the tensions over this break the surface, but if they were minded to, the more ambitious hacks in the Scottish media could start asking the right questions now … and get this story before it becomes impossible for even their industry to miss.