IN the shape-shifting and treacherous terrain of professional football there’s often fun to be had observing sporadic outbreaks of maudlin sentiment. Thus, when a manager loses his job it will be the task of someone on a newspaper’s sports desk to solicit treacly regrets about his denouement.

A player will emerge from the dressing-room to say that he and his colleagues “let the boss down”. Another, whose attempts at scoring goals recalled the old metaphor about banjos and coos’ arses, will be quoted saying he will “always be grateful” to the manager for “believing in me”.

In normal circumstances, you would have expected to see some of these epithets in the next few days, following Rangers’ sacking of their manager, Michael Beale. The decision to dispense with Beale’s services came as no surprise to anyone who has seen Rangers perform recently.

The Ibrox club had simply been beaten too often already this season and performed so cravenly that with eight months of the campaign still remaining and the league title probably already a lost cause that there was a risk of further humiliations had the directors not acted.

In the first despatches about Beale’s dismissal a certain chilliness has been evident. Reviews of his 10 months in the job have been uniformly pitiless and not just on account of Rangers’ poor start to the season. There is a feeling that Beale wasn’t just out of his depth in trying to manage expectations at such a massive club, but that he had lacked the necessary "class" and "dignity" expected from those who must climb Ibrox stadium’s marble staircase each day.

Less than a year ago, Beale had popped up in the Rangers’ directors’ box to watch a game while his predecessor, the former Dutch international Giovanni van Bronckhorst, was enduring his own torments on the pitch down below. It had seemed that Beale was advertising his own credentials for the job while one of his fellow managers was still fighting to hang on to it.

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Football managers more than any other group of professional workers know how fragile their tenures can be and this creates a "band of brothers" bond between even the fiercest rivals. Beale’s appearance at Ibrox that day, just weeks before his predecessor was sacked, seemed to breach the informal managers’ code.

Moreover, he had accepted the Rangers job not long after professing loyalty to the London second-tier club, Queens Park Rangers. He had previously been an assistant coach at Ibrox when the renowned former England international Steven Gerrard was manager between 2018 and 2021. There was a feeling among some of my Rangers-supporting friends that Beale could have done more to squash a falsehood that developed during this time. This suggested that it was him and not  Gerrard who had been the architect of Rangers winning the league title in 2021.

This was sheer sophistry. Were we really expected to believe that Gerrard, who had won a European Champions League medal; been capped 114 times for England and played under some of the world’s best coaches, was only there to provide inspirational talks and show everyone his medals?

Nor did Beale help himself by appearing to be disrespectful of Aberdeen following their 3-1 victory at Ibrox last Saturday. He had said that Rangers should not be getting beaten at home “by a club like Aberdeen”. Had he not been aware that Aberdeen were the last Scottish club to lift a European trophy – against Real Madrid in 1983 – and that they had arguably provided the best performance by any Scottish team this season in losing narrowly in Germany to the Bundesliga giants, Eintracht Frankfurt?

And yet, it’s still possible to have some sympathy for Michael Beale. Like each of the other eight Rangers managers who have come and gone since 2012 he has had to endure the ruinous consequences of the club’s previous custodians. In spending money they didn’t have, the old Ibrox regime bankrupted Rangers and forced its liquidation, which compelled it to start again in Scotland’s fourth tier.

In these years, their intense local rivals Celtic reinforced their financial hegemony over Rangers. The Parkhead club have amassed a formidable treasure chest, reinforced by the extra revenue that comes from having a stadium that has 10,000 more seats than their great rivals and Rangers could risk further financial problems in trying to keep pace.

This doesn’t of itself automatically lead to dominance in this fierce city rivalry. The concentration of football wealth in only four countries - England, Germany, Spain and Italy - means that Celtic, no matter how much money they have, must recruit uncertainly from a narrower and shallower football gene pool. Rangers must also fish from that pool. It’s just that Celtic will usually get first pick ahead of them from what talent that exists there. Beale’s permanent successor will have to deal with these realities too.

There is a bigger picture here though, which adversely affects Celtic as well as Rangers. Such is the intensity of their personal rivalry that their fans demand almost instant gratification. Thus, both clubs feel compelled to pay well over the odds in risky investments for foreign players who come with garlanded and souped-up CVs.

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Having invested heavily in them, they are given extended runs in the team, often at the expense of their home-grown players. Celtic this season have only three Scottish players playing regularly in their first team while Rangers in their recent game against Real Betis had none. Other big clubs across Europe who play in similarly unheralded leagues feel less pressure to play costly foreign imports at the expense of home-grown talent.

They can nurture them and provide them with more opportunities to fulfil their potential than has recently been the case at Celtic and Rangers whose expensive overseas recruits consistently fail to deliver in European competition. And when both do produce home-grown diamonds such as Ben Doak or Billy Gilmour they are scouted and scalped by super-rich English Premiership clubs.

And why would they want to remain here anyway and have their development stunted by the agricultural version of the game which exists in Scotland and indulged by referees who seem more familiar with kick-boxing?

Celtic supporters, as well as those of other Scottish clubs, will exult in Rangers’ latest travails. To the rest of Europe though, our top clubs are mere warm-up challenges for the more serious ones that await them. To them, we now occupy the same place those humble Scandinavian clubs once occupied a generation ago.