Red Star, Graeme Souness and a decision made in the home of golf that would shape Rangers' future

The source of that diversion can be traced back to the Old Course at St Andrews where UEFA met on 3rd May 1988 to implement new rules that would shape European football for the 1990s. As of the following season - 1988/89 - any club side involved in one of Europe’s three competitions would only be allowed to field up to four ‘foreigners’ in those ties. The principle wasn’t new - Italy and Spain had league limits of two but were about to raise that to three - and the same rules were in place in the British league systems too. The only difference on these islands was that all home nations were counted as one and the same for that purpose whereas UEFA’s plan would involve demarcation by individual association.

It is probably no coincidence that this change to the laws came about in tandem with a renewed debate on when to let English clubs back into the fold following the Heysel ban in 1985. Talks were held throughout the first half of 1988 about a potential re-entry the following season but much would depend on the behaviour of English fans at that summer’s European Championships in West Germany. The results were predictably awful and the ban would remain in place for another two years. Jacques Georges, the French President of UEFA, justified the decision to limit foreign players in European competition by saying that it was done “to help national teams with their build-ups, encourage young players, and give more clubs an equal chance.” All very noble but a more cynical view would be that it was a blunt attempt to limit the power of English clubs upon their eventual return. When Liverpool took to field on that fateful night in Belgium, nine of their players weren’t English and of their team that won the FA Cup to complete the Double in 1986, only Craig Johnston would qualify to play at Wembley on another occasion in an England shirt. The grip that English clubs had wielded on the Big Cup was traditionally strengthened from all corners of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Never again, if UEFA had their way.

For Rangers - with the Souness Revolution being so dependent on English internationals - this presented an immediate problem although UEFA were kind enough to provide three years of grace. Any ‘foreign’ player on the books of a club at the end of the 1987/88 season - from Mark Hateley at Monaco to Diego Maradona at Napoli - would be naturalised for three years if they stayed at that club. Only new signings would count and then all bets were off at the start of the 1991/92 season.

It was a three-year warning that was almost forgotten about, pushed to the back of the collective mind whilst there were immediate prizes to be won. A football manager - even one as secure as Souness was with his financial stake and directorship at Rangers - couldn’t afford to be sacrificing the next cup or league title in order to build a team for a competition that they may never see from the same dugout. There was also the chance that UEFA might renege on it or that, as so many football writers and club chairmen were speaking about with such conviction around 1989 onwards, a proper European League would emerge from the club structure and would take decisions that benefitted them rather than their home associations. That was all for another day.

Whenever challenged on his European record as manager of Rangers, Graeme Souness would always make the fair point that his side were never eliminated by minnows. There was none of the humiliation that would characterise - despite one glorious exception - his successor’s spell in the nineties. Red Star would go on to win that season’s European Cup and in his first attempt at the trophy in 1987/88, the 1986 winners Steaua Bucharest were too much in the last eight. Outside of that it was the power of West Germany that proved to be a problem with a mixture of carelessness, misfortune and naivety undoing the ties against Borussia Monchengladbach and Köln before a schooling by the nation’s best in 1989 that would have repercussions still being felt in the modern day.

The mood around the Rangers board meeting following that tie was downbeat. There was to be no journey to the European Cup last eight or beyond this time. In fact Rangers never even made it over the first hurdle. It was a high one, it must be said. It could have been Sliema Wanderers of Malta, Ruch Chorzów of Poland or Knattspyrnufélagið Fram of Iceland but instead Rangers had drawn Bayern Munich. Despite a bright start, 1-0 up in the first leg at Ibrox by virtue of a penalty from Mark Walters - pushed into a more central attacking role with Maurice Johnston due to the suspension of both Ally McCoist and Kevin Drinkell - it was cancelled out quickly by a stunning Ludwig Kögl volley after a weak header by Scott Nisbet. An early second half penalty by Olaf Thon and a trademark, long-range screamer into the top corner by Klaus Augenthaler killed the tie stone dead. Rangers played well in the 0-0 return leg but it was never likely to trouble a Bayern team who would only be eliminated from the tournament in semi-final extra time by one of the greatest club sides in history: Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan. ‘Does it have to be this way?’, the Rangers chairman asked his board of directors.

It was during this conversation in late September of 1989 when the ball started to roll with pace towards modernising European football. The open draw, although romantic, could cut cup runs for even the biggest clubs down to size before it started to get chilly in northern Europe. Surely there was a way to guarantee three home games at least before the real knock-out fun could begin? Campbell Ogilvie was tasked with sketching out this new world and, eventually, nothing would be the same again.

Arriving in Munich for the second leg, Graeme Souness made an observation that would linger over the whole season, and ultimately for much of the new decade. “The way the game is played back home gives us a severe handicap when it comes to having any chance of being successful at the very highest level”, he said. Because of the physical demands domestically and the need to play with non-stop pace and aggression, it was, he felt, becoming too difficult to adapt to an increasingly different game in continental competition. Critics would suggest that this was a convenient excuse for expensive failure and would point to Dundee United’s journey to the UEFA Cup final only two years before as evidence to the contrary. There is no question that the timing of his complaint was deliberate but there was something in it nonetheless.

Apart from the obvious riposte that Dundee United had enjoyed that UEFA Cup run without troubling trophy engravers for some time, the British game - or really the English game - had dominated the style of the competitions in the decade leading up to Heysel, with twelve European titles being won by British clubs , seven of those being the European Cup itself. There was then arguably a kind of interregnum for three seasons where sides from Romania, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal and the Soviet Union all triumphed , before the influence of Serie A and West Germany installed a new order, one which was increasingly different in nature from the Scottish Premier Division.

The noise of the Rangers fans who were still celebrating around the streets of Dundee on April 21 1990 was still audible as Archie Macpherson started his post-match interview with Graeme Souness. The title had been won less than an hour before but, as his interlocutor raised the subject of Europe, Souness bristled before going on yet another monologue about a subject that was clearly dominating his mind. Understandable for a man hungry for the next challenge which - after retaining the title for the first time - combining that success with European respectability clearly was. He happily picked up the thread which he started back in September. “Our football doesn’t lend itself to doing well in European competitions. Either the amount of games you play or the style of football that’s played. It doesn’t lend itself for you to change your system, change your players to, all of a sudden, go and do well in European football. Our football demands a certain type of player. It’s a Catch-22 for us. I was fortunate when I played for Liverpool that we had the right balance. Where we had the grit that’s required for the British game and we had enough flair to go and compete against the best of the Italians, the best of the French and the best of the West Germans. We managed to cross that bridge. Now that is something that we (Rangers) must do. I would say that the Premier League is a harder league to win than the English First Division. The four times that you play each other does not help. It does not help if you’re looking further ahead, i.e. to do well in European competitions.”

Souness had correctly identified a problem but he seemed less sure about committing to the obvious solution in practice. When the league title was the number one priority, ‘Catch-22’ was the perfect way to sum up his predicament and his summer activity in 1990 would suggest that he hoped to bridge both worlds simply by personnel alone. He would finally get his ideal target man in Mark Hateley, another midfield enforcer in Terry Hurlock, more out and out width in Pieter Huistra and then would try to balance that with the class of Oleg Kusnetsov from Dynamo Kiev. However, the issue was not so much the individual players but the way in which they were used. As his career on the continent would show, Mark Hateley had more to his game than being an out-ball but, when the domestic style and tempo demands it, then it should be no surprise that Rangers would use him in that way and hence, become a more direct team as a result. Switching back to the patient and compact unit that Souness tried to develop during 1989/90 - which saw both the lowest average goals for and goals against during the nine-in-a-row period - was far easier said than done.

If the extent of this strain became apparent in 1990, it has remained a dilemma for both Rangers and Celtic well into the 21st century as the ‘project managers’ who tried to quickly modernise the playing style were given short shrift when domestic superiority was threatened. The three seasons of relative Old Firm European success - 1992/93 and 2007/08 for Rangers and 2002/03 for Celtic - all derived as much from a sense of dogged team spirit and uncompromising anti-style as they did to adapting to and then bettering the prevailing dogma. Arguably though, when Rangers found themselves so far in front, 1990 was the time to commit to a more rounded, technical, passing side and push ahead until it became so comfortable that the approach on a Wednesday night under the European lights didn’t need such an overhaul from Saturday’s instructions.

The direction of European football was not heading towards a direct style based around a giant centre forward, wingers and no composed ball-players in the middle of the park, indeed it was decidedly moving away from it. Only Tomáš Skuhravy, who would shine at the World Cup for Czechoslovakia and then move to Genoa, comes close, but then he had classy midfielders around him in both sides, as did Julio Salinas at Barcelona and Spain. There was unquestionably a move towards power and, especially with Sacchi’s Milan side, an exceptional work ethic off the ball, but the style was still based around good all-round technique and clear tactical planning. Graeme Souness was not a man who dithered but his reticence over the next twelve months to use the class of Trevor Steven in the middle of the park perfectly exemplified his reluctance to consistently deploy a ready made solution to a problem that he had already identified.

When the time came for Rangers to make the trip to Belgrade October 1990, the club was in the middle of an internal maelstrom. On the morning of Skol League Cup semi-final against Aberdeen at Hampden on 26 September, Souness pulled Terry Butcher aside for a chat. Although the weekend’s costly error - an own goal that signalled defeat at Tannadice - was still fresh in the mind, this was a decision that was based on an early, but unavoidable, pattern of form. The Rangers captain, the man whose absence derailed an entire season not too long ago, was going to be dropped. “I was distraught, in tears”, Butcher wrote later. According to Ally McCoist, “it was like a slap in the face to see that colossus crying.” Butcher had asked specifically to be left out of the match entirely, so has his downbeat presence didn’t affect the team as a whole but given that it was common for the the scarce two substitute spaces to be reserved for more progressive options, it may have been a redundant request. Amidst the inevitable media storm, Souness ditched the recent experimentation with a three man defence for the standard 4-4-2, this time with McCoist and Johnston spearheading the attack, John Brown coming in to replace Butcher, Stuart Munro returning at left back and Trevor Steven and Nigel Spackman taking shifts in covering the right side of midfield whilst in reality both were happy for Gary Stevens to do the real leg work down that side. Rangers were excellent on the night, showing an ability to respond to adversity that would prove crucial over the campaign. A 1-0 scoreline flattered Aberdeen as Rangers dominated throughout, the only goal coming from a Trevor Steven burst through the middle of the park - a role he was desperate to make his own - and it was enough to ensure a fifth final appearance in a row.

The initial concern about Butcher’s absence, with little being said publicly about his future, was assuaged by the eventual arrival of Kuznetsov in October. His debut - in a 5-0 home win over St Mirren - was sensational. Coming out of defence so comfortably with the ball, starting moves and, on one occasion, smashing the bottom of the post with a long-range drive, were everything that fans had hoped that they’d see from him after seeing him close up when Dynamo Kiev strolled past Rangers at Ibrox in a pre-season friendly in August. In this signing, Souness had a player that fitted his European profile down to the ground with experience, class and intelligence in abundance. And then, within twenty minutes of his second game for Rangers, away to St Johnstone on the Saturday before the midweek trip to Yugoslavia, he broke down after an innocuous challenge. His cruciate ligaments were torn after his studs caught in the turf and Souness, after the bureaucratic struggle to bring him to Ibrox, would never be able to select him again. Even for a manager who seemed to be struck with a serious injury to a key player every season, this was desperately bad luck for both himself and the player and was yet another sliding door which closed off a route towards a more technical evolution of a Rangers team.

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Following the 10-0 aggregate hammering of Valletta of Malta - with Chris Woods showing a slight lack of respect by taking, and missing, a penalty at Ibrox in torrential rain - Rangers set off for Belgrade’s 80,000 strong Marakana, to face Red Star. Smith’s assessment was on the money as Rangers were ripped apart by a classier and technically superior outfit who could cause problems just as serious through the middle as they could on the flanks, as was proved by Duško Radinović’s punishing run and low cross in the eighth minute that John Brown could only deflect into his own net. Fortunate to be only one goal behind at halftime, Rangers continued to hang on past the hour mark. Previous trips in Europe had taught them that a 1-0 defeat was not terminal. Others, however, had fallen apart as the end drew near and this would be one more of those. One Rangers fan tells a story where he popped into a Belgrade cafe that morning for some beer. Upon being served, the cafe owner pointed to a man at the other end of the bar sipping a coffee and drawing on a cigarette. “He’ll be playing you today.” It was Robert Prosinečki and he’d do more than just play as he pulled the Rangers midfielders around as if they were attached to his hands with strings before sailing a brilliant free-kick beyond Woods to make it 2-0. Like Bucharest and Köln, Rangers succumbed late in the game and a Darko Pančev goal, when Richard Gough appeared to just stop moving with him, put the tie to bed before the Ibrox leg had even entered the equation.

It was just as difficult a night for the 700 Rangers fans who were dwarfed in that huge crowd. At least the players didn’t have an 84-hour round trip on a bus to endure. Scott Carson set off at 7pm on the Monday night with the Thornliebank True Blues for the longest road trip of his life. “We were still a year or 18 months away from the civil war but the famous Dinamo Zagreb v Red Star match had taken place in the May and the city itself felt quite imposing. Red Star fans started to congregate at the stadium nine hours before kick-off and friends showed their bruises when we met up to head to the game, so we knew that this was a bit different. The actual facade of the stadium wasn’t too special but once we were through the gates the full scope of the bowl became apparent. I did wonder immediately why there were two fire engines on the running track but that would soon become apparent when the flares started and actual fires were built on the terracing. Just a sea of red and white. It was a riot of colour and noise and was very intimidating.” Perhaps the typical machismo of that Rangers team withered as a result.

Souness was utterly despondent in that Belgrade Airport. The constant failure to get to the later stages of a competition that was becoming more and more the focus of his chairman, was a tangible frustration. “How can I possibly win the European Cup with 11 Scots in the team?”, was a truly ridiculous excuse to offer the press pack waiting for the plane home, given that more than half of his starting XI that evening weren’t Scottish. His observations from the previous season were once again given credence. Red Star’s ability to keep possession and rotate it quickly was too often in stark contrast to the natural Rangers inclination to knock it longer into the wider channels to Huistra and Walters, especially when the lone striker was Maurice Johnston who was chosen ahead of the more natural target man, Mark Hateley.

It was a bizarre selection on paper but evidence of the tightening effect that the UEFA constraints were starting to have. Woods and Walters were naturalised and Stevens and Steven were dead certs to start, meaning only two more foreigners could be used. The strength and experience of Spackman was always likely to be utilised alongside Ian Ferguson in the middle of the park but if Souness was wedded to the five across midfield that he had used away from home in Europe before, then his only other option was to play Nisbet alongside them, push Steven out wide and use Hateley as the lone striker. Souness, understandably, preferred to have Steven in the middle against such a technical opponent but it meant having a completely isolated Johnston unable to utilise the genuine pace and width around him without support. A 4-4-2 would have been possible, with Huistra sacrificed for Steven, but with the obvious risk of being completely overrun. It was a straight jacket that was only going to become more suffocating as the years progressed. The opposition was truly world class, as they’d go on to prove, but Souness was, by then, showing little sign that he was able to counteract the challenges that he was facing at this level by way of coaching or new ideas. The early examples of nous in those first two or three years were not followed up thereafter as getting close to Bayern or Red Star proved a lot more difficult than altering the dimensions of the playing surface and packing numbers into midfield. As the chairman’s European ambitions seemed to be driving on with limitless energy, the team’s appeared to be going backwards. There had been disappointments before but the gulf in class that night was as big as any Rangers performance since 1986. For the first time there was a sense that Graeme Souness was now out of his depth, something that the Glasgow Herald’s Jim Traynor suggested in his final Red Star report. Upon attending the next press conference at Ibrox, Traynor was promptly banned and dismissed is a ‘little socialist’ because he was jealous of footballers earning ten times what he earned. A year on from calmly managing some bad results with a fixed, positive outlook and justified optimism, Souness - with his newly acquired beard - was turning into Lear.

The storm intensified as the relationship with Butcher descended into a very public, angry and irreparable state, on the eve of an Old Firm League Cup Final no less. If the match in the former Yugoslavia four days earlier represented future horrors then this final was a window into a decade of further domestic dominance. A poor game played in appalling conditions, Rangers came from behind to win the cup. The new captain - Richard Gough - popping up in extra-time to score the winner. It was a fitting week really. The chaos that the cult of Souness couldn’t help but create also produced conditions that helped to build the character of a side who could come through adversity to beat their immediate rivals to prizes whilst, if perhaps sub-consciously, moving away from being able to meet to the on-field demands of a European game that, ironically, they were shaping off the field.

It would be the final trophy of seven that Graeme Souness would lift as Rangers manager and the tie with Red Star was his last involvement in the old European Cup, a trophy with which he was so synonymous as a player. He’d have one shot at its modern reincarnation - the Champions League - with Benfica in 1998/99 but it would end at the first group stage. The harsh lessons of Belgrade were that Rangers would need technicians rather than warriors in order to be consistently successful in European competition but it also suggested that they’d need a new - and preferably foreign - manager too.

By October 1990 his Rangers Revolution was close to being over in any case. It would be the final season when any other Scottish side would put up a serious challenge for the title for five years. The journey from jesters to undisputed rulers was almost complete and so, in a way, was Souness’s remit and the reliance on his ‘Best of British’ policy. His dramatic departure to Liverpool at the end of the season was, in an ideal world, the perfect juncture at which Rangers could have gone down a different, more continental road. Britain was no longer producing the best technical players and tactical managers. Rangers, with its money and driven ambition, would have to plunder Europe in the same way it had done with England. It would have been the Second Revolution, the next logical step in a process of constant modernisation that had characterised the previous five years.

Such a consideration is purely academic because in the real world that UEFA decision in 1988 blocked off any route to a more technically proficient future. There would be foreign imports, of course, but not of the required quantity and quality to make a material impact. The foreigners rule - adapted in 1992/93 to three foreigners and two ‘naturalised’ players - ensured that Rangers had to become more Scottish just at the moment that they needed to be even less so. One small problem with the new law was that it was wholly illegal. It would take until the Bosman case of 1995 for that to be ratified and the ban was formally lifted for the 1995-96 season by which time so much was changing in European football. 1997-98 was the first season where runners-up from the big leagues were allowed to compete in the premier competition and the television markets were now the sport’s primary influencers. That window between 1991 and 1995 seems short but in reality it hosted seismic changes that would transform the game such as the creation of the Champions League and English Premier League, the explosion in television revenue which would soon be replicated in transfer fees and wages and even in the law itself, like the backpass rule which instantly demanded technically better defenders and goalkeepers. By the time Rangers could properly try and exploit their full potential in a fairer market, it was too late. It was a different sport.

Smith’s focus may have been on Robert Prosinečki, Darko Pančev and Dejan Savićević when he made his acerbic assessment but his two words work well for the decade as a whole. It would still be a period that would be littered with silver. Rangers would weaken their rivals by buying the best of Scottish talent - starting with Andy Goram and David Robertson in that summer of 1991- and they would elect, when Souness finally did depart, to promote the man who was better placed than any other to build domestic domination. Arguably no decision was more significant in leading Rangers to nine-in-a-row and an era unsurpassed in the club’s history, than the one taken at the home of golf. The club’s focus was turned more towards home and the chemistry that was created produced domestic bliss.

And yet it is an era not without its tension because, despite the constant parade of trophies, it took place right at the time in football history when so many horizons were broadening and the club’s publicly stated sense of ambition and vision, ignited in 1986, started to become disconnected with the reality on the field of play. With the indefinite nature of the Heysel ban in 1985, UEFA opened a window of opportunity that Rangers exploited better than anyone but when they effectively closed two of those windows at once, the pace of the Rangers modernisation slowed dramatically. With the exception of that brave but ultimately glorious failure of 1992/93, Rangers really were shackled when it came to trying to win the biggest competition in the game. A lot of that would be of their own agency; bad signings, in-game mistakes, woeful preparation. But ultimately - despite the soundbites and moonbeams - Smith, Murray, Gascoigne, Laudrup et al were swimming against a massive tide. One that started on the links of St Andrews.