Rangers are finally the modern and well run club we have long craved - David Marshall

In the past, the perception was more important than reality.

The Rangers of days gone by, fueled by hubris, was a club that bought and spent its way out of trouble. The idea of “for every fiver Celtic spend, Rangers will spend a tenner” seems so long ago and is frankly not the way Rangers fans want their club to be run.

Then we had to suffer the other side of this and the charlatans that were running Rangers, almost into the ground. We fumbled from one embarrassment to another but those days of pain seem just as distant as the cavalier, yuppie era of David Murray in the 90s.

Rangers are now, in all departments of the club, a modern football operation.

The man who has to take a large share of the credit for this is the manager Steven Gerrard. He is the very epitome of everything that is good about Rangers right now. He has created a culture at the club that is not only present in the first team but through the academy, the women’s program, to the very stitching of the club itself.

It wasn’t too long ago where the entire scouting network was decimated and its only revival was through the phone book of Mark Warburton’s “best in the business” pal.

There is a system now and a way of thinking when it comes to recruitment.

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There are no square pegs in round holes. No Joey Barton, Niko Kranjcar, Bruno Alves or (God forbid) Phillipe Senderos' - no pinning your hopes on guys that were good five to 10 years ago because 'it’s only Scottish football after all'!

As a fan who was born in the 90s and missed out on the Nine In A Row years, I’ve never really known Rangers to have a plan, to have a set idea of where the club wants to be.

Now, you can overcomplicate this because Rangers' main goal has been and always will be to finish ahead of Celtic. That is the plan first and foremost, but it’s how we go about it now that is different.

In my early years following the club was really characterised by two men holding the place together. That would be firstly Alex McLeish, who was brought in during a period of massive downsizing and still managed to win two league titles and a domestic treble against arguably the greatest Celtic team since the days of Jock Stein.

David is one of many voices on the brilliant Heart and Hand Rangers podcast

The second man, in hindsight, literally kept the club going and maybe even papered over the cracks and delayed the inevitable. I don’t think there was anyone in world football that could have delivered the success that Walter Smith did at Rangers between 2007-2011.

This was a Rangers that scraped, clawed and had to fight for everything - just to keep our head above water. Now, for the first time, this feels like a Rangers that sees the light at the end of the tunnel and whose targets don’t exclusively end at bringing the league title home.

Of course, we are not out of the woods. The club is still at a point where we are losing money.

I can, however, truly say that the club feels for the first time in my life as a Rangers supporter not, at best, in a state of recovery but actually building towards not just a secure future but a prosperous one.

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As much as I would love to heap all the praise unto Gerrard and his backroom team it is not as simple as that. The success at the club is owed to every person at every level working towards this bright future. In the boardroom, Douglas Park and Co. and Dave King who came before them. Focusing more on the football side of things, Ross Wilson might just be the most important person at the club as he doesn’t just contribute to the current team’s success but will be surely planning for life after Gerrard.

Rangers are changing, the club is evolving. The rough will come with the smooth and there is currently a discussion amongst the fans about how commercialised things are becoming and if the traditional working-class supporter is being priced out of certain aspects.

That will continue over the next few years with MyGers and share issues. However, the club being successful off the pitch and on the pitch is symbiotic, one cannot happen without the other. I would suggest that the more successful the team pulling on a jersey on a Saturday continues to be, the more forgiving of the modern commercial aspects the fans will become.

You can hear more from David on the Heart and Hand podcast. Subscribe here for as little as £1.50 a month or listen free to the flagship shows on all good podcast platforms.