Steven Gerrard’s Rangers, back on track in the Scottish Football League

If we review the list of Scottish Premiership champions throughout their history, we will find a couple of common factors: the names of Celtic and Rangers repeated an enormity of times. In fact, the two giants of Scotland have shared 85 % of the league championships.

Now if we review the last decade of the league, we will notice that only one of the two names appears and that is Celtic. This is mainly as a result of the decline suffered by Rangers in 2012 due to problems of economic mismanagement that led them to be relegated to the fourth tier of the Scottish Professional Football League.

That situation served Rangers as a way to get a fresh start and they made promotions until they returned to the Scottish Premiership in 2016 after winning the Scottish lower leagues. However, since his return they have failed to lift the highest Scottish football league title. In 2018, Rangers hired Steven Gerrard, a living legend of Liverpool FC, who was working with the youth teams of the Reds, as their manager.

Gerrard has had a major impact on Rangers, taking them to two consecutive second places in the last two Scottish Premiership seasons. However, this is not enough for a club of this stature. That is why Gerrard has taken the team to the next level and this season, as we speak, Gerrard has Rangers in first place leading over second place, their eternal rivals, Celtic, by 16 points. Steven Gerrard has opted for a 4-3-3 that usually changes to a 4-2-3-1 varying the functions of the midfielders since sometimes he plays with a single defensive midfielder and, in others, he does it with two defensive midfielders, thus giving him more freedom to the third midfielder of combining with the three attackers.

Some of the prominent Rangers players are the Colombian Alfredo Morelos, Ianis Hagi (son of the Romanian legend Georghe), Scott Arfield and defender Connor Goldson, essential in Gerrard’s starting elevens. Rangers are undefeated this season in both the Scottish Premiership and the Europa League with 22 wins out of 26 games. In the national league, they have a goal difference of +49, having received only 5 goals in the 20 Scottish Premiership games and an average of 2.7 goals scored per game.

Apparently, this seems to be, at last, the year that Rangers return to the path that their history belongs to.