The two have also been obsessed with the cult of the manager for almost all of that time span, which makes sense. Both clubs have had a legendary manager in the recent past who felt almost like an institution in their own right. Rangers have the memory of Walter Smith and everything that came with that era, and United have Sir Alex Ferguson.
When that is the reference point or historical touchstone for fans, it can weigh pretty heavy. The club gets itself into trouble, the latest right man walks through the door, the dressing room snaps into line, and suddenly everything is rosy again and years of poor decisions are fixed with a snap of the fingers, or a magic hat.
Walter Smith.Walter Smith remains a hero for Rangers supporters (Image: Colorsport/Ian Macnicol / Shutterstock)
Modern football does not really work like that anymore, or at least not as consistently as it once did. It definitely does not if other important areas of clubs are not quite best in class for the level you are expecting to compete at.
Managers matter, obviously they do. They shape behaviour, they can raise standards, they can win you games with good decisions, and in the right environment they can be a key difference-maker that helps turn a good squad into a great team. What they cannot do, at least not consistently, is wave a wand at years of scattergun recruitment and fix it instantly.
Transfers cost a lot of money, in fees of course but also in wages and bonuses. A poorly thought-out signing of a squad player at Rangers could still see the club on the hook for multi-million pounds, even if the player is deemed hopeless by fans before the schools go back.
All of that takes time and money to unpick and, as we have seen in the recent past, inevitably ends up in taking transfer losses to free up wages, never-ending loan spells, or simply cutting players loose to free up some wages to go again. It is a black hole that can only be fixed by time and by making good transfer-market decisions consistently.
The obvious outcome of a series of bad transfer-market decisions is that clubs rip everything up every summer and start again. This level of flux makes it next to impossible to develop a solid, consistent on-pitch leadership spine.
Danny Rohl's side must bounce back from the defeat in BudapestDanny Rohl will oversee the recruitment this summer (Image: PA)
You are left asking a lot of a bunch of players signed sometimes seemingly at random, or by different managers who like to play different systems and styles. When a club keeps reinventing itself every season for yet another new manager, is it really a big surprise that an unbalanced and unfit-for-purpose squad is the outcome?
So this is probably an end-of-season argument for Rangers to stop buying into manager sales pitches and to start building what actually decides success in the modern game: buying very good footballers who are very well suited to playing for your club.
Not in the shallow sense of “just sign any good players”, but more like building a club that repeatedly signs the right players, technically, physically and mentally, regardless of who the head coach is or what style of football they want to play.
Get that part wrong and the manager debate never ends, and you might end up with a few good players through sheer probability but never enough to pull everything together. Then you just rotate the faces at the top of the pile, make the same mistakes with the squad, and keep asking one person to perform miracles with a group of players who can probably be fine in isolation but do not or cannot form a reliable title-winning team together.
As we witnessed again in the recently ended season, football has loads of noise around it on and off the pitch. Handballs, offsides, referees, injuries. One sclaffed clearance lands at the edge of your box and suddenly the narrative flips from “we are building something here” to “sack everyone”. The margins are insanely tight and random in a way that many other sports or businesses just are not.
What should not be random is the business of recruiting players. A club like Rangers should not still be talking about Daniel Candeias as the last permanent right winger of acceptable quality, a player who was signed nearly ten years and almost as many managers ago.
It is close to becoming a cliché now, but the most glaring example of this is in the middle of the Ibrox pitch. Steven Davis, already an outstanding player, gets better with every passing day of his well-deserved retirement.
In more recent years, Rangers should not be buying roughly three versions of the same midfielder if none of them are able to control the tempo of a game consistently or to a high enough standard. Yet they do, because they were signed by three different managers and three different recruitment teams. If there is no consistency in recruitment, how can we expect consistency on the pitch?
Yes, it is an odd little league at times, and yes, there are nuances and demands in playing for Rangers that are not applicable to most clubs at our financial level. That is all part of good scouting. Those are basic prerequisites that should be factored into every decision.
If you make enough good decisions over enough transfer windows then you end up with a squad that can survive whatever gets thrown at them. If you get enough wrong, you can have a great coach and still collapse whenever the flow of a game changes. A great squad can make a good manager look great, but it is less and less clear that the opposite is as true as it once was.
To go back to the earlier Manchester United example, last summer they made a decision to bolt on serious attacking quality when most people thought their main issues lay in the middle of the pitch. Signing enough attackers to take you to the next level probably is not enough to win a league in England, but it is a solid first step.
Goals change everything, and better attackers who score more goals mean you do not need to be absolutely perfect in midfield and defence. It lets you stop trying to win every game 1-0 while panicking over what happens if you lose the ball and, or, your keeper decides to throw one in again.
In Scotland, a step up in attacking quality can be the difference between wobbling and winning, because so many games are about breaking a team down, scoring first and not letting it turn into a battle. It is probably why Rangers can, in theory, improve faster than some other clubs in bigger leagues. The margins can swing violently, it does not take long for teams to start to sit deep when they know Rangers are on form, but it is also why getting recruitment wrong is usually catastrophic.
And this is where Rangers keep falling into the same trap.
We talk about managers as if they are the root cause of all good or bad, because they are the easiest, most visible person at the club. The bigger truth is that Rangers have spent years building squads that are full of players we like, players who might be good soon, players who can look good next to reliability, players who might flourish in a more settled environment. What we have not had enough of is a spine of players you can hang your hat on, the ones who do not just have technical ability but have the physical and psychological make-up to do what is needed in every game when it matters.
Danny RohlDanny Rohl will remain as Rangers boss (Image: Steve Welsh)
Danny Röhl has been kept on as Rangers manager and, whether people like it or not, it is now not really a discussion point for this summer, so the more useful question is: what does this actually mean for how Rangers need to recruit?
At their best, Röhl’s Rangers were high-risk and high-reward. The 4-2-2-2 set-up gave you that feeling of momentum going forward, with repeated waves of attack instead of retreating into their own half and pretending that was them controlling games despite not having a midfield that could do it.
But that was always the problem: struggling to consistently control games when they had the ball, and even more so without it. The team scored a very high volume of goals in a short period, nearly 40 goals in their last 15 league games, but they also conceded 26 in that same timeframe.
In the 15 league games prior to that, just eight goals were conceded as Rangers were generally stuffy and hard to beat, something that had ironically become something of a Danny Röhl trademark over the winter months.
That is the trade-off. I absolutely wanted the team to recruit in January with the first, second and third priority of scoring more goals, but not at the expense of any defensive solidity. The eternal search for balance, and never quite managing it, is also a very Rangers thing over the last few decades.
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A 4-2-2-2 set-up that presses and attacks in waves needs very specific types of player, not just good ones. It needs forwards who press and link and can finish, not passengers who need someone to run for them.
It needs attacking midfielders and wingers who work with and without the ball, can win duels in tight areas and can actually contribute consistently in the final third. Most importantly, it needs a midfield base that can dominate their man in any game, players who can sense danger and set tempo, and centre-halves who can hold a high line, defend space and dominate one v one.
We know we need all these things, we know we do not have them, and we still wonder why things fall apart. Without them the whole thing becomes dependent on perfect moments and perfect finishing, which is basically another way of saying it becomes dependent on luck and riding the fine margins.
Andrew Cavenagh at IbroxAndrew Cavenagh has backed Rohl as boss (Image: Andrew Milligan)
Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh has mentioned recently the need to sign players with the right chemistry, mentality and leadership. That could be empty PR, the kind of easy line you put out when you want fans back onside, but it could also be an indicator of a key point that every Rangers fan understands instinctively: the job is not just being good at football. The job is also being good at football here.
Playing against low blocks, playing at speed with intensity and continually making good decisions under pressure. Being able to lose the ball, win it back, lose it again, and not mentally crumble when the crowd gets on your back. These qualities are not primarily about technical ability.
Chemistry and leadership should not mean signing players because they shout at their team-mates or because they have played in Scotland before. The pool of domestic talent is getting a little bigger, but it is still not big enough to choose solely from.
Instead, it would make sense if Rangers tried to target:
players who have performed under pressure in comparable environments
players whose game holds up in lots of different situations
players who make fewer bad decisions when things get hectic
players who can execute tactical instructions repeatedly
If you do not build around that, and keep building around it every year, then who the manager is might not make a difference, just as it has not in the last few years.