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New Rangers senior figure reveals radical changes to recruitment team
By James Black
Rangers’ newly-appointed chief scout Andy Scoulding has revealed some of the changes that have been made behind the scenes at Ibrox as the club look to finally get their recruiting department in order.
Successive Rangers bosses have worked with a woefully under-staffed scouting team over the last five years and have often relied purely on first-hand knowledge of players and agent recommendations.
Director of football Mark Allen recently unveiled a raft of changes to the club’s scouting network including the appointment of former Liverpool and Valencia analyst Scoulding.
Scoulding revealed some of the improvements that have been made to overhaul the scouting team since his appointment in September.
“Two things really, the people, we had to bring in some people to build the team and also the environment,” Scoulding said, as quoted by the club’s official website.
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“We have spent some time working on those two things and I think we have now got a good team in place and an elite environment where we can start to really action the vision.
“We set the bar pretty high, from the outset we had a clean sheet of paper for us to pretty much do it how we wanted to and go in the direction we wanted.
“We have worked hard on bringing the right people in and we have changed the environment.”
Previous recruitment head Frank McParland preferred to operate solely relying on his “little black book” of contacts resulting in a signing policy that looked like a who’s who of Watford’s recent history.
Scoulding’s first role in football was as an opposition scout under Roy Hodgson at Fulham, Liverpool and England before joining Valencia with Gary Neville in 2015.
While with Neville at the Mestalla, Scoulding split his time between working with the England national team and the Spanish giants.
John Brown, Dave Swanick, Dave Stevenson and Billy McLaren all joined the club’s scouting department alongside Scoulding and Allen.
In other Rangers news, a Premier League club has joined the Light Blues in pursuing one of their top targets.
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