Clark - 20 players risked axe

Rangers: Administrators could have axed 20 players if the squad had not agreed wage cuts

Rangers would have been forced to axe 20 players if the first-team squad had not agreed to wage cuts, according to administrator Paul Clark.

Clark has revealed the squad would have been "decimated" to save £1million a month.

Mass redundancies were prevented on Friday when all players accepted wage cuts of up to 75 per cent for the rest of the season, while Mervan Celik and Gregg Wylde left voluntarily.

He told Sunday newspapers: "We were looking at the decimation of the squad.

"There was mention over the last week of between eight and 11 players being made redundant had the players not taken pay cuts. If we'd made eight to 11 redundancies we would have still needed 50% pay cuts from the players who remained.

"If those cuts hadn't been made, and I couldn't do the sums until now, we would have been looking at cuts of up to 20 players in total."

Interest

Clark says Rangers' administrators, Duff and Phelps, are keen to whittle down parties interested in buying the club to 'serious bidders' by the end of the week.

Former director Paul Murray confirmed on Saturday his Blue Knights consortium are finalising an offer to buy the Ibrox club with the surprise backing of Ticketus.

But Clark claims there is widespread interest from a number of parties, including potential buyers from the Far East and America.

He told Rangers' official website: "What we want is to have only serious bidders left by the end of the week. So anybody who has just been talking - and there are a few out there who have done a lot of talking - we want to seek them out and, as it were, put their money where their mouth is.

"Let's get them round a table so we know how many parties we've got. I don't care how many bidders we end up with but I want to know who they are, what they are and what their worth is, so then we can have more serious conversations about achieving the end goal which is to get Rangers under new ownership.

"I don't want to be specific about bidders but there is at least one party from the Far East and we've had some interest as well from the American continent.

"We're talking about Scotland, wider UK and some overseas parties. There's been a number of meetings over the last few days and more planned for next week."

Objective

The club's administrators are determined to find a new owner for financially stricken Rangers by the end of the season.

"You've got different people asking different questions," he added.

"We hope and believe that a new owner will be installed before the end of the season so that it's not us in charge at season's end. That's our objective."