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• Lower-paid players agree smaller cuts to their salaries
• Kyle Bartley: pay cuts will help to save people's job
Rangers' players are on the verge of agreeing a tiered pay cut deal to avoid what earlier seemed an inevitable prospect of a raft of enforced redundancies at the club.
Administrators from Duff and Phelps, who are in charge of affairs at Ibrox, need to eliminate £4.5m from the Rangers budget between now and the summer. To aid that process, Rangers' top earners are close to accepting a 75% pay cut, with those lower down the wage scale taking on 50% and 25% drops until the end of May.
For the highest paid players, Steven Davis and Allan McGregor, thought to earn £28,000 and £26,000 a week respectively, salaries will be slashed to less than £10,000. The wages of the Rangers management team will be included in the scaled cuts. In exchange for absorbing vastly reduced terms, it is understood some players have sought to have clauses inserted in their contracts which offer a free transfer or one at a reasonable fee when the campaign ends.
Kyle Bartley, the defender on loan at Rangers from Arsenal, said: "All the players who will be taking wage cuts or leaving will be saving people's jobs. I don't think anyone who is still at the club wants to leave but it is a situation where some may have to leave to benefit the club. My parent club is Arsenal. It was said I'd go back if there were cuts but nothing has been decided yet. I am still a Rangers player for this season as it stands. It is a shame that such a big club has come to such a crisis. It is a very sad time for Rangers."
A frantic Tuesday at Rangers' Murray Park training complex saw a wage deferral plan put forward by players – which had been described as "final" by Duff and Phelps on Monday evening – rejected by the administrators. At that stage, squad members faced the straightforward option of accepting significant pay cuts or being sacked.
Thereafter, players departed and reappeared to the training ground, as did agents, as yet another round of deliberations surprisingly got under way.
At 7.30pm, the Rangers captain Davis once again arrived at Murray Park with administrators thought to be ready to put their formalised wage cut proposal forward then. Two players, Gregg Wylde and Mervan Celik, were released from their contracts without any form of compensation at their own request but that matter will save Rangers only around £50,000 a month in wages. Celik had moved to Rangers during the January transfer window.
Wylde said: "I volunteered to walk with no redundancy package today to help the other people in the club who have families, like the kitchen staff. I don't know what is going to happen next but I thought it was important to play my part in saving Rangers."
Wylde, who says he has no future employer already lined up, told Scottish TV: "I was so tired I couldn't really sleep at night. It was getting to me so I thought I would leave."
