DEREK LYLE has revealed he offered to play for Rangers for free when the Ibrox side was in the Scottish lower leagues.
The 39-year-old Queen of the South legend, who is still plying his trade at Peterhead, has told how he asked his agent to make the offer to then-Rangers manager Ally McCoist to help keep the club’s wage bill down.
Lyle is a lifelong Rangers fan, and in 2017 was honoured by Queen of the South with a testimonial against a Rangers Legends side boasting the likes of Barry Ferguson and Peter Lovenkrands. But he has never played professionally for the Glasgow team.
He told the Football Daft podcast he could have ‘done a job’ for Rangers to get them up the leagues and helped with the club’s finances – but ‘it just wasn’t to be’.
He said: "I actually asked my agent to ask [Ally] McCoist when they went down. I would play for nothing, because I was obviously a Rangers man and I would have loved to have played for them.
“Just to go there and play. I said I’d play for nothing, and I know that when they’d come up the leagues they would have been looking for a wee bit better quality going into the SPL, obviously trying to win championships and leagues.
“It wasn’t to be, they brought the likes of Kenny Miller and Kris Boyd and that in - good players, so it just wasn’t to be for me...
“And not taking anything away from McCoist, I know what he’s tried to do, he’s tried to get your Kenny Millers and just to get through the leagues and go into the SPL, but he could have probably done with a few people in the standard of myself going through the leagues just to get them up.”
He added: “That was the thought behind it. I’m thinking ‘they’ll not want to go out and spend crazy money to get out the Third Division’.
“I get it, when they get up to the Championship, it’s a hard league, you probably get up there and go ‘I’m going for the better Kenny Millers and all that’.
“But third and second division? Could have got them out of that [with] players that played in the Championship and kept the wage bill down.
“But the Championship, you’re not guaranteed anything, as they found out. It’s not a given in the Championship... but the first two years, I think they could have done it.”
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