The former Rangers boss remains unhappy about how his exit was handled
Former Rangers boss Mark Warburton has repeated his claims he would never have resigned from the club and insists his exit was ‘handled appallingly’.
But he hopes to return to Ibrox in the near future as a fan with his only time back at the club coming in the away dugout as assistant to David Moyes during a pre-season friendly against West Ham last summer. Warburton had spent just more than 18 months in charge of Rangers when he left under a cloud with the club claiming he had resigned while he insisted he had been sacked.
And he’s now revealed he didn’t want to take on a legal battle over it because it could have harmed his reputation and nobody would want to hire him while it was ongoing. He quickly moved on to Nottingham Forest and there were suggestions he had spoken to the English side prior to leaving Rangers and that’s what resulted in his exit.
But Warburton has denied it and claimed he first heard he had left the club when he looked at Sky Sports News and it said he had resigned at the bottom. He immediately phoned David Weir who said the same and reckons his agent didn’t even know anything about it but they were out the door.
He told the ScotScore podcast: “I’ve never said anything derogatory about the club and never will. I was lying on the sofa and it was five to nine and I’ll never forget this, it’s burned on my brain.
“My phone started jumping a little bit and I got an email from Stewart saying ‘Please check your email’. It’s a minute to nine on a Friday night before a game so I’m literally going to watch the news, do a little bit of paperwork and go to bed. I look over and purely by chance I’m on Sky Sports and on the yellow ticker tape I see ‘Mark Warburton has resigned from Rangers’. I did a double take.
“So I phone Davie Weir and said ‘I think I’ve just been sacked’ but as I’m talking to Davie the TV is over here and he said ‘so have I’. I look up and it says ‘David Weir has resigned from Rangers.
“I said what’s going on? We tried to call and no one picks up. My agent calls and asked what’s going on, I said I have no idea, apparently I’ve resigned and I’ve no idea what they’re talking about.
“So in a nutshell, absolutely not, we were sacked by Rangers. We’d never walk away from a club like Rangers ever. That was the frustration that people suggested we had resigned. Nonsense. It was handled appallingly at the time. You’d never walk away from a club like Rangers but you have to deal with it.
“Then you get all the media saying ‘sue the club’. First of all, you don’t want embroiled in a court case because nobody is going to touch you while it’s going on. Different legal laws about English laws and Scottish courts and you’re going to go down that route and win money but your reputation is in tatters because you’ve gone legal.
“Everyone said ‘he must be guilty, he must have resigned because he’s not going down the legal route’. What do you win by going down the legal route?
“It’s a great shame because we had a really good relationship so for it to end that way it was bitter. It was unnecessary because it was purely because of Celtic’s unbeaten form.
“At the end of the day it was a privilege to manage Rangers and that will never change. I haven’t been back to Ibrox (as a fan) since that and I want to go back obviously but it’s about the right time but to be clear, you’d never resign from a club like Rangers.”
