How Rangers were architects of the Champions League that’s become a £2bn monster trailblazer now regrets

When Campbell Ogilvie first started work at Rangers in 1978, the club’s office staff amounted to a grand total of eight people.

Over the next decade and a half, the Ibrox operation would grow to the point that the Light Blues could rival any club in Britain on and off the pitch.

But competing in Europe was a different matter entirely.

In fact, in the days when you only had to see your way through nine matches to win UEFA’s two biggest competitions, Gers were developing a nasty habit of falling at the first hurdle.

The 1980s saw Osasuna, Dukla Prague and Bayern Munich all end Rangers’ hopes of climbing to the peak of European football before they’d even got off the ground.

And so with frustration building in the boardroom, the Light Blues' general secretary Ogilvie was tasked with coming up with a way of safeguarding Rangers from the luck of the draw.

From that brief, Ogilvie came up with an idea that almost four decades later has spawned into a competition that this season will dish out more than £2billion worth of prize money to Europe’s top clubs.

Ogilvie’s original concept saw the old European Cup rejigged, with a double mini-league section replacing the traditional quarter-final stage. The winners of each group would progress through to a winner takes all shoot-out.

That change took place in 1991 but it wasn’t until the following year that the competition got its Champions League makeover, a glitzy rebrand covering everything from the anthem played before kick-off to the centralised TV and commercial deals that would provide participants with previously unimaginable riches.

Now 34 years on, reaching a Champions League with a format that has been tinkered with time and time again remains the holy grail for Rangers and