There’s a lot of noise around recruitment at Rangers, and it usually boils down to one idea: if a player works out, somebody “found” him, and if it goes wrong, somebody “missed” him. Truth is, the structure matters just as much as the names, and that’s where I think a few folk are misunderstanding what Koppen actually did at the club.
Head of Scouting vs Technical Director isn’t the same gig
Koppen came in as Head of Scouting and later moved into the Technical Director role. That matters, because those titles aren’t just fancy wording. They describe a shift from the hands-on end of recruitment into the bit that shapes how the whole department works.
At that level you’re talking about recruitment strategy, how the club identifies targets, how reports are built, and how decisions get made. You’re leading scouts and analysts, setting player pathways, and overseeing evaluation and reporting. It’s less “I watched this lad on a Tuesday night” and more “this is how Rangers will consistently find and judge players across multiple markets”.
Yes, he’d know players, but that’s not the point
Of course Koppen would still have direct knowledge of certain players and feed names into the system. The example given is Igamane, and that’s a fair way of looking at it. People in senior recruitment roles do have opinions and they do flag players.
But it’s a misunderstanding to frame it like he was the club’s main scout. At Rangers he wasn’t out there doing the day-to-day legwork as if he was one of the spotters. He was operating at a higher level, building the framework that makes the spotting and filtering work properly.
The process doesn’t reset every time a manager changes
This is the bit that gets lost whenever there’s a change in the building. Fans tend to assume a new regime means ripping everything up and starting again. Sometimes that happens, but good clubs don’t work like that. They keep a living database of players, keep monitoring, keep profiling, and keep refining what they already know.
The point being made here is that the recruitment team are still tracking players identified across different managerial spells, and they’ll keep developing that under Danny Röhl too. That shouldn’t be controversial. Managers influence the profile and the priorities, but the department’s job is to keep the pipeline moving regardless.
And if the processes embedded by Koppen are still being used, that’s not nostalgia. It’s just a sign the club felt the method was solid enough to build on, with tweaks rather than a complete overhaul.
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