Derek McInnes finally got the job he had been linked with for the best part of a decade, and almost as soon as he sat down in the Ibrox office, the scrutiny that comes with managing Rangers arrived with him. His appointment in June 2026 closed a saga that had rumbled on since his Aberdeen days, when a move to Govan looked close before he chose to stay at Pittodrie. This time there was no hesitation. Hearts had just finished second in the Premiership under him, eight points clear of Rangers, and when Danny Röhl departed for Red Bull Salzburg, the Ibrox board moved quickly to get their man. Few pundits welcomed the appointment as warmly as Kris Boyd, who has spent years insisting that Scottish football too often looks past its own coaches in favour of imported names, and who saw in McInnes someone with a genuine record of building teams rather than simply inheriting them.
Boyd’s early praise was built on specifics rather than sentiment. He pointed to what McInnes had done at Pittodrie, turning Aberdeen into a side capable of pushing Celtic and finishing above Rangers themselves for a spell, and to the stability he had left behind when he eventually moved on. He talked about the platform McInnes built at Kilmarnock, taking them straight back into the top flight and then into Europe, and about the surprise package he produced at Tynecastle, where Hearts threatened a genuine title challenge under a manager many had written off as a solid but unspectacular operator. For Boyd, the throughline was obvious: a coach who sticks to his principles, organises a team well, and gets more out of limited resources than the balance sheet suggests he should. That, in Boyd’s eyes, made McInnes exactly the profile of manager Rangers needed after years of chopping and changing since Steven Gerrard’s title-winning side broke up in 2021.
That goodwill did not disappear the moment a ball was kicked in anger, but it did come with conditions attached. In the build-up to the opening weekend of the new season, Boyd used his column to lay out what he thought mattered most, and it was not the performance level or the elegance of the football. It was the result. Rangers had failed to win on the opening day of the season for four years running, and Boyd’s argument was blunt: another slip at the first hurdle risked feeding a negativity around Ibrox that would follow McInnes into a summer already complicated by a major squad rebuild. He was not asking for perfection. He was asking for three points, because he understood better than most watching from the stands how quickly a shaky start can curdle into pressure on a new manager before he has even had the chance to properly stamp his ideas on a group of players still getting to know him and each other.
Rangers did not get the win. They went behind away to Dundee United, needed a moment of quality from Thelo Aasgaard to drag themselves level, and walked away with a point that extended rather than ended that unwanted opening-day run. Boyd’s response afterwards captured the tension of the situation rather than tipping fully into panic. He noted that this had now become a pattern stretching back four seasons, and that patterns like that start to breed exactly the kind of doubt a new manager can do without. He pointed out how quickly the mood in the stadium shifted once Dundee United scored, evidence for him of a support that wants desperately to get behind something but has had its patience tested by years of near misses and false starts. At the same time, he was careful to credit the character Rangers showed in coming back to level it, and to note that better performances were surely still to come once new signings settled and the manager got more time on the training ground with his squad.
Three days later, that settling-in period got no easier. McInnes made wholesale changes for a Europa League qualifying tie against Jagiellonia Białystok, handing a debut to a new signing and rotating heavily across midfield and attack, only to see his side beaten in the first leg. Two competitive matches into his reign, McInnes had a draw and a defeat to show for it, and the tone around the coverage began to shift accordingly. It is worth being precise here about what changed and what did not. Boyd did not turn on McInnes the way some feared a two-game stumble might invite. He continued to talk in terms of patience and context, pointing out that no serious voice in Scottish football was demanding a managerial change after two matches, and that judging a rebuild this early would be absurd given the scale of turnover in the squad and the short time McInnes has had to work with his new players. What he did do, consistently, was frame Rangers’ business in the transfer market as the thing that would ultimately determine whether that patience was rewarded.
On that front, Boyd has been anything but quiet. He has pushed hard on the idea that Rangers’ rebuild cannot be considered complete, pointing specifically to a lack of cover and competition at right-back following James Tavernier’s departure in the summer, a position Rangers had relied on for the best part of a decade without much thought because one man simply nailed it down. With Tavernier gone, McInnes has had to shuffle between converting a versatile defender into the role and bringing in a specialist midfielder to fill the gap on an interim basis, and Boyd has made clear he does not see that as a long-term solution. He has talked about the need for further reinforcements in that area, noting links to defenders elsewhere in Europe, and framed it as one of the clearest examples of unfinished business hanging over the new manager’s first transfer window. It is a recurring theme in how Boyd assesses managers generally: less concerned with the eye test from week to week, more interested in whether the structural building blocks are actually in place for sustained improvement.
That emphasis on structure and long-term building is really the throughline in everything Boyd has said about McInnes, going all the way back to when the two of them were not manager and pundit but manager and target. There was a spell at Aberdeen when McInnes tried to sign Boyd outright, sitting down with him and his agent to make a pitch for Pittodrie, only to watch him choose Rangers instead. There was a later moment, during Rangers’ post-Caixinha managerial search, when Boyd was adamant on air that McInnes would take the Ibrox job the second compensation was agreed with Aberdeen, a prediction that turned out to be premature by the better part of a decade but was not wrong in its basic reading of what McInnes wanted. Across all of that history, Boyd’s read on McInnes has been remarkably stable: a manager who backs himself, who knows how to build something from a difficult starting position, and who was always likely to end up at Ibrox eventually if the circumstances lined up.
What has made the current spell more interesting is the comparison some observers have started drawing between how Boyd assesses McInnes and how he assesses managers at the other end of Glasgow. When Wilfried Nancy took over at Celtic Park after only ten days in the job, inheriting a squad mid-season with no pre-season of his own and an immediate run of fixtures against the league leaders and a European opponent, Boyd’s tone in analysing those opening matches was notably sharper. Questions were raised about naivety and arrogance, about whether an unconvincing start might unravel quickly, about the manager ultimately being the one who carries responsibility when results go wrong. Set against the more measured, context-heavy language used for McInnes after a similarly small sample of games, it is not hard to see why some Celtic-leaning commentators have accused Boyd of running two different scales depending on which end of the city he is talking about. Boyd would likely argue, and has argued in other contexts, that circumstances differ from case to case, that his affection for his old club is no secret and does not disqualify him from having informed opinions, and that consistency is something he strives for even if outside observers do not always see it that way. Whatever the merits of that defence, the comparison has become part of the noise around McInnes’s opening weeks, adding an extra layer of scrutiny to a start that was always going to be picked apart given the size of the job and the expectation that comes with it.
None of this amounts to Boyd abandoning the case he made back in June, when he argued that Rangers had finally got the appointment right after a run of managers since Gerrard who never quite fit the demands of the role. He has been explicit that Rangers are still a huge football club that underperformed last season, that getting back to winning trophies regularly is the only real measure of success at Ibrox, and that a large chunk of transfer investment ought to be made available to McInnes given the scale of the rebuild required. He has also made the point, repeatedly, that judging McInnes purely against Rangers’ spending power misses something important: at both Aberdeen and Hearts, McInnes routinely got more out of his resources than the raw finances suggested he should, regularly finishing above or competitive with clubs who could outspend him several times over. For Boyd, that record is the reason for patience now, even as he keeps pushing publicly for results, transfer activity, and a right-back to actually arrive before the window closes.
Where this leaves the conversation about a rebuild at Rangers is somewhere more nuanced than a straightforward vote of confidence or a vote of no confidence. Boyd’s position, read across everything he has said since McInnes’s appointment was confirmed, amounts to this: the appointment itself was the right call, built on a genuine track record rather than reputation or sentiment, but a managerial appointment on its own does not fix a football club. It needs to be matched by smart recruitment that closes the specific gaps in the squad, patience from supporters who have understandably grown weary of false dawns, and results arriving quickly enough to keep the goodwill from curdling into the kind of negativity that has undone previous regimes at Ibrox. Two winless competitive matches at the start of a new era were never going to be the moment that verdict got delivered either way, and Boyd has been careful not to pretend otherwise, even while making sure his concerns about the squad’s remaining gaps are heard loudly and often.
What comes next will matter more than anything said in the opening fortnight. Rangers’ business in the remainder of the transfer window, how quickly the new arrivals bed in, and whether the kind of resilience shown in fighting back against Dundee United becomes a pattern rather than a one-off, will decide whether the framing around McInnes shifts from cautious optimism to genuine pressure. Boyd, for his part, has positioned himself less as cheerleader or critic and more as a pundit measuring the club against the standard he thinks it should be held to: proper recruitment, a clear structure, and results that reflect the resources at the manager’s disposal once the rebuild is actually complete. Whether McInnes gets the time and the signings to meet that standard is the story that will define his first season at Ibrox, and it is one Boyd shows no sign of stepping back from covering closely, week by week, result by result, as the early weeks of this new era at Rangers