NO matter what happened exactly, there is little doubt that Mark Warburton’s departure from Rangers was a bit of a botched job on all sides.

Sorry to sound heartless, but I can’t exactly work up any sympathy for any of those involved, save for David Weir and Frank McParland who no doubt felt they had to go along with Warburton when they could have stayed – Weir might even have ended up manager.

The matter will end up in the courts, no doubt, because a lot of money is at stake for the Warburton Three – a potential claim to more than £1m in compensation if their contracts were wrongly terminated – as well as for the club itself. In the old days, cash-rich Rangers would have bunged them plenty and made them sign non-disclosure agreements, but there’s not a lot in the Ibrox kitty these days.

The problem for chairman Dave King is that his own statement at the weekend indicated that there was no formal written resignation by any of the three men. Leaving a job is a process that is heavily regulated by law and just because someone says ‘I am thinking about resigning’, or an agent makes that remark on your behalf, does not necessarily mean that you have actually resigned. Was it intended to be just the opening of a negotiation? That is not how the board understood it. They took it as a done deal.

If the Warburton Three handed in written ‘with immediate effect’ resignations signed by them, including the foregoing of compensation and notice periods, to chief executive Stewart Robertson, then tough luck on them – the club had every right to treat their contracts as at an end there and then.

If, on the other hand, the board of Rangers did not receive written resignations signed by the Warburton Three with the departure terms explicitly stated, and were merely reacting to a statement from their agent Martin Lockwood, without the three being present, then there could be a few questions about whether this was effective as a ‘resignation’ at all. We can’t know until we get the full story.

Speaking as someone with more than 20 years’ experience of trade union negotiations, I was always baffled at the way football conducted itself. It often seemed that there was one law for football, and one for everybody else. In recent years, however, and especially since the Bosman case, football has had to conduct itself rather more in accordance with the law of the land when it comes to such matters as employment legislation.

So I expect the board of Rangers consulted expert employment lawyers before they acted. King has also outlined what he says was an attempt by Lockwood to rescind the Warburton Three’s resignations. A company does not have to accept any such rescinding, but there is case law to show that employment tribunals, for example, often side with employees when employers refuse to consider a rescinded resignation.

Again, Rangers must have consulted their lawyers about this attempt to rescind the resignations before letting Warburton and his colleagues go, but even so, it does seem that it was all done in haste.

The plain truth is that the board wanted to get rid of the Warburton Three. The fact that the club was prepared to waive any compensation they might be due from a new club taking on the Warburton Three just shows how desperate the board were to be rid of them. For in plain language, Warburton just wasn’t up to the job of getting Rangers into a solid second place and King and Co wanted him out. There is no doubt that Warburton was given money to buy players and pay them well, and ultimately he is gone from Ibrox because most of those players just were not good enough for Rangers to prosper in the Premiership to the extent that King wanted. Waghorn, Foderingham, Tavernier, Windass and Hill might pass muster and Harry Forrester hasn’t had enough game time, but Joey Barton was a disastrous signing in every respect, Michael O’Halloran and Philippe Senderos haven’t performed, and Warburton has been plain unlucky with long term injuries to Nico Krancjar and Joe Garner. Nevertheless, given the disparity in resources that Rangers have over the rest of the league except Celtic, they should be sitting comfortably in second place and certainly not 27 points behind their old rivals in the East End.

Some of King’s other remarks were somewhat strange. He claims that of the £30m investment that was promised when he took over, some £18m has already been spent. Try as I might, and being very generous in my calculations, Warburton has laid out possibly £3-4m on players, so the other £15m went on increased wages? Mmmm… No Rangers fan needs reminding that it was five years ago today that the oldco went into administration, followed by liquidation.

The truth that has never been admitted by those in charge of the game in Scotland is that Rangers really were too big to be allowed to fail and their absence from the scene even for a year would have had devastating consequences for such things as TV income.

No doubt many club chairman and treasurers did a quick calculation before the vote at the Scottish Football League and realised that Rangers would be very good for their bank balances.

The people who really kept Rangers going were their fans.They are worried about their club’s future. Chairman King really needs to find a manager who can work miracles and do it now.