Derek McInnes Set for Rangers Return Amid World Cup Fever

While Scotland wrestles with World Cup fever, another story keeps humming away in the background, growing louder by the day. Derek McInnes, the man who dragged Hearts to the brink of a first title in 66 years, is edging towards a return to Ibrox. To Rangers. To the club he once patrolled as a midfielder between 1995 and 2000.

In a Scottish football year already bursting with drama, this would be another jolt to the system.

The domino that sets it all off sits in the dugout. Danny Rohl is expected to head to RB Salzburg, a move that would crack open the Rangers job and offer McInnes the chance he has circled for much of his managerial career. From the outside, it looks like a neat swap: Rohl out, compensation in, McInnes through the front door.

Those who know him best see the fit immediately.

‘Perfect fit’ for a fragile Rangers

Tony Docherty has spent longer than most in McInnes’ orbit. St Johnstone, Aberdeen, more than a decade shoulder to shoulder. When he talks about his old boss, there’s no hesitation.

"It's a brilliant opportunity - if it presents itself," he told the Scottish Football Podcast. "If it goes the way it looks as though it's going to go, I think it's the perfect fit for Rangers to be totally honest."

Docherty has watched Rangers stumble when it mattered most. He saw it again last season. When the split arrived, Rohl’s side were in a position many at Ibrox would have taken in August: second place, one point behind Hearts, ahead of Celtic. Five games left. “Five cup finals,” Rohl called them.

Rangers lost four of them and limped home in third.

This is where Docherty believes McInnes changes the picture. Not with grand gestures or flashy football, but with something far more basic and far more brutal: edge.

"Derek is a hugely competitive person," he said. "You saw that last year, when people thought his team were going to disappear. Purely through him and the recruitment he did they were competitive right the way through."

That stubborn refusal to fold has followed McInnes from job to job. At Aberdeen, he kept dragging his team back up off the canvas, finishing second again and again behind Brendan Rodgers’ Celtic. At Kilmarnock, he took a club operating on a fraction of the Old Firm budget and turned them into a side capable of bloodying noses and qualifying for Europe. At Hearts, he delivered the club’s best-ever points tally and still only lost the title to Martin O’Neill’s Celtic in the dying minutes of the season.

No wonder Docherty sees something powerful in the idea of McInnes in royal blue.

"I've got no doubt having that edge and having played at Rangers and having that affinity with the club, it will be a fantastic appointment," he said. "It is that mentality, you saw it in abundance last year. You've seen it all through his career, the amount of second-place finishes to Brendan Rodgers' Celtic with an Aberdeen team. And last year, every time Hearts were written off they would come up trumps."

Mentality, money and a rare opening

The word that keeps coming back is “mentality”. It has hung over Rangers for the best part of a decade, a quiet accusation that grows louder every time a title race frays or a cup run fizzles out.

Former Rangers and Dundee striker Rory Loy doesn’t dance around it. For him, the potential chain of events at Ibrox borders on ideal.

"To think three or four weeks ago, some Rangers fans - given the decline after the split - were looking to move him [Rohl] on," he said on the Scottish Football Podcast. "To get money for him and to use that money to recruit Derek McInnes, I don't think it could have fallen more favourably for Rangers.

"The one thing Derek McInnes will bring above all else is the one thing that's been levelled at Rangers for the last decade - that's what is between the ears, that's mentality."

This is not a manager weighed down with silverware. McInnes’ honours list is modest: a League Cup with Aberdeen in 2014 and a Championship title with Kilmarnock. On paper, it looks light beside what Rangers demand and what Celtic currently possess.

But context matters. At Pittodrie, he ran into Rodgers’ juggernaut, losing finals and league campaigns to a Celtic side operating at full throttle. At Kilmarnock, he turned Old Firm visits into awkward afternoons and parlayed that into European football in only his second season. At Hearts, he took a squad still punching below the financial heavyweights and pushed O’Neill’s Celtic to the last few, agonising minutes of the campaign.

This is his career pattern: walk into clubs who can’t match the giants pound for pound, and make them believe they can stay in the fight.

O’Neill, McInnes and the title race waiting to happen

Across the city, Celtic have installed Martin O’Neill on the back of a league and Scottish Cup double. Seven wins on the spin to rip the title away at the end of last season underlined the scale of the job Rangers face.

"His one issue may be is he's coming up against a powerhouse when it comes to these things in Martin O'Neill," Loy said. "He has a proven track record. To win seven on the bounce last year to win the title was unbelievable."

That, in many ways, is the challenge and the appeal. McInnes, the serial overachiever, thrown directly at O’Neill, the proven serial winner.

Loy is convinced that if this appointment had happened a little earlier, last season’s script would have looked very different.

"I genuinely believe that if Derek McInnes was the Rangers manager going into the split, they don't collapse. They might not have won it - but I don't think they collapse. They take it to the last day at the very least."

"And with Martin O'Neill in charge, he has a proven track record, I think it has all the ingredients for nip-and-tuck, last game of the season stuff."

Docherty sees the same storm brewing. Two managers with clear identities, two clubs with no margin for error, a league that already feels like it’s tightening.

"If it does happen and Martin O'Neill is in place at Celtic and Derek McInnes is in place at Rangers it's going to be one hell of a title race this year," he said. "Derek's strength is his longevity. He's been a manager for 18 years. For 15 years I was assistant to him. It's incredible to have that longevity and that amount of success."

Eighteen years in the dugout. Battles with Rodgers, O’Neill, the Old Firm, the expectation, the doubt. McInnes has lived all of it from the outside looking in.

If the move goes through, he walks back into Ibrox not as the midfielder he once was, but as the man asked to fix what’s “between the ears” and drag Rangers toe-to-toe with a Celtic side that has forgotten how to blink.

For a league that thrives on tension, it’s hard to script a sharper edge to the season ahead.