Paraag Marathe, the man behind 49ers Enterprises, the company that's a key force in the bid to buy Rangers has opened a window into what might happen to the Ibrox club should his consortium wrest control of Ibrox.
It's clear that the days of heavy losses and overspends would be over under American ownership as his group seek top business professionals with sporting experience not essential to getting the job.
Speaking on the Sports Geek Replay podcast, Marathe explained how teams in his stable no longer operate as 'lemonade stands' and are run to maximise return on investment.
He said: "The fundamental thing that's changed with professional sports teams on and off the pitch is professional sports teams are no longer run as lemonade stands. They are no longer just about the football team, or the baseball team, or the soccer team, it's now run as a business, as a big Fortune 50, Fortune 500 type of business.
"That means you need to get as much value as you can and minimising risk as much as you can, both on the field of the players and also in the business.
"And I think what you're seeing is every sports organization is now building up their own business analytics. Sometimes, they call it business intelligence, sometimes business strategy, sometimes business operations. But it's the same thing. And you're basically just trying to maximize your return of investment and there's been a big shift in teams sort of running more like businesses than they do just a sports club."
Asked about the importance of a sports team's stadium, Marathe looked back to his role in the $1.3bn Levi's Stadium which was custom-built for the 49ers under his watchful eye back in 2014.
He said: "The name of the game for any sports team is to have yourself a sustainable stadium or arena that you can play in that generates enough that you can support the team you want, a competitive team on the field.
"And that was, that was all of our focus, you know, for seven or eight years that I was COO of the team itself. That's all our focus was, was figuring out where to get, build a stadium, how to build it, how to finance it, how to sell it, all of that.
"And yeah, we did transition from a $3bn lemonade stand to a sort of more of a sports entertainment company. It was actually part of the birth of 49ers Enterprises because what we decided to do is go about our hiring a little bit differently.
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"At that time, we hired most of our C-level executives who are here today, as well as most of our EVPs or VPs. And what we did is we just, it was just, we just flipped, flipped a fundamental hiring practice kind of upside down for the beginning, since the beginning of time in the sports industry, people hired other sports people, maybe had a little bit of business experience. But the primary trait was, hey, you worked in that sport or this sport and like success or failure didn't matter, but you just had sports experience.
"We took the other approach as we were hiring. We said, hold on, let's go get really good sound business people. And by the way, if they happen to have sports experience, then great, but not a prerequisite. In the end, we ended up hiring, as we grew from, I think, 70 people to 300 people, we ended up hiring a lot of talented, talented individuals of all colours and genders as well, because we were, we tried to do it as much of a meritocracy as we could. And that's what enabled us to transition and actually be able to do all these other things that we still do today."
