Is Rangers going MAGA?

On the walls of The District pub on Paisley Road West are match-worn Rangers shirts, lots of them, dating from the early 1990s to this season’s latest. One is really big and was given to the pub by former Rangers player Ian Durrant, I’m told by a man who’s wearing glasses, drinking 0% Heineken, and wearing a Rangers shirt under a Rangers gilet. 

I’m here, listening to jokes about going to Bosnia to kill Croatian Catholics, because change is afoot for Rangers F.C. A club takeover looms, spearheaded by a group of American investors, led by healthcare insurance boss Andrew Cavenagh, and the investment arm of NFL football team, the San Francisco 49ers. At the same time, a new fashion trend seems to be sweeping through Ibrox’s stands. Take a look at the Rangers end of a game when the men’s team are playing. You’ll spot a rash of navy blue caps, sometimes bobble hats. They bear the same message in bold white lettering: ‘MAKE RANGERS GREAT AGAIN”. 

You’ll likely recognise the phrase as a reworking of the rallying cry that swept current U.S. president Donald Trump to power. ‘MAGA’ ideology is sprawling and diffuse but it basically boils down to the idea that America used to be really, really great until immigrants, liberals, and the ‘woke mind virus’ (read progressive values) humiliated the nation and impoverished her people. MAGA is also a chameleon. It’s global now, and means many things to many people. My question is: what does MRGA mean to Rangers? 

Is it as simple as adopting a catchy slogan about genuinely just making the club ‘great’ again? Or is a more interesting, political alignment taking place, its brain centre now located squarely across the pond? Also, crucially: who’s making these damn hats? 

On a bear hunt

The first time ‘Make Rangers Great Again’ muscled its way properly into public consciousness was on 12 December 2024 when Rangers faced Tottenham Hotspur at Ibrox. For the occasion, the Union Bears, Rangers’ set of ultras (die-hard fans), draped a large banner bearing the message across the Copland Stand, the Union Bears’ fiefdom. The same night, an anonymous Facebook page called simply ‘Make Rangers Great Again’ began promoting the navy caps for sale at £19.99 a pop. It seemed a coordinated effort. Was it? 

Digging reveals the Make Rangers Great Again Facebook page is not new, hugely predating the American consortium sniffing around to buy the club. 

The page started in 2020, when Donald Trump (unsuccessfully) ran for re-election in the US and Rangers were heading for their 55th Premiership title. This was followed by a long period of dormancy until the Spurs fixture on 12 December 2024 — just over a month after Trump won his second term in the White House. Now the MRGA Facebook feed is congested with a Frankenstein monster’s mix of memes referencing Trump, Rangers and the San Francisco 49ers — and of course plenty of plugs for the cap to the page’s 2,500 followers. 

I begin with the obvious move: messaging the mysterious administrator(s?) of ‘Make Rangers Great Again’ on Facebook, and through the website, but no reply. I’ll have to track them down the old fashioned way. Meanwhile, I continue my parallel quest of finding out whether Rangers is becoming an outpost for American right-wing politics, starting with the literal standard bearers: the Union Bears.

These ultras aren’t exactly representative. They’re at the extreme end of Rangers fandom and have flirted with far-right politics since their 2007 formation. In March of this year, the club was fined £25,000 by UEFA and hit with various sanctions for a Bears banner displayed at a Europa League fixture. It read: ‘Keep woke foreign ideologies out - defend Europe’, a line I’m familiar with from my work monitoring far-right and neo-Nazi Telegram channels during the riots in England last summer. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Bears might be sympathetic to the political connotations of ‘Make Rangers Great Again’. But they only represent a few hundred Rangers fans. How far is the sentiment spreading? 

Grievance football

I turn first to Craig, who runs the retro-inspired Rangers merch store, Copland Road Retros, as well as the ‘Rangers ‘Til I Die’ Facebook page, which has over 120,000 followers. Craig spotted the ‘Make Rangers Great Again’ slogan in the stands and on the caps and found resonance, at least financially. He stuck it on bobble hats and has sold over 150 in the last month. Craig says he doesn’t intend the slogan to be interpreted “politically [...] it’s really about the future of the club and restoring its glory”. 

But he adds that there is “strong demand” for the hats in North America. To Craig, this, “shows that the slogan really resonates with Rangers fans globally. It’s clear that the message is connecting with fans who share that ambition for the future of the club.” But could it be that the Union Bears’ message is more easily adopted in a part of the world where MAGA is far more widely followed — and normalised?  

Craig doesn’t know if any Union Bears have bought one of his hats yet — there’s no post-purchase survey asking that particular question — only that his customers comprise a broad range, “from fans who are totally fed up with the direction the club's taken, to others who just liked the boldness of the message”.

Why fans are fed up is an interesting question. Rangers supporters do not like being number two. Until recently, Rangers’ men’s team were comfortably, to borrow a chilling American phrase, the winningest side in professional footballing history. But two episodes in the last fifteen years have particularly scarred fans. The first, was the club going bust in 2012, which saw them forced back to the bottom tier of Scottish football. A four year climb back to the Premiership ensued.