David Holmes

Who is David Holmes?

David Holmes is a Scottish businessman. He is best known as a former chairman and chief executive of Rangers football club.

Holmes was appointed a director of Rangers in November 1985 by the club's then majority shareholder, the Nevada-based businessman Lawrence Marlborough, head of the Lawrence Group of construction companies. This followed several years of internecine squabbling amongst major Rangers shareholders, including Jack Gillespie, John Paton and Tom Dawson. Marlborough had inherited much of his shareholding from John Lawrence, a former Rangers chairman of many years standing. His reputed objective in the mid-1980s was to reinvigorate Rangers after years of under-performance, prior to eventual sale.

To meet this objective, Holmes embarked upon a bold strategy of returning Rangers to the primacy the club had enjoyed throughout most of its history. In doing so, Holmes was able to capitalise on the modernisation of Ibrox stadium in the late 1970s and early 1980s, several years in advance of the upgrading of most comparable British grounds. The ban on English clubs from European competition in the wake of the Heysel Stadium disaster provided Rangers with a further competitive advantage. Both factors proved critical in enabling Graeme Souness, appointed manager at Holmes's behest in 1986, to attract leading English internationalists. The appointment of Souness - at the time one of European football's most celebrated players - was a major coup for Holmes, especially in the context of a Scottish league historically characterised by the exodus of leading players.