Paul Le Guen, the former Rangers manager who was in charge at Ibrox for eight stormy months, felt betrayed by David Murray, the chairman, according to a new book to be serialised in The Times next week. It describes how Murray gave up on Le Guen, having stood by him during the early part of his time in Glasgow, then, in a terse telephone conversation four weeks before his departure from the club in January this year, told the Frenchman that his time was up.

The book, Paul Le Guen, Enigma: Trauma and Turmoil inside Rangers, written by The Times’s Scottish football correspondent, Graham Spiers, also explains why Murray is now actively looking to sell his 90 per cent stake in the club. It includes testimony from Le Guen, Murray, Barry Ferguson, Alex McLeish and various others, detailing the internal collapse of the Le Guen-Rangers marriage and the strain it has left on the club.

Ferguson’s spat with Le Guen is chronicled from both the player’s and the Frenchman’s perspectives, a row which ended, according to the book, with Le Guen wondering if Ferguson “had the intelligence” to go with his undoubted talent.

Le Guen, it is revealed, made a specific plea to Murray to put Ferguson up for transfer. It was a plea that Murray rejected, which left Le Guen knowing that he no longer had full say in first-team affairs at Rangers.

The book also details for the first time the inside story of the Uefa prosecution of Rangers over bigotry, including the key role played by Martin O’Neill, while manager of Celtic, in landing Rangers in trouble with the European authorities.

It also reveals the way in which Rangers were manipulated by Austria Vienna over the transfer of Filip Sebo, a key Le Guen signing that proved disastrous. Markus Kraetschmer, the financial controller of Austria Vienna, is described as being “slapped on the back in every bar in Vienna” after selling the relatively untested Sebo for £1.8 million to Rangers. Kraetschmer is quoted as saying: “I made a 300 per cent profit for this club on the sale of Sebo to Rangers.”

A key section of the book focuses on Murray’s role at the club after 20 years at Ibrox, his manipulation of the media, and why and when the Rangers chairman chose to start seeking a buyer for his majority shareholding. Murray is portrayed as piqued and angry at criticism aimed at him by some Rangers supporters despite the haul of 27 trophies during his time in charge.

Yet it is also reveals that Le Guen, Rangers’ first Catholic manager, felt warmly embraced by the Rangers support, and rejects any notion that he was shunned or ostracised on grounds of culture or religion. On the contrary, Le Guen tells Spiers: “The Rangers supporters were brilliant to me. In terms of the support and welcome I received in Glasgow, there can be no excuses. Ibrox is a special place, there is nothing like it. But I made mistakes.”

Le Guen, now the Paris Saint-Germain coach, met the author three times in Paris in the piecing together of the story. The Frenchman says his family miss Scotland and that he has no regrets about taking the Rangers job, even though it ended in disaster.

The Le Guen story begins on Monday in The Times.