Sir David Murray made his name in steel before diversifying into silverware when he bought Glasgow Rangers on November 23, 1988. There have been 31 trophies in the 20 years since, including 13 league titles. A haul delivered by just four managers - Graeme Souness, Walter Smith, Dick Advocaat and Alex McLeish. Who better then to provide insight into Murray’s two decades at the club and what comes next for him and Rangers?

It all started at Raffaelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh’s west end where Murray and Souness often met as their friendship grew. Murray casually mentioned he would be interested in buying Rangers if they came on the market and this seed soon sprouted in Souness’s head. He put the proposal to Lawrence Marlborough, then the major shareholder, suspecting he might be willing to sell and a deal was soon struck for just over £6m.

Souness’s appointment as manager in 1986 marked the start of the most exciting era in the club’s history, and when he and Murray got together it only added further momentum. Having already broken one barrier by tempting English internationals such as Terry Butcher and Chris Woods to Ibrox with his persuasive sales pitch and big wages, next on Souness’s to-do list was something far more controversial, signing a Catholic. Not just any Catholic either, but Maurice Johnston, who was on the brink of returning to Celtic in the summer of 1989, having posed in the club’s strip ahead of actually signing his contract. There is still relish in Souness’s voice as he recalls putting this plan to Murray. “That was the first time, and only time, I have seen him speechless,” says Souness now. “He just went ‘Yeah’ and then ‘Yeah’ again, as if he was reasssuring himself. I think Walter [Smith] was on the floor by that point, but it was proved it was the correct thing to do.”

Souness maintains he got the “best” years of Murray as chairman, while he was still feeling his way into football, having been a rugby player until losing both legs in a car crash in March 1976 when he was 24. Murray, a stand-off, was on his way back from kicking 18 points for Dalkeith against North Berwick when a blowout sent his Lotus Elite into a tree. “He was naive and I could persuade him,” says Souness. “They were exciting times, I was David’s first manager and we had a very good time. I think I got the best of him. After that, he started to have an opinion on who was a good footballer, which isn’t always the best recipe for a manager.”

Souness also mischievously notes Murray has “generally picked the right person [to manage Rangers], but don’t forget, it was me who picked him.” When he left for Liverpool in April 1991, Souness wanted to take Smith, his No 2 at Ibrox, with him and subsequently missed his influence. “Walter thought about it, but told me with his family and everything, if he had a chance of being Rangers manager he would stay. I told him he had a great chance.”

Murray’s parting shot to Souness was a warning - Liverpool were no longer the same club he had played for and he would regret returning. “It was the only club I would have left Rangers for but the timing wasn’t right,” admits Souness. “I had lots of aggravation in my personal life, I had separated and was on my own, and it seemed I was falling out with people by the day, even that tea lady up at Perth. I just felt the whole world was against me. So while professionally it was the wrong thing, privately if I had stayed in Scotland I might not have met my second wife and have a wonderful nine-year-old son just now. I would have needed a break somehow, whether it was stepping back to let someone else like Walter be manager. Who knows what would have happened? No one does.”

Smith, meanwhile, credits Murray for his bravery in promoting him from assistant manager with a title at stake and with the Rangers job then a coveted one. “I owe him a great deal,” says Smith. “When I became manager it would have been easy for him to go out to any club in Britain at that time. The Premiership wasn’t what it is these days and Rangers would have been a huge attraction for any manager in the country. To pick someone who was inexperienced and give him his first job in management was a brave decision on his part and one I’ll always be grateful for. It kind of typified him as a chairman, he’s never been afraid to make the decisions he felt were the right ones for the club.”

Murray was handsomely repaid for his faith in Smith. If Souness provided Rangers with their, occasionally bloody, revolution, then Smith was more of a benign dictator as he continued to chalk up championships with Celtic often in chaos. His team almost reached the 1993 European Cup final too, as tantalisingly close as they have come in the modern era to claiming club football’s greatest prize. Besides local heroes like Ally McCoist, there were also world-class players at Ibrox in this period including Paul Gascoigne and Brian Laudrup for supporters to drool over, but when Smith’s team gave out in pursuit of a 10th consecutive title in 1998 it was time for a new era. Rangers were going Dutch.

Dick Advocaat liked Murray from the first time he met him, in Jersey early in 1998, and the feeling was mutual. “He likes you or doesn’t like you. When he likes you, he will show that,” says Advocaat. “We still speak regularly about football and about normal life. David is a man who knows how the world looks and I always have a good feeling when I call him. You can ask him anything. He’s still very much involved in my life, I can always go to him for advice and give him some as well.” They met up in August when Murray was at his home in the south of France while Advocaat was preparing Zenit St Petersburg for their Super Cup win over Manchester United in Monaco, but the Dutchman insists he was not brought in specifically to provide European success. “No, David never said that. He said we would work together to get a very attractive type of football, with good players. That was all. The way I worked with him made it the best part of my career.”

All his managers stress the short chain of command at Rangers and Murray’s capacity for making decisions quickly as utopia for them. “You can’t have a football club run by committee, it just doesn’t work,” notes Souness. “I was very lucky with David Holmes and then David Murray. When I needed a quick answer on things I could get it and it was usually ‘yes’. David [Murray] actually likes aggravation. You are not the chairman of Rangers unless you can make difficult decisions, sometimes on a daily basis.”

Yet there was a shift in policy as 2001 turned to 2002. The party was over in many ways and the club entered a new austere, debt-reduc-ing era. It fell to Alex McLeish to manage in this difficult period and Murray even stepped down as chairman in the summer of 2002, fearing he would become “a dinosaur”, something which appalled him. Yet McLeish still found him to have “a touch of class”, adding: “You don’t become a magnate, or as he calls himself, ‘a typhoon’, because you are soft but he was typified by loyalty and trust. If you look through his whole organisation, it’s full of guys who have been with him for years.”

It wasn’t all cutbacks, either. “When we had won the league for the second time I said I was going to Rome with the family for a few days,” recalls McLeish. “We had done this deal with EasyJet, but David said, ‘As a thank you, I’ll put on the [private] jet’. So we relinquished our tickets for about £500 and had a few days in Rome and then he flew us back again. It was stunning, a phenomenal gesture.”

There was also a common touch. One of McLeish’s favourite parts of the week came at Ibrox on Saturdays. “He would come in about 12, and we’d have a roll and square-sliced sausage with our respective brown and tomato sauces and a cup of tea. That’s when he would tell me the team, so I am blaming him for that last year.”

Then came Murray’s only failure with a Rangers manager, his fifth appointment. Paul Le Guen departed after the final six torrid months of 2006 when the team probably reached its lowest ebb in Murray’s 20 years, before Smith returned to rebuild it. The Frenchman politely declined to comment on that period when contacted last week.

So what of the future? Murray has said he will sell if he can find the right buyer but Advocaat finds that hard to envisage. “He is crazy about Rangers. I cannot see Rangers without David and I cannot see David without Glasgow Rangers.” Souness can see his friend selling up, but only if completely convinced of a buyer’s intentions. “He’ll know when it’s right to move on. He’s very much aware of the traditions of Glasgow Rangers. He will want to be certain whoever he passes it on to is the right person to maintain them, not just the one with the deepest pockets.”

David Murray: 20 years of soundbites

1988: ‘I am glad a Scottish institution has stayed in Scottish hands. This is the business deal of the year’ - after buying Rangers

1989: ‘Do you, or do you not, want us to be the best club in Europe?’ - at the club’s agm,after signing Maurice Johnston

1990: ‘I'm past the money thing now, I do it for pride’

1991: ‘I feel personally let down by Graeme Souness’s decision to leave [for Liverpool]. I think he’s made the biggest mistake of his life’

1992: ‘A lot of credit must go to Walter [Smith] for taking on a very difficult job after Graeme left. This is the end of the Souness era’

1993: ‘When we budgeted for this season, it was on a basis of winning half our matches at this stage of the European Cup and losing half. A minimum of £3m. Getting to the final would be an absolute bonus’

1994: ‘I’m not the type who is looking for plaudits. You’ll never see me when the club win anything. But if there’s a crisis or a problem, then that’s my time to step in and put a firm hand on the tiller’

1995: ‘Iregard Rangersasaprivi-lege, not a pressure’

1996: ‘Rangers will stand still until this nine-in-a-row thing disappears. It’s like a monkey on our backs’

1997: ‘Celtic have gone public. Many of their fans have stumped up money to buy shares, which in turn has helped to finance the stadium. As a result, I sometimes think their supporters feel greater loyalty to the cause. Rangers fans basically got the stadium for nothing, and some of them have had it too easy for too long’

1998: ‘Dick Advocaat was first choice. He was the only contender and I’m sure he’ll be a major success. It’s a peculiar situation as Walter Smith is still in the job, but this only happened because Walter made it clear that he wanted to step down’

1999: ‘The latest results [£6.3m loss] are disappointing but £6m isn’t even a player these days, is it?’

2000: ‘We’re delighted to get such a high-quality player’ - after breaking the British transfer record to sign Tore Andre Flo for £12m

2001: ‘I like a good fight. I’m Celtic’s problem and their supporters know that. I said if they put down a fiver then I’d put down a tenner to keep Rangers ahead of Celtic. Now it might be 15 quid I’ll need to put down, but I’ll do whatever’s necessary to achieve my aims for Rangers’

2002: ‘Dick and I came to the conclusion that it had to change then and not at the end of the season when Alex McLeish would have been starting cold’

2003: The reason we’ve accumulated [£20m of] debt is we spent money on the basis we had high ambitions. I accept full responsibility’

2004: ‘You get affected by supporter pressure, your own pressure and the chase for success. I invested too much and I was caught out in the cyclical downturn of football’

2005: ‘Alex knows who will be the next manager of Rangers, if he has to go ‘

2006: ‘This is a world football story. I don’t need to build Paul Le Guen up with tags because he will do it himself with his actions’

2007: ‘Paul and I felt this was the time to make a change, he was an honourable man. I don’t want to dig up Le Guen but it was results-driven. Sometimes when you are in a hole you stop digging’

2008: ‘Yes, 1972 was remarkable. But I think when you take the financial parameters into it this time [reaching the Uefa Cup final] is more so’