Scottish Premiership fixtures 2018/19: Steven Gerrard's Rangers start with tricky trip to Aberdeen

Steven Gerrard’s first experience of league football as a manager looks a tasty prospect – a visit to last season’s Scottish runners-up, Aberdeen, at Pittodrie, a ground where the atmosphere always has an edge when the Ibrox side visit.

Nor will Gerrard have much time to find his feet before the opening Old Firm collision of the season brings him up against his former Liverpool mentor, Brendan Rodgers, when Celtic host their arch-foes on either September 1 or 2.

Celtic, meanwhile, open their season with a home fixture against newly-promoted Livingston, who last visited Celtic Park in the league on Boxing Day 2005 when Shaun Maloney and Shunsuke Nakamura scored to give Celtic a 2-1 win.

The Hoops have already been rated as overwhelming favourites to take their championship run to eight successive titles, with SPFL sponsors Ladbrokes pricing Rodgers’ side at 1/10, with Rangers a distant 7/1 to break the sequence.

Aberdeen come in at 18/1 with Neil Lennon’s Hibernian – who surprised last season by following promotion from the Championship with a fourth-place finish – well out at 80/1, although Easter Road partisans will be gratified that Hearts are even more remote at 100/1.

Ladbrokes’ spokesman, David Macdonald, said: “The arrival of Steven Gerrard at Ibrox has certainly given Rangers fans some hope that Celtic's dominance will soon come to an end, but early betting suggests that Brendan Rodgers success will run into next season.”

Celtic made history last season with a second successive clean sweep of the Scottish honours and are priced at 7/2 for an historic treble-treble, with Rangers 250/1 to lift all three trophies. 

Meanwhile, Club 1872, the Rangers fans’ shareholding group confirmed that it would invest £1 million in the forthcoming stock issue, which is intended to fund Gerrard’s reconstruction of the playing squad. The announcement came a year after Club 1872 paid £1 million to buy the shares of Mike Ashley’s MASH Holdings.

Club 1872 Director Laura Fawkes said: “A huge thank you to all our members for their regular donations and those in our membership and the wider support who made one-off donations towards our share issue campaign. These funds will not only put more shares into the hands of Rangers supporters but will go directly into the club to assist with the rebuilding process now underway under Steven Gerrard.

“For Club 1872 to raise this level of funding purely through donations from around 7500 Rangers supporters shows the huge potential of the organisation. What we can achieve together will be determined solely by how many supporters take part.

“When we look at the number of supporters involved, we have only scratched the surface of the contribution that we can make to Rangers. We hope that investment into the club on this scale will show the thousands of supporters out there who have not yet joined us, that there are huge benefits of doing so.”

“Club 1872 is still a young organisation and we are learning all the time but there is no question that if our support acts together we can be a formidable force, not only in pushing our football club back to where it belongs but also in making sure that the damaging events of the past can never be repeated.”

So far, Gerrard has secured six players – Allan McGregor, Scott Arfield, Jamie Murphy, Ovie Ejaria, Nikola Katic and Connor Goldson – and met his squad for the first time on Friday morning at the club’s Auchenhowie base, which has also been the subject of an income-generating deal and is now named the Hummel Training Centre after their new kit manufacturer.

Rangers have not been alone in making plans for the next campaign. Celtic have secured Odsonne Edouard, the 20-year-old PSG striker who spent last season on loan to the Scottish champions, for a club record transfer purchase fee, believed to be in the region of £9 million. Edouard, who scored 11 goals in 29 appearances, said: “Now that I’m back here I want to continue learning from both the manager and my team-mates as well.

“There wasn’t a particular moment that I knew I wanted to stay. As soon as I came on board I wanted to impress enough to try and stay at Celtic. I was working closely with the manager on a project and I want to finish what I had started with the manager because I feel I am improving as a player.

“It feels amazing to have finally signed. I’m very happy to be here. It was my number one objective to come back to the club. Now that I’m here, I’m going to focus on enjoying my time here, learning a lot from the coach and my team mates and just really try to enjoy my time here at this club.

“The day we won the league against Rangers at Celtic Park has been one of the highlights of my time here at Celtic so far. At the beginning, it was a bit hard because I was adapting to a new country, a new club and new team-mates.

“I needed time to settle down. Once I did that I started to score and really started enjoying my time here.”

Hibs have also kept the services of a loan striker, Florian Kamberi, who became a favourite with the Easter Road faithful when he arrived from Grasshopper Zurich in January and scored nine goals in 14 outings. Kamberi was secured for £100,000, because of a purchase option open to Hibs and negotiated at the start of his loan period, despite interest in him from clubs – including Sunderland – evidently willing to pay £1 million or more.