Danny Rohl Explains Why He Left Rangers for Red Bull Salzburg After Eight Months at Ibrox

Danny Rohl's tenure at Rangers lasted eight months. It ended not in crisis, but in a phone call answered from the deck of a cruise ship in Hawaii.

Rohl, 37, took over at Ibrox when Rangers sat sixth in the Scottish Premiership after winning just one of their opening eight matches. He steadied the club and dragged them back into title contention before four defeats in their final five games left Rangers third at season's end, according to BBC Sport.

By June, Rangers expected him to stay. Rohl says he expected the same thing.

"I was not prepared for this change in the summer," Rohl told BBC Sport, describing the moment Red Bull Salzburg's interest reached him mid-vacation. "I was in Hawaii, the time difference was 12 hours and I was often on the main deck on the cruise around five or six in the morning. I had some calls and I thought about the situation."

He says the decision wasn't made in a boardroom. It was made staring at the ocean. "I saw the beautiful sea, I saw the sun and then you think: 'OK, what is the future?'"

A Mutual, Not Messy, Split

Rohl is adamant the exit wasn't acrimonious. He says he was upfront with Rangers throughout the process and gave the club the same transparency he gave Salzburg.

"I spoke, of course, with Rangers. I was really transparent and open on how I feel, how I see it," Rohl said. "On the other side there was Red Bull Salzburg, especially Marcus [Mann, sporting director], he really gave me the feeling of what we can do here."

He says he set a condition for himself from day one. If no agreement could be reached with Salzburg, he'd have stayed at Rangers without complaint. "I said from the first day to both, if there's no agreement then we carry on, we move on because I have big respect to Rangers. It was also clear, our story was not finished."

Ultimately, the appeal of rebuilding from scratch with a talented young Salzburg squad won out over continuing the project he'd started at Ibrox. "I saw a lot of opportunities, what we can do in the summer, what we should do but on the other side, I saw also a good opportunity to restart, to start from zero with a group of players with high quality."

McInnes Inherits a Tough Job

Rangers replaced Rohl with Derek McInnes, who had come agonizingly close to a Scottish title with Hearts before finishing runner-up to Celtic on the final day of last season, according to BBC Sport.

McInnes has not had the honeymoon Rohl once got. His first four games in charge produced no wins. BBC Sport reports the losing streak included a Europa League exit to Polish club Jagiellonia Bialystok.

Rohl, who made his comments before that Europa League defeat, was careful not to criticize his successor directly. But he was blunt about what the job demands.

"Consistency, this is the most important thing. The environment is really demanding," Rohl said. "Everyone who goes there, it doesn't matter if it's a manager, a player, a staff member, you have to understand this club is demanding and this creates a lot of pressure on people to make the right decisions."

He added that no amount of preparation gets a manager ready for Ibrox. "Nobody can prepare [for] this step. I cannot speak for the new manager but you can't prepare. You have to be there and if you are there, then you really feel what it means."

A Career Built on Turnarounds

Rohl's path to Salzburg runs through crisis management. He arrived at Sheffield Wednesday amid turmoil before taking the Rangers job under similarly rocky conditions, and before that worked as a coach under Hansi Flick at Bayern Munich, now Barcelona's manager, according to Yahoo Sports.

Now he's settled into an office at Salzburg's Taxham training ground, with the Berchtesgaden Alps as a backdrop instead of Ibrox's pressure cooker.

Whether McInnes can find the same traction Rohl briefly had at Rangers before his own exit remains to be seen. Four games without a win, capped by a European exit to a Polish side few would have picked as favorites, is not the start Rangers hoped for. Whether that's an early-season blip or a sign of deeper trouble will play out over Rangers' coming Premiership and cup fixtures.