Rangers have reached agreement to sell the naming rights of Ibrox to Mike Ashley's Sports Direct. Ashley, the owner of Newcastle United, also has a stake in the Rangers International Football Club plc. Sports Direct already has an agreement as Rangers' merchandising partner.

Charles Green, the Rangers chief executive, hopes to have the naming rights in place before the start of next season. Rangers supporters, Green believes, are more relaxed over the issue than before.

Green told STV: "We have now decided that Sports Direct will be the partner [for stadium naming]. We had representatives from Sports Direct up for a fans' forum a couple of weeks ago. We also had Derek Llambias of Newcastle United sharing his experience of how that helped his club.

"We are now into the stage where we are doing some layouts, some pictorials of how it might look and we'll stick those on the website shortly so the fans can see what's being proposed.

"We have had good engagement from the fans on this. I think it was always an issue for fans but I think the fans accept now that this is something that we have to do. Almost all of the big stadia have been named now."

Ashley had wounding experience of renaming a stadium at Newcastle, though. There, fans were bitter in their complaints about St James' Park being titled the Sports Direct Arena; it has since been returned to the original name.

Rangers announced a loss of £7m for the seven months to 31 December 2012. Operating expenses stood at £16.6m against a revenue of £9.5m; the figures are the first to be released since Rangers plunged into liquidation last summer.

"Nobody expects the club to be making a big profit in the first year," said Brian Stockbridge, Rangers' finance director. "We are not about trying to make profit at the expense of everything else.

"We do need to create shareholder value because we are now a public company but it's about approaching things in a sensible way. The existing investors haven't invested to make profits in the first six months, put it that way."