Glasgow Rocks have been renamed Caledonian Gladiators with a view to taking the British Basketball League club to nearby East Kilbride.

They hope to gain planning permission for a new facility so the club can move from Emirates Arena.

“It is all part of the strategy to build a world-class arena,” Steve Timoney told BBC Scotland.

“We changed the name because, if you look at the long term, the Caledonian Gladiators name really comes out of the fact we are positioning the club as a Scottish club and not as a Glasgow club.”

The couple had started sponsoring the Lady Rocks team 12 years ago and now the men’s and women’s sections will both play under the same Caledonian Gladiators banner.

Timoney explained that recent investments in the BBL suggested it was “entering a new era of tremendous growth of the sport in the UK” that will position British basketball “as the most technologically advanced sport in the world”.

“They say that the best way to turn a large fortune into a small fortune is to buy a sports club,” he said. “First, I don’t intend to lose a large fortune and turn it into a small fortune and second this is about more than a commercial enterprise for us.”

Timoney says he has enjoyed “all the success I’m ever going to have in business” through his Smart Metering Systems company and now wants “to use that wealth for common good”.

“We are not looking to make a profit from it,” he stressed. “All the money made from the basketball will go back into the basketball and the community.”

The club were established as Edinburgh Rocks in 1998, became Scottish Rocks in 2002 and have played at Emirates Arena since 2012 – three years after becoming Glasgow Rocks.

Timoney believes a permanent home is needed as matches could be displaced by other sports at the Glasgow facility and general manager Sean Skelly added that: “Although the name of Rocks will always be synonymous with the franchise, an exciting new era has come to the club.”