The other day, someone marvelled at the number of issues surrounding Scottish football today that can be traced back to what happened in the summer of 2012.
“Why the Hell didn’t anyone see this coming?” he asked. Easy answer.
It’s called the law of unintended consequences.
You all seen what they’ve done to Toblerone?
This is a shining example of the law of unintended consequences, a minor one I’ll grant you and I’m not about to suggest a single Brexiter would have changed his or her vote on the back of it, but no-one saw that coming, that companies would start doing stuff like this because of the collapsing value of the £.
Stuff like that is happening in every sector of the economy.
The Brexiters were warned that some negative stuff would happen. Nobody saw effects like these, because nobody was looking for them, the small stuff, the background stuff, the Marmite effect if you like. Small but noticeable price rises. Things that impact on our daily lives.
We had a colossal, Brexit-like thing happen in Scottish football in 2012.
The effects of it can only be guessed at right now; we’re still feeling them.
It was Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster who changed our game forever.
They did it trying to keep it the same.
What they unleashed transformed it instead.
At the heart of it, all the issues seem to have been resolved, but of course none of them are. Sevco were told to start life in the bottom tier. They clawed their way up through the leagues to arrive in the SPL and life was supposed to have went on.
But life didn’t just go on.
Things had changed, and things have happened in our game which can never be rolled back. The genie is out of the bottle; change is happening everywhere and the tremors are still reverberating down through the sport.
For one thing, the first unintended consequence was that they let people every bad as Whyte take over the running of the Ibrox operation. They were so keen to get a club calling itself Rangers back in to the league that they allowed Green and others – largely unscrutinised – to take control. The Bampots knew what this guy was all about; our research was completed and our assertions being made before the ink was even dry on the contracts.
The SFA and SPFL unwittingly allowed the fox into the henhouse. You know Sevco is counting the costs of that enormous mistake to this day.
Which brings me to the Bampots themselves.
There were football fan sites before 2012, of course, but the way those sites came together as campaigning platforms and as the only realistic sources of information on what was going on throughout that period was truly transformational.
Our sport will never be the same again because of it. The fans have found out they’ve got power after all; it’s a matter of time before blogs are so influential and ubiquitous that they can literally change the fates and the course of direction of their clubs. We’re in a new era here, and we might have got here anyway but the crisis of 2012 undeniably sped us towards this. Games without frontiers, as Peter Gabriel once put it.
What kind of practical impact will this have on our sport?
Eventually it’ll be profound, and not just for the clubs.
The associations too will be susceptible to change via the fans.
We might not be able to topple their leaders but they will no longer be able to hide from our views or ignore them as Regan and Doncaster are doing at the moment. These might be the most gutless men ever to hold senior office in our game, but I am comforted by the idea they’ll be the last to think they can dodge supporter opinion in the way they have. The next guys in those seats will know we’re watching everything, and that can’t help but have an impact in how they behave, whether they admit that or not.
One of the unintended consequences was that it was Celtic fans who started to lead the way on SFA reforms. I’m not going to say that our supporters were disengaged before, but we had our own club to worry about and didn’t see involvement in the way the SFA ran its affairs as something that was our business, something to be overly concerned about.
Doncaster and Regan brought us into their lives, made us part of the debate. In fact, they made it so we would have to lead the debate. Getting others to follow us into the morass has proved the hard part, but it’s happening now, little by little, with Aberdeen having put Financial Fair Play on the agenda, and their supporters are partly responsible for that.
Not only did our fans not want to lead this, but it’s caused some problems with our own club. The Resolution 12 guys brought forward a proposal to the AGM which I’m sure Celtic would rather not have had publicly raised, but once pressed our club had no choice but to begin questioning the decision makers too, so the governing bodies brought that into their lives as well.
The unintended consequences don’t stop with the influence of the Internet Bampots. One phrase has been erased from our national footballing vocabulary; that expression is “too big to fail.” It was always a fallacy, but 2012 revealed it for one. I suspect it’s going to take another lesson – and probably at the same ground – before it sinks in, but the convulsions of what happened at Ibrox are still too fresh for anyone outside the club to doubt it could happen again, and with the way they are headed it most certainly is going to happen.
Today I read that their leading supporter’s organisation, Club 1832, has purchased some more shares. This is what the organisation was set up for, after all, but I have little doubt that fan ownership would be an unprecedented disaster at Sevco, far more so than at any other club. It all sounds very nice but one of the unintended consequences of what Regan and Doncaster did in 2012 looms over Ibrox like a poisonous fume; I refer, of course, to the Survival Lie, exposed as such in the UEFA letter, confirming what we all knew.
When Regan and Doncaster supported this idiocy it was because they believed, wrongly, the game could not survive without a club called Rangers in it. Charles Green was pleased; he had initially been planning to embrace the NewCo idea, but he realised there was easy money to be made in pandering to the mob, and when the SFA and the SPL endorsed the fiction that was all he needed to hear to start pushing it like a drug.
But the unintended – but wholly predictable – consequence was that the new club was born sick, with the same virus that killed the old one, and pain has followed. The hurt hasn’t gone away either and it won’t as long as they cling to the fantasy and act accordingly.
Can you imagine a Sevco fan-led board, where they believe the paranoid nonsense that’s frequently trotted out over there? Where they still think they are a club with huge financial resources? Where they believe they didn’t – and can’t – die? Because they are the only people who don‘t believe that “too big to fail” no longer applies; and it was Regan and Doncaster who made sure of that, even as they were counting the cost of Rangers’ death.
I marvel at all this, and can’t understand how so many mistakes and mis-steps have got us here, when all Regan and Doncaster wanted to do was keep everything rolling along as before. The league table, and the respective states of Celtic and Sevco, is only one manifestation of how spectacularly they failed. The existence of the Bampots and the prominence of the blogs is another. Allowing Green to walk away with millions of Sevco’s money, and ushering in the likes of Ashley, can be laid squarely at their door.
These events also revealed the media and its complicity and corruption. The press’s campaign to have Sevco start in the SPL or in the Championship at least had an unintended consequences for them, in that it brought to shocking light how little respect existed in the newsrooms for the views of ordinary fans. At least one “journalist” – Craig Burley – brought his career to a stunning end with a foaming column about how the smaller clubs had no right to a say on the issue, whilst another, Jim Traynor, quit in the aftermath of that decision in spectacular fashion, lambasting Bampots and colleagues alike, those who had dared expose the dark heart of the Ibrox operation.
The sports media here will never recover from this. Much like Scottish Labour, a brand tainted almost beyond rescue, they don’t even know how to start getting past it. Trust in them has plateaued. It is impossible to imagine them ever getting it back, especially with the Bampots coming to prominence and exposing them as liars and frauds.
I could go on all day, because there are unintended consequences galore here, for everyone involved, and for Celtic included, and it’s an ever-evolving situation. We haven’t seen the last of them yet, not by a long shot … and everything they do at Ibrox and Hampden to close the book on this stuff creates more … creates more … creates more …