Reform of the SFA has never been more necessary, or sought after.
The Resolution 12 campaign gave the world a glimpse of the laxity of their regulatory framework, as if we needed to be reminded of that following the events of 2012.
What we’ve learned since then though is the depth of the SFA’s dishonest behaviour, and that asks a brand new question of us; is it even possible to reform an organisation which acts in such an appalling and brazenly discriminatory manner?
Is there any point to it?
Because you have to wonder how deep the roots of this go.
How far reaching is the corruption?
Look, there was a time when I might have dismissed such questions as those of a paranoid crank, but history has taught us that there are good reasons for harbouring such suspicions.
Farry might have fallen on his own sword but we’ve always known he didn’t act alone, and his head of registrations – who in the view of learned people, Fergus included, was equally implicated – Sandy Bryson survived that to stand in front of the Lord Nimmo Smith commission and talk the worst kind of nonsense about the illegal registration of players and how it wasn’t against the rules at the time because although it was no-one knew about it then.
Then there was George Peat, who offered to postpone the SFA’s showpiece cup final event at the urging of Rangers, but who never bothered to ask their opponents if it was alright with them. He had already helped get the SPL to agree to an unprecedented extension of the league campaign and who knew what else in the background.
These men didn’t operate in a vacuum and the hiring of Gordon Smith as chief executive, a short time after he’d denied The Billy Boys was a sectarian song and written a chapter for a book in which he decried SFA bias against Rangers, was another notable case in point. At the time of his appointment he was the single most unqualified person holding down an executive job in the country; he had ticked not one of the “personal profile” boxes necessary to get it.
There are people at every level in the structure who’ve been there for years, so long that they are built in with the bricks.
McCrae himself – our utterly invisible SFA President – has been around the organisation since he was elected to their council in 1993, at the head of Cove Rangers. This is farcical, it’s like an old medieval title passed down through generations without any open process or scrutiny at all. Now, I know this has recently changed – there is no longer a “required service period” before someone can run for office – but who really has faith enough in the process that we can believe it won’t still pass on to a “favourite son”?
The problem isn’t even with the personnel, it’s with the culture.
The SFA has become a bastion of secrecy, concealment and denial. The Survival Lie and Victim Lies were birthed inside its walls, and this whole mind-set that the whole game here revolves around two clubs (but actually, just one) is ingrained in the thinking.
As long as that’s the case we don’t have a prayer of changing how things work.
What makes the Survival Lie so abrasive is that it promotes the deadly idea that some clubs are too big to fail, and that encourages future bad behaviour as much as any breaking of the rules. Today Walter Smith is calling for Sevco to spend money in January, as if he’s simply unplugged himself from reality and is urging those running the club to do the same.
This needs to be gotten a grip on, the whole lot of it.
This very week, the Offshore Game has published another article on Scottish football, where they point out that the Lord Nimmo Smith commission was lied to … by the SFA itself. This takes us into wholly unprecedented territory, and re-opens the debate on whether historical titles should be stripped from Rangers.
Of course they should, there’s barely a person in Scottish football who does not know this full well.
Because not only did the SFA wilfully shrink the LNS commission to where it excluded the Discounted Options Scheme from the frame of reference, but in order to support this they lied about what they knew the Discounted Options Scheme to be. The entire premise of the LNS findings – that the EBT schemes were legal and so available to every club who wanted to use them (the basis of the “no competitive advantage” decision) – isn’t undermined by this, it is totally destroyed.
The SFA had a letter from HMRC telling them that the Discounted Options Scheme was “fraudulent.”
They excluded the Discounted Options Scheme from the frame of reference on the grounds that it was not materially different from the main EBT scheme, but this discovery proves conclusively that they knew that to be false.
On top of that, apart from protecting Campbell Ogilvie from being dragged into the affair, it also kept from the inquiry’s eyes the proof of what Rangers had done.
And if the DOS scheme was “fraudulent” as HMRC contend – and which even Rangers’ lawyer, Andrew Thornhill QC accepted and Craig Whyte himself conceded – then it’s worse than just the SFA helping to conceal that.
Ogilvie himself was the guy who instigated the scheme, so the SFA had proof in its hands that its own President was party to fraud … and ignored it.
Every single person who was party to that information ought to be considered a co-conspirator and accessory after the fact.
This wasn’t just the tax fraud committed by Rangers, the LNS inquiry is now exposed as a fraud itself, against the whole of Scottish football, hatched inside the walls of Hampden by the people who’s job it was to protect sporting integrity and uphold the rules.
And we don’t know who those people were, or which clubs they were at.
We don’t know how much information was shared by those at the top or who they shared it with.
Was there a discussion? A vote? Or did certain people simply decide to bury all this and hope that it would go away?
We can’t even begin to reform this organisation until who know who’s involved in all this, because we might be shipping one bunch of chancers out only to appoint others in their place.
In the first Offshore Game report on this issue, the writers expressed the view that what the game here needs is a public body independent of the SFA to look into these matters in detail, and for reforms to be laid out which change the entire culture of the organisation.
I’ve been resistant to those ideas for the most part, as I always believed that Scottish football could fix itself, that with the right oversight and leadership we could change the way the game here is run, but I cannot support that view in light of these disclosures.
This organisation simply can’t be trusted at all, and only a full-scale publicly inquiry into its affairs and governance can resolve these matters by digging into, and exposing, it all. There’s simply no other way that any positive change gets made. An inquiry of that sort could lay out recommendations and the clubs could vote on them wholescale – including appropriate punishments for past misdeeds – and then we’d see who was committed to real reform and who wasn’t.
Anyone who thinks the game can just “move on” from this is kidding themselves on.
We’re in frigging Dark Disney Land here and every revelation is more disturbing than the last. The people running our sport are not discredited as much as their moral right is completely shot. Unless these matters are faced up to and resolved they will stink the game out for a generation or longer; we might never recover from the reputational damage it does.
Tonight, from where I’m sitting even the reform agenda has run out of road.
The game here needs turned upside down and inside out, every tree shaken, every rock pulled up.
Truth and openness have been delayed as long as is tolerable.
By God, it deserves its day.