The Consequences To Football

This is a complicated matter, because there are two types of consequences for our national sport of what Rangers did.

One is material, the other is reputational.

Material covers everything from the way it impacted other clubs, to the way they led to the collapse of the club itself and reputational includes both current perception and the way the game here will be viewed through the prism of history and by those who watch it in the future.

The material consequences were enormous, but they are often misunderstood or overlooked.

The entire recent history of Rangers, from the way the club was run with financial aid from Murray’s favourite bankers – those which tried to shut us down for a mere £7 million – to the EBT era itself, was one that did enormous material damage to our sport.

We will never know exactly what Rangers’ cheating in those years cost clubs in terms of lost revenues.

They won titles, when we would have been their closest challengers. We can surmise that the costs to Celtic, in terms of loss Champions League money and such were enormous, but there were costs that trickled down through the game.

Had they not spent that money they would have finished below us in some of those years; that’s pretty clear-cut. Even Alex McLeish, who was a prime beneficiary of what the clubs did in those years, admitted that fact openly, but it’s unlikely they would have finished third or lower without it; the financial gap between them and the rest would clearly have advantaged them, although there is one year that casts that into some doubt.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

But during those years their performances would have certainly had major implications for other sides. Some of those EBT players would have scored crucial goals in massive matches; those matches would have seen teams drop out of the top six. They would have seen some clubs miss out on Europe. They might even have cost some teams a place in the league. The impact of those moments probably plunged some clubs into real trouble.

They won cups during that time. Some of the sides they faced in those competitions lost out on prize money. There were four lower league clubs who played finals against them; that’s no joke to the clubs which did not win those.

One season hints at the possibilities, the one before they brought in Le Guen.

That was the latter stages of the crazy years, the EBT’s were in full swing, but Rangers were floundering. That season, the 2005-06 season, they finished third, a single point behind Hearts. Were there years when, without the EBT’s, they’d have been in similar dire straits?

Possible. All too possible. We’ll never know, nor what those years meant for clubs like Hearts and Aberdeen, who if they’d seen a chance to take second place may have gone for it. The whole of Scottish football might look different.

The duopoly might have been broken.

The damage to the reputation of the game has been worse.

That, as I said, can be measured in two ways, by actual damage and by potential damage.

The EBT years led directly to the collapse of the club. Murray himself maintains that the EBT case was the principal reason the club was unable to find a better buyer than Whyte; this is disingenuous nonsense, of course, because the club had been for sale a couple of years before the story about EBT’s broke into the mainstream, and the only people who had been interested were Russian gangster and a Loyalist politician who never said where the cash was going to come from.

The Murray years overall led to a football spending “arms race” where every club started to spend crazy money. It led to an inflationary cycle which was lethally dangerous. EBT’s came at a time when, even before the crash, Murray’s companies were under pressure to cut spending; they already knew they couldn’t afford for it to go on. EBT’s were one last crazy splurge, one way to keep the gravy train running long after it should have quit.

Rangers were the club with the most influence on the game at the time. They had a compliant media which thought every word that came out of Murray’s mouth was pure gold. Had their club shown sense, had it stopped the insane spending, then other clubs would have sat up and taken notice quick smart. The message it would have sent would have been stark; no club can defy financial gravity for long. That might have put others on the sane road.

Reputationaly, that period damaged the game because it led to the collapse of the club.

That, in turn, led to lies, some of them scandalous beyond belief. Amongst them was the idea that Rangers had been “murdered”, arrant nonsense still being repeated by one of the idiot children of Ibrox last month, as he assumed a seat on the board of the NewCo. He was one of the men who served as club chairman during the EBT years; his lack of humility and his assertion that the rest of Scottish football was to blame for what happened to them is mind-blowing.

The reputational damage that will be done to the game, in the eyes of historians and the next generation of fans, if those years of cheating are allowed to stand is what’s truly awesome to consider.

An entire generation of football fans knows what actually happened here.

Some of us will write books on this period, and they will form part of the record. They will, in fact, be the definitive version of it because they will be the only ones written to reflect Absolute Fact, and that still means something and it always will.

But the next generation of supporters, the ones who are just starting to go to games, perhaps, many of whom are already feeling the financial pinch, will have a choice to make about whether they buy into the rigged nature of football here or not.

To one degree or another, that’s a choice that was never really open to some of us. Think of us as addicts, hooked through the bag; the next generation will be more circumspect and their first view of Scottish football might well be that it’s little more than a cynical joke, a rigged game, and decide not to buy in.

Whether they do or not, football historians will look back on those years as ones in which blatant cheating, perhaps even criminality, were taking place at a major club, and if that club is not punished for it that will stink out the halls of Hampden forever.

Our current “administrators” think this stuff can be wished away; they’ve created a scandal here that is going to go on forever. Clubs will be eternally damned or not depending on how they respond to it. A clear-cut and definitive, independent, investigation has to be launched into what happened in those years, a hands-off inquiry that gets to the bottom of them, and it has to look at the whole EBT affair, in detail, and reach a conclusion.

Unless Scottish football cleans this mess up it will spread; there is no way it ends now, not after today, not after this verdict. The campaign will go on and it will last as long as it takes and from now until its successful conclusion we will call what happened in those years cheating and we will call the SFA and the SPFL’s failure to act a cover-up and we will call the clubs and those in them who did not act the cowards that they are.

Scottish football has been royally grafted by the people who ran that club in the EBT years. If the game here does not respond to that, acknowledge it, and act on it then it is telling the world that cheating is acceptable. And giving fans no reason to attend games.

And all the chaos that causes in the future will be for nothing anyway because no matter what happens in the here and now those titles will go; the historical facts of this period will be recorded and remembered and sooner or later there will be a reckoning even after the long slow death of Scottish football has been set in motion.