I had a conversation some weeks ago with a guy I know in England who was largely oblivious to the reasons why this blog and others spend so much time focused on things other than our own club. I told him that Scottish football has suffered a trauma; that trauma was because of the events of 2012.
For many people, it was like ripping aside the curtains and letting in the light.
Many had lived in ignorance at how corrupt our game was … that year changed a lot of minds.
I filled him in on some of the details of that trauma, but what I realised was that there had to be more to it than that.
And the idea dawned on me; how about a simple guide for everyone who wants to truly understand what has gone on here over the years?
Over on Fields, I once put together two parts of what was intended to be a three-part piece on how the SFA almost destroyed Scottish football. I never wrote the third piece because Dave King is still at Ibrox and the story is not yet complete.
I considered re-hashing that piece with some additions … I rejected the idea outright.
They are long pieces, and I didn’t want this one to be.
I thought the idea of doing an A-Z was a nice, neat one, with a pre-defined road-map.
The concept pleased me.
Working out what fell into all the letters was tougher.
I don’t consider this a Final Word on the scandals of Scottish football, but it’s a nice overview of them.
Obviously this is too long an article to publish in one go; I decided to split it into four.
Part two will be up tomorrow.
For now, let’s focus on A-G … and there are some gruesome tales to be told here.
A is for Administration
A word the media seems only to vaguely understand; it is a process which ends in one of two ways.
It ends with a club coming out of it, or it ends in a club dying.
Hearts exited it. Rangers were swallowed up in it and vanished down the plug-hole. They did not survive.
Nor do clubs that come out of administration get relegated; Sevco has long claimed to have been “relegated” but even the SFA rulebook does not allow for any club to be sanctioned by demotion to the bottom tier just for running into financial trouble.
Administration is far too common in Scottish football; it would be far less so if clubs could be convinced to adopt the Financial Fair Play procedures which protect them and sporting integrity in other countries; almost every league in Europe in fact.
B is for Bryson
Sandy Bryson is the SFA registrations officer, the man who is supposed to make sure that all the contracts the association holds are up to snuff.
When the side-letters held by Rangers were revealed he should have declared every one of the contracts those players to be null and void; that would have overturned the results of hundreds of games and would have resulted in the retrospective stripping of titles and trophies.
Instead he appeared before the LNS commission and gave a highly suspect interpretation of the rules; the long and short of it was that the registrations were valid at the time of the games because the side letters were not known of.
The logic of this is easy to understand but almost impossible to reconcile with fairness and justice; if a crime is committed it is only a crime if the authorities knew it was being committed at the time. Otherwise, there’s no case to answer.
Incredibly, that was the second major scandal he was involved in at the SFA.
He was at the heart of the Jim Farry / Jorge Cadete case way back when … and he would have been next on the stand, and certain to have followed his boss out the door at the SFA, had Farry’s lawyer not convinced his client that he had no choice but to step down and plead no contest.
Fergus always smarted about not getting Bryson too; he knew what had to be done there.
The history of our game would look very different if he had.
C is for Craig Whyte
The man who needs no introduction.
No person in the history of football has ever gotten so much fun out of a quid, nor spread such joy to the people around him.
The events of 2011-12, his reign of error, was truly game-changing.
Some of us think the club would have fallen anyway, but he added that special touch that means so much … he gave it the public face we never could have dreamed of; a smirking used car salesman, a back-street boiler room wide-boy, Del Trotter without the three-wheel van or any of the scruples.
He was the owner they deserved, and proof that a good layer of bullshit can cover a multitude of sins.
And oh what bullshit it was.
Oh what sins they were.
They said he was a billionaire, but his “Glasgow headquarters” was a room with grates on the windows and a single file cabinet behind a locked door. They said he was an international jet-setter, but the building he closed the Rangers deal from was a portacabin in a field full of cows.
The media reported all of it after the fact; the Bampots were way in front of them.
The Scottish public still doesn’t know the half of it.
The Bampots dug up so much dirt you could have buried a hundred bodies in it. From the multiple variations of his name which appeared on documents, different dates of birth, from his involvement in land deals, his links with other football club scams and even a period as a gold-trader who caught the eyes of the US Justice Department and the FBI, Craig Whyte’s story is a book just begging to be written.
Of course, you would need good lawyers if you ever wanted to have it published … but let’s face it, the guy is never going to get on the stand, put his hand on a bible and swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth is he?
D is for Doncaster
Neil Doncaster is perhaps more to blame than anyone else in the game for what was allowed to happen in 2012. He was one of the earliest people to be informed of what was going on at Ibrox, when Craig Whyte met with him shortly after Rangers was knocked out of the Europa League.
There is no question that he was well aware of their predicament in November of 2011, because that month he told the SPL board that they would have to shelve the proposals for FansTV, which was the brainchild of Hibs’ Rod Petrie, because of a “change in circumstances” affecting one of the clubs.
It was around that time that he urged the signing of a new TV deal with Sky, one that included the notorious “four Old Firm games” clause; or so he later stated.
In fact, we have good reason to believe that the clause did not reference a set number of games but was, in fact, security against circumstances where “either Celtic or Rangers was not in the league.”
A memo to that effect has been circulating in certain circles online for many years and is definitive evidence that the SPL hierarchy signed that deal, with that clause inserted, to blackmail clubs who might not be keen on the idea of an Ibrox NewCo in the top flight.
Doncaster’s scam was defeated by the clubs on a straight vote with only Kilmarnock demurring.
His Scottish football career ought to have ended that day, but he remains on the SPFL board – and now has a seat at the SFA to boot.
Celtic has enabled Doncaster’s survival for reasons known only to those inside Celtic Park.
One day that will have to be explained.
E is for EBT’s
The alpha and omega of Scottish football’s modern scandals, the tax fraud schemes set up by a non struck off financial advisor and former porn star, Paul Baxendale Walker, should have been watertight. Baxendale Walker always said he had built it that way and that the club screwed it up in how they implemented it.
Whether he’s right or wrong, it was a disaster.
Confusion still surrounds exactly what happened here, and even more swirls around the fact that the EBT scheme was not just one tax scam but two; the main scheme which ran for about ten years and the Discounted Options Scheme – the wee tax case – which preceded it.
The man who’s signature is on the DOS paperwork has his own section of this article; he was the SFA President when the story broke.
The scandal was uncovered when police raided Ibrox during the Stevens Inquiry into transfer deals and bungs; they were investigating the dodgy deal which took Boumsong to Newcastle whilst Sounees was manager there.
The investigation didn’t find any evidence of a fraud in that case; what it found instead was the whole EBT scheme, and they handed it over to the Treasury.
In order to hide as much detail from HRMC , the scheme had involved players being issued with “side contracts”, something the club had flatly denied when HMRC had asked them about it. That dishonesty constituted fraud, something the club’s own lawyer was at pains to point out to them when the Discounted Options Scheme was rumbled.
Those side contracts were also never disclosed to the SFA, which should have rendered all the games involving the players who had them null and void; thankfully for all at Ibrox, Sandy Bryson was on hand to offer his own unique interpretation of the rules.
Nevertheless, EBT’s destroyed Rangers. When the club entered administration, HRMC rolled the EBT scheme up with the with-holding of PAYE by Craig Whyte to make themselves far and away the largest of the creditors, and that gave them total control of the process.
They rejected any offer of a settlement, preferring to have the corpse of the club as a warning to others.
F is for Fit And Proper Person
One of the most scandalous things about the SFA is their sheer laziness and their utter ineptness when it comes to offering scrutiny to even the most obvious issues. This is never clearer than in their policies on what are called Fit and Proper Persons.
Many folks actually misunderstand this issue; there is not an actual “fit and proper person” test; that would imply that the SFA does some work in this regard and I would certainly never want to accuse them of that. In fact, that’s just the trouble; they don’t do any. In fact, what they rely on is that dishonest people will be honest enough to tell the governing body that they are dishonest. If that sounds absolutely ludicrous it’s because it is.
The SFA’s “fit and proper person” regulations are built around the idea that people who have evil designs on football clubs, or who are unsuitable to be in charge of them, should let the SFA know that in advance. Then the governing body can decide whether or not they should be disqualified.
In effect, the SFA has a self-certification system.
Try that in any other walk of life; see how much chaos it causes.
And of course, it has caused a fair old amount of in football here as well.
David Murray is a peer of the realm but he ran Rangers so dishonestly than the club went bust mired in scandal. Craig Whyte who bought it from him famously had a string of issues in his past including directorship bans. The guy who bought the assets of Rangers, Charles Green, was a fly-by-night chancer every bit as dodgy as Whyte himself. He appointed a convicted criminal to the board, only for that board to be ousted and taken over by another convicted crook who we’ll get to in a short time.
All of them presumably self-certified which, I dunno, suggests that perhaps the rules are in need of some tightening up. Or, in fact, simply being turned into rules instead of a giant Get Out Of Jail Free card for anyone who fancies taking over a Scottish club.
Vladimir Romanov, the former owner of Hearts, had issues of his own, apart from being as mad as a march hare and from time to time other clubs in Scotland dabble with the devil; Ibrox seems to be unique in attracting some many dodgy characters.
You’d think after the first couple that the SFA would have taken steps to make sure others didn’t follow them … but of course, as long as someone is promising to restore the Grand Old Days Of Yore they can breeze through the system, even if, as with the current chairman, the ink was still drying on the plea deal.
What all this means of course is that Scottish football is probably the widest open in all of Europe to organised crime syndicates and other assorted dodgy folk who want to use clubs as conduits for dirty money and all manner of other schemes and scams, and there are plenty of them if you know what you’re doing, everything from robbing the tax man to bleeding out the clubs themselves.
The SFA regulations are an open invitation to roll up and take the cash.
G is for Gordon Smith
In the fullness of time, I do believe that the SFA will have to make a full accounting of the decision to appoint Gordon Smith as its CEO. His loyalties were never in the slightest question; they were to one particular club and not the game as a whole.
His appointment as Chief Executive at the national association was a scandalous one.
His tenure was a disaster.
One story from that period will be covered later; that we have a few to choose from speaks volumes about the guy and the decision making process which led to him getting the gig.
The SFA published a detailed critera for the job of CEO when they advertised the post. At the time, the SFA seemed to be a reasonably sane organisation; this was the first sign since Farry that there was something dark and rotten behind the scenes.
Because Smith ticked not one of the boxes on the SFA’s personal profile, the one on which they were basing their hiring process.
He was an ex footballer who had become an agent and then went into broadcasting.
His pro-Rangers credentials were solid though, and that appeared to be a key factor in appointing him, which can be surmised by a book that was published a matter of weeks after he took the job, a book about the club in which he had contributed a chapter.
And what was the chapter about? It was about the SFA’s “historical bias” against the club, an assertion so laughable I still don’t quite believe he made it.
Smith’s myopia involving Ibrox was, and is, legendary.
During UEFA’s first investigtions into sectarian singing at Ibrox he started by trying to drag Celtic into the debate and then finally settled for asking what was wrong with some of the songs the club had been cited for.
It so exasperated even Jim Traynor – yes, no joke – that he famous asked, live on the air, “What part of F the Pope do you not believe is sectarian, Gordon?”
Smith’s tenure ended in some controversy; with Livingston chasing him because he had personally intervened in a disciplinary case to have their striker banned for diving; Smith had been a spectator at the game and highlighted the incident himself, after it had been missed by all the officials.
The club was alleging misuse of office when he quit all of a sudden.
It was also around about the same time as the EBT story was breaking; perhaps he feared having to do something about it.
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