Yesterday, I posted Part One of the A-Z of Scottish Football Corruption.
Today it’s time for Part Two.
Scottish football has no shortage of evil tales to tell.
The game here is amongst the most scandalised in Europe. People who aren’t aware of it, and who are informed about what goes on, are frequently astounded by how venal and corrupt our so-called “administrators” are.
Amongst the stories from the other day was the sordid story of Gordon Smith, the tale of Craig Whyte and the scandal of Fit and Proper Person.
For all that, today’s rogues gallery is far worse.
We open with a guy who needs no introduction at all, the referees head who was brought down in a sectarian email scandal.
Following him, we look at Jim Farry, the SFA’s failure to grant Celtic an independent inquiry, the persecution of Neil Lennon, the role of the media in all this and the sordid saga of Dodgy Dave King. This is how our sport has fallen, and continues to fall …
H is for Hugh Dallas
The departure of Gordon Smith, for whatever reason, brought a new CEO to the SFA and no sooner was that guy in the job – his name was Stewart Regan and people forget just how good a start this guy had – but he had to deal with two major crises and I still suspect that the source of both was the same.
The first involved the referee strike, the second involved the SFA’s head of referees; his name was Hugh Dallas. Darling of the media, hated by our fans.
Dallas gave one of the most celebrated refereeing performances of all time against Celtic, on the day Rangers clinched the title at Celtic Park by 3-0. He was hit by a coin from the crowd that day after sending Stephane Mahe off. Within sixty seconds of getting to his feet he had given the Ibrox club a penalty. I have rarely seen such a one-sided display. I have spent years telling people that it was one of the most biased things I’ve ever witnessed.
I have always believed Dallas was the guy who instigated the refereeing strike, at a time when Celtic were justifiably concerned about things that were going on. It came after Dougiegate, when a linesman resigned because he and the ref had gotten together and lied to our club about an incident. We still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it when the media was told that our “harassment” of officials had prompted them to consider withdrawing their services.
Everyone at Celtic Park knew we were being smeared and used as a deflector shield for some of the real issues refs had with the Association; in truth it was all about money but they saw a chance to attack us and use us a means to get their cash.
Regan saw through it.
He said he would call in foreign refs if that’s what it took. And then into the mix, came Dallasgate.
It catapulted Phil to his early prominence.
He was the one who broke the story; it came from inside the SFA itself, which has always convinced me that someone wanted to bring the real motivations behind the refereeing strike to our attention. The news that Dallas had sent a sectarian email on an official SFA server was dynamite. What followed was allegedly even more incredible, as Dallas offered to bring the refereeing strike to an end if he could keep his job.
There was no chance of that; the outcry was more than he was ever going to be able to survive. Regan impressed everyone with the way he rejected Dallas’ pleas and removed him from the post. Or so we thought. The SFA was pulling yet another flanker on us, as we discovered later.
Dallas later turned up as one of UEFA’s top refereeing coaches … that could only have happened with the full endorsement of his old bosses at Hampden. They had fired him, but made sure he had a soft landing. They made it clear, not only to us but to the whole of European football, that they considered sectarianism as no big deal but something that had to be danced around for PR purposes. I cannot think of anything more disgraceful.
I is for Independent Inquiry
Celtic knows that a lot of what went on in the EBT years and since has left stains on our national sport.
They know that cheating that goes unanswered or unpunished leaves the whole game in turmoil. They know that what went on over Resolution 12 was corrupt. They know that governing bodies were up to their necks in what Whyte did, and they know what those same governing bodies tried to do in the aftermath of it.
And because they know all that, Celtic has been pushing hard for an independent review of all these matters, one that does not have a set remit but which can move backwards and forwards up the timeline, which can settle all these issues in one go.
An independent review would leave no stone unturned.
It would answer every question that Scottish football fans have, and would even have the power to recommend sanctions. And all of this was clear to the SPFL when they agreed that the inquiry should take place … but the SFA decided that it would not, and that remains the position right now.
Scottish football needs this. It needs closure on all these matters.
Almost every club knows this deep down, but not one of them is prepared to support us in public.
This is what has to change if the game it to get well again and if justice is finally to be done.
J is for Jim Farry
No examination of Scottish football scandals would be complete without looking at the man who Celtic removed from office at the SFA in a high profile court case. Farry is the ultimate cautionary tale to all corrupt executives who think they can act with impunity. Celtic’s apparent inaction over other issues can sometimes be seen as weakness; in fact, it’s simply a question of leadership. The club itself still has immense power when it chooses to wield it.
And at the time we had a chairman, in Fergus McCann, who was more than willing to take issues to the courts when he believed there was a case to answer. Fergus had no problem engaging in litigation; that, after all, is what a company pays its lawyers for.
When he challenged the Bosman ruling by taking a compensation case to court involving John Collins going to Monaco – Fergus argued that since Monaco was a tax shelter outside the EU’s jurisdiction that we were due a transfer fee for that – that should have been a warning to our enemies not to screw with him or the club.
It was a warning that went right over Farry’s head; the crazy thing about that was that he had already incurred Fergus’ wrath with the exorbitant fee the SFA charged us over the use of Hampden and the fine we got for allegedly “tapping up” Tommy Burns.
Our man was just waiting for an opportunity to settle some scores with him.
When we paid Sporting Lisbon for their striker Jorge Cadete we were in the midst of a bitter league race with Rangers, and there was a crucial Scottish cup game with them to boot. We were surprised when his registration was delayed and then delayed again. It would be weeks before the player pulled on the Celtic shirt for the first time, in a 5-0 league win over Aberdeen at Parkhead. McCann was smarting over it and he wanted answers.
And so he asked the SFA to explain it. When they offered him lame excuses and made their contempt clear he did what he always did, and he put the machinery of the law into motion. If anyone thought he was bluffing they were wrong. Farry ended up in front of a court where his performance so appalled his own lawyer he told him that it was over and that he should plead no contest and resign at once, which is what he did.
We would all later have cause to regret that Fergus did not go the full road and really clean out the Augean Stables by getting rid of Bryson and a bunch of others at Hampden at the same time, but the point had been made and we had shown our teeth after a long period of slumber. It was one of the most significant moments in our history because it showed that when we were willing to fight for our place and for our rights that we could win.
K is for King
To understand everything that’s presently wrong with the SFA, and to see how little has changed since the 2012 crisis, you don’t have to look any further than Ibrox and Dodgy Dave King.
He ought never to have been allowed to hold office at any Scottish club; for openers, he was on the board at Ibrox when the first club there collapsed. That, on its own, should have been disqualifying. The SFA was scandalously lax in letting King and Murray have seats.
But the issues with this guy don’t stop there.
The sheer number of things that should disqualify King would take your breath away.
His tax convictions in South Africa are part of it, but so is the litany of other crimes over that which he successful pled guilty to have excluded from the record; these include bribery, forgery and money laundering.
Before he rolled back into Ibrox, he purchased the Charlotte Fakeovers documents; essentially a blackmail file, which he used to his advantage against the previous board. We don’t know whether there was compromising stuff in there which enables him to control goings on at Hampden, but events strongly suggest that there was.
On top of that, he carried out a public plan to destabilise the club via the media, in an effort to devalue the company share price so that he and his cronies could get the shares on the cheap; an offence known as tortious interference.
We now know that his “concert party” warned him that the nature of the deal would violate Takeover Panel rules.
King continues to defy them from the helm of his club. He is in open breach of UK court orders and right now he’s attempting to circumvent the law of the land with a share issue as the governing body stands idly by and watches. Does he have something on the SFA? Is that why they won’t deal with him as they would anyone else? Or is this about Ibrox again, that ground where the residents know they can get away with whatever they want?
The more you see of King and his club – including using the media to launch his attack dogs on anyone they don’t like – the more it resembles a crime family more than a football organisation. And the SFA allows him to get away with it all.
L is for Lennon
In this history of Scottish football, I do not know any man who has been more maligned, slandered, leaned on and misrepresented more than Neil Francis Lennon. The way he was treated across all of Scotland was disgraceful enough, but his persecution by the governing bodies is notorious
. The SFA allowed Lennon to suffer appalling sectarian abuse at every ground without uttering a word, but every time he broke the slightest rule they went after him for it.
Things got so bad that Lennon hired a lawyer, the late Paul McBride, to represent him in his dealings with the Association.
Things came to a head twice.
The first was when Lennon was sent to the stand at Tynecastle and the SFA imposed a six match ban; the club was especially concerned with the behaviour of then SFA President George Peat (more on him later) who took a more personal role in the investigation that the rules allowed.
The second incident was much more serious, and with graver repercussions.
It came about after Lennon’s touch-line flare-up with Ally McCoist. This saw the SFA threaten him with an eight match touchline ban; McBride reacted furiously and said that it was a disgraceful position to take.
At the hearing, Lennon’s ban was dropped to four games but Celtic’s fury reached its height as McCoist was cleared and two Rangers players had red cards rescinded, effectively leaving Lennon as the only “guilty” party from the event.
McBride went on to call this decision “dysfunctional and biased.” It was ever thus.
Lennon continues to be the subject of SFA witch-hunts to this day; his latest ban came about because he celebrated a win at Ibrox by giving some verbal back to the “fans” who had spent the entire 90 minutes singing about being up to their knees in his blood.
M is for Media
The mainstream media in Scotland is a big part of everything that’s gone wrong with the game.
They are complicit in much of the scandal I’ve written about here and elsewhere, characterised by their ignorance, their biases, their cowardice and their sheer laziness. They are hand-fed dogs, who bark only on command. They are neutered. They are weak. They are gutless. They are a disgrace to the name journalism.
And if they were doing their jobs I wouldn’t be doing this.
Any list of their most egregious offences would be too long for this article.
Their greatest hits include the persecution of Neil Lennon (“he brings it on himself”; it including death threats, bombs being sent to his home and the club, attacks in public and whilst doing his job and enough sectarian bile to drown a Russian tank division all the time, every time, whenever he steps out onto the touchline or onto the park); ignoring decades of sectarian singing and bigotry at Ibrox; the promotion of the Survival and Victim lies; a total unwillingness to engage with the fans on the issue of SFA reform; their “succulent lamb” culture; their promotion of hatred; their anti-Celtic editorialising; their shameless promoting of men like Dave King … I could go on.
But it’s their complete unwillingness to do even the most basic research that sees them embarrassed again and again and again.
The Craig Whyte episode – the “billionaire” with “wealth off the radar” as Keith Jackson called him – is perhaps the worst of them, but it was by no means the only humiliation suffered by the mainstream press as a consequence of their blind acceptance of PR and self-spinning.
As the Ibrox clubs could not have gotten into such a mess without the SFA, the governing bodies would never have engaged on their own self-destructive course had the media been awake and on the job. The MSM should have been minding the people’s business … instead they were shilling nonsense for whoever had, or wanted, the Ibrox keys.
They never scrutinised any of them, nor pressed the SFA to.
They continue to allow those who brought our game to the brink of disaster to get away with it.
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