This is the fourth and final part of my article on Scottish football corruption and scandal.
I consider this a reasonable overview of the issues our game has had to deal with in the past six or so years, and whilst it is not exhaustive it is still pretty extensive.
I had actually forgotten to finish this, until I was reminded earlier.
The article is now complete, and all four parts can be read at their respective links.
In this section, I’m going to look at Scottish football’s xenophobia, the media’s pushing of the two biggest lies in the sport’s history on this island, the SFA’s ability to slap on the whitewash and how silence is used by the SFA and the media to close down arguments and discussions they do not want to have.
And I’m also going to look at our unlikely hero in 2012, a man who never wanted to be but stepped up when others wouldn’t.
What a debt we owe him.
If you think the game is a mess now, imagine how it might have looked without his quiet anger on the Hampden steps.
The game here is stuck in the mud. There are scandals galore at its heart, and no neutral, no outsider, would believe them unless they were fully acquainted with all this stuff. I do not consider this list to be the final word; there will be books and documentaries about all of this stuff in the years to come. We also have to consider that some of these issues are yet to be fully resolved. There are legal issues arising from some of it which are still going through the process.
Others will certain inspire legal actions in the future.
It is still amazing to me that the game does collapse under the collective weight of all this stuff.
T is for Turnbull Hutton
If ever a single word summed up the crazy summer of 2012, it was the one the late chairman of Raith Rovers said standing on the steps of Hampden on the way in to vote on whether or not to let a brand new club start in Scotland’s second tier.
The SPL had already voted Sevco out of their league; Regan and Doncaster were determinedly ramping up the pressure to have them start in the second tier instead. They had tried bribery. They had tried intimidation. They had produced Scottish football’s own version of the “dodgy dossier” and leaked it to the press. It spelled out the catastrophe that awaited the game if the new Ibrox club was made to start at the bottom.
The whole thing was transparent cobblers, of course, because anyone could tell that having Sevco climb the divisions would have spread more money to those leagues than many of their clubs would ever have seen. The nonsense that the top flight would miss a club calling itself Rangers for four years (hilariously, it turned out to be five) was equally barking; the fans had been the ones who insisted upon it and the clubs had followed suit.
It was fan pressure that was holding back the tide as much as anything, but fans on their own could never have gotten this done. We needed a leader, someone who would say what was in all of our minds, someone with the gravitas to make his voice heard.
The wait for such a figure seemed to be taking forever, and then, all of a sudden, there he was.
It is difficult to state the enormity of what Turnbull Hutton did for Scottish football that day at Hampden.
He paused in front of the media and agreed to talk on camera.
“I think Raith Rovers’ position has been perfectly clear,” he said, in reference to the club’s official statement which had said they intended to vote no to Regan and Doncaster’s grubby stitch-up. “We’ve been lumbered with this,” he said of his fellow SPFL clubs. Then, getting to the heart of it, he said what few had been willing to. “There are rules and we feel that those rules should be followed … (Sevco) should apply for the Third Division.”
He could have left it at that, and none of us would have thought less of him, but he was angry that day, as we all were, and what he said next changed the whole debate. When he was asked for his take on the declarations of doom he was unequivocal that he did not believe a word of it.
When asked if he felt his club and others had been “railroaded” he agreed.
“Railroaded, bullied, lied to … we’ve been lied to by the SFA, SPL … we’ve been bullied, threatened. It’s not football as I know it … it was a ridiculous document that came out last week whereby the threat was there that if you don’t vote for an acceptance into the First Division (for Sevco) that a breakaway SPL 2 will come along and those that didn’t vote won’t be invited … What kind of game are we running?”
The interviewer asked him what he thought the answer to that was and his response became the by-word for the whole affair. “Corrupt,” he said.
Thank you Turnbull, thank you for saying what the rest wouldn’t.
Scottish football will never forget your courage or determination to stand up for what was right.
In the following years he would see his club subjected to further harassment, this time due to Ally McCoist’s tub-rattling which resulted in attempts being made to burn Raith Rovers’ stadium down … through all of it, the never flinched from telling it like it was.
The game misses him and that kind of integrity.
U is for Unspoken Truths
One of Scottish football’s least lovely traits is the way in which those in it would rather not discuss difficult, or complicated, issues. A whole slew of things are never explored properly as a result, and problems which lie unresolved have a tendency to get bigger.
For openers, there is Neil Lennon and the sectarian abuse he is frequently subjected to.
This is a subject Scottish football wishes it could ignore, and so it frequently ignores it. It’s something the game wishes it could forget, and so it conveniently does, until some ghastly incident or other pushes it back into the public consciousness all over again.
Then there is the sectarian singing that for years has poured forth from the Ibrox stands; everyone knows this is an issue, but nobody wants to bring it up. Increasingly, the general behaviour of those same supporters has been a real cause for concern.
The press and the governing bodies are very good at ignoring that too, and when they can’t they blame other clubs fans.
The greatest unspoken truths revolve around 2012 and its aftermath; the media’s failure to confront the Survival Lie is probably the worst of them, although everyone knows that Rangers died. But that few are willing to accept that Lord Nimmo Smith was a sham, that it has left stains on the game and that the roles which were played by people like Campbell Ogilvie need to be properly explored. Everyone in Scottish football knows it was rotten … a lot of people are still not prepared to say it.
Our game is full of unspoken truths.
Things will never get better until they are acknowledged and faced up to … and said out loud.
V is for Victim Lie
Back in 2012, when the decision was taken that Sevco should start its pitiful footballing life in the bottom tier, there was very little argument about that outcome anywhere in the game. Even the Ibrox fan-base was reasonably sanguine about it.
The reason for this is that most people acknowledged the Death of Rangers and accepted that the NewCo would be a brand new club.
Even Sevco fans understood this simple truth.
Yet Charles Green had no sooner gotten his hands on the assets than he was pushing what we call the Survival Lie. Rangers had not died at all. He had saved them, using those big Yorkshire hands of his to heal the club and take them forward up through the ranks.
Green knew his audience well. On the club’s first game he stood on the touchline and said that Scottish football had stabbed them in the back.
He called the SFA and those who ran the clubs “sectarian.” His assertion was based on a simple truth, one of those Unspoken Facts which people in charge here don’t want to acknowledge; if Rangers and Sevco were the same club then what the SFA and the SPL did to them was illegal.
Think about that. Is there a more dangerous assertion in Scottish football than the idea that Rangers was destroyed by the rest of Scottish football? That a club that ran into financial trouble was thrown down through the leagues out of jealousy and spite?
Their fans have been fuming over this for six years now, and they aren’t ready to make nice.
Scottish football continues to push it every single day that it supports the Survival Lie.
Nobody wants to confront the myriad contradictions of that particular fiction, and that means all of us are living with the consequences of the other big lie that toxifies the sport. The Ibrox fans really do believe they are the only people who suffered here, that the suffering was forced on them, that it was a product of hatred.
We can’t move forward until that is spiked.
W is for Whitewash
There are a number of major events in our sport where instead of disclosure and fairness the governing bodies slapped on the whitewash. Foremost amongst them is Lord Nimmo Smith which we now know was a sham from the off. It was a disgraceful set-up.
The SFA, which was supposed to the body of appeal, was allowed to give evidence; all that evidence did was clear Rangers of the central charge and steer them clear of serious punishment. Campbell Ogilvie was never called to account.
The scope of the inquiry itself was shrunk so that it did not include the Wee Tax Case, which a court had already found was illegal. Smith was not encouraged to draw a distinction between the two separate schemes.
Everything about it was slanted, and bent, and on top of that what we later learned was that it was all underpinned by a segment of the Five Way Agreement which gave the new Ibrox club a guarantee that it would not lose historic titles or trophies. The whole LNS inquiry was a fraud.
It was not the only time whitewash was liberally applied to matters at Hampden.
Remember, when evidence emerged that Craig Whyte had been working with Charles Green the SFA refused to investigate the affair. They instead turned the whole thing over to Sevco itself, and they chose what parts of it to look into and what parts not to; the result was the Pinsent Mason report which, of course, found no evidence to support the claim, although both Whyte and Green had admitted to knowing one another and meeting to discuss their plans.
When Dave King was approved to join the Ibrox board, as chairman, the SFA refused to clarify the means by which that decision was reached. Mike Ashley won a court case seeking a judicial review of the matter; he demanded that the SFA publish the details of that finding in public, but they never have and probably never will.
Who knows what grubby deal was done to allow him to play the fool at the top of the Marble Staircase?
The SFA is very good at covering its own back.
There’s always enough whitewash to go round.
X is for Xenophobia
Scottish football will moan loudly that it has no problem with xenophobia, but that’s basically untrue.
It exists here as it does everywhere else.
The most prominent sign of it is the treatment handed out to Neil Lennon, but it also applies to the way James McCarthy and Aiden McGeady were treated when they opted to play for Ireland.
Gordon McQueen was only one of the voices who spoke out against them both before they came to play against Scotland; branding them traitors, he said “I’ve got no time for these players. You’re born in Glasgow but then you go and play for somebody else? What’s that all about? I’m not having that at all. Will it be hard for them coming back here with Ireland? I really hope so. I hope they get a horrible reception because they deserve it.”
Anti-Irish racism is not the only sort out there though.
The media’s response to Ronny Deila was disgraceful; the perception that a Norwegian was not cut out to manage in Scottish football was widespread amongst the press corps. This is not the only example of a Celtic appointee being treated this way. Wim Jansen was labelled “the worst thing to hit Hiroshima since the atom bomb” and Dr Jo Venglos was slaughtered. The undertone of racism was there in all those cases.
On top of that, we have a peculiarly British sentimentality about the integrity of our own players and our own officials. Scandals have hit every major association in Europe; it is not only arrogance that promotes the idea that “our officials don’t do that.”
It’s racism too.
The belief that foreigners are more corrupt, their refs more susceptible to bribery and that their players more readily dive.
Scottish football is full of stupid attitudes like this.
Never has this been clearer than in the case of Gordon Smith and his comments, whilst SFA Chief Executive, in regards to Saulius Mikoliunas and his alleged dive when Lithuania played against Scotland back in 2007. Speaking after the game, and in his official capacity, Smith said things that should have had him fired.
“I was disappointed in Mikoliunas,” he said. “It could be that he reverted to what is acceptable in Lithuania because he was playing for his national side, even though it’s unacceptable here.”
But he wasn’t content leaving it there either, he also had words for the referee in that game, who was from Slovenia. “”I don’t think the referee helped the situation, either, possibly because he comes from a country where that sort of behaviour isn’t so frowned upon.”
When that is the attitude at the top, how can we possibly keep it out of the stands?
Y is for Yob Culture
A recent one this, and a worrying one.
Whether it’s the throwing of coins or other objects, bringing flares into the grounds, the singing of racist and sectarian songs, attacks on rival players, fans, managers or officials, there is more of this in the game than ever before.
Events at Hearts – Hibs recently should have been a catalyst for real changes but it didn’t happen any more than it did after the Scottish Cup Final of 2016.
Yobbish behaviour is not unusual in Scottish football, but back in the old days it was at least tackled by the governing bodies, the police and the clubs themselves. That doesn’t happen any longer, and the SFA hides behind its regulations which pretty much absolve clubs of any blame for their supporters do, whether that’s throwing things or rioting on the pitch.
The consequences of this look likely to be paid by all of us; if football cannot police itself then the government has made it clear that they’ll do the job instead, with the passage of Strict Liability laws which force action on everybody.
Z is for Zombies
What’s dead but still walks around? Rangers.
Apparently.
If you believe Scottish football’s governing bodies and the media. They are the zombie club. This is what we call the Survival Lie, the notion that Rangers somehow escape the liquidation process and lives on. It has fed into the Victim Lie which I mentioned earlier in the piece.
The thing of it is, this matter was resolved. Everyone involved knew the score. Rangers players who left the club upon the liquidation knew their contracts had been terminated because the OldCo was dead. Former directors, even Walter Smith himself, said goodbye and accepted the truth. The media wrote obituaries and published photos of Rangers crested coffins being lowered into the ground. It was an accepted fact that nobody was arguing with.
And all of a sudden history was being rewritten. Reality was being unmade. The world was being turned upside down and everything we’d been told was true was being described as a haters lie. Rangers had “survived”, seemingly by a miracle although nobody was ever told what the miracle was. Nobody in the media has ever explained what changed, and the SFA was not encouraged to offer clarity. But suddenly they were all singing a new song.
That song destroyed trust in the mainstream media.
It revealed the governing bodies in the worst possible light, as people willing to push convenient fictions no matter how much damage they did. The Victim Lie is just part of it. Nobody has ever explained, for example, why Sevco started in the early rounds of the Scottish Cup, for one, or why both Rangers was allowed a vote on allowing Sevco into the SPL, or how Rangers and the mysterious Club 13 could have existed at the same time, or why an SFA member club needed a new membership.
The Zombie Club scandal is probably the biggest lie ever forced on football fans anywhere and the notion that football clubs in Scotland can’t die is a flat contradiction of our graveyard full of them, including Gretna and Airdrie in the modern age.
It poisoned the well of Scottish football discourse forever. It will have dangerous consequences far into the future, because it encourages debt dumping and makes real the notion that clubs can spend their way to success and simply re-form when the rent comes due.
Nothing could be more damaging to the long-term future of our sport.
And this is Scottish football, and where it stands, at the end of 2018.