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.
