Barry Ferguson, EBT value: £2.5million. – had a side letter.
Barry Ferguson has been vocal in not thinking Celtic should get the title, even though it created a potential conflict with the club he manages, Kelty Hearts, who accepted their title with nary a word about the unfairness of it all.
They did subsequently complain about not going a play-off tie and possible promotion to the professional league.
Ferguson doesn’t think our title is entirely legitimate. Yet a quick glance at his own career shows that if we were going to take a proper look at legitimacy he would be on shaky ground to say the least and some of his own medals would need to be handed back.
Ferguson is another media darling who’s been a frequent guest on radio shows and TV panels … and he has a column in The Daily Record.
Not only was his EBT a whopper – £2.5 million – but he had the side-letter to go with it.
The question is when he first signed a contract with one; the first time he was at the club or the second?
The scheme ran from the year 2000 until 2010.
In that time, he was there twice; in the second half of his first one he won a league title in 2002-03, two Scottish Cups in 2001-02 and 2002-03 and two League Cups in those same years. All would be considered void if the side letter applied to them.
He returned to Ibrox in 2004-05, and won another league title that year and another in 2008-09.
They would definitely be gone. A
s would his Scottish Cups of 2007-08 and 2008-09.
His League Cups of 2004-05 and 2007-08 would, likewise, be voided.
There’s actually an argument for saying that it doesn’t even matter when the contract was signed … because in his first spell at Ibrox he certainly played in teams which contained one or more EBT recipients who did have those side letters … so cancel all his Ibrox honours anyway and take those medals off him.
He won them with a cheating club.